Meet The Locals: Yarrow

Yarrow, Achillea millefolium 

Its flat white flowers tower along front gardens of homes. Bay Area gardeners use it as an ornamental decoration to attract pollinators. It truly is a great plant for the front of your garden. But the garden is not its normal home. This is yarrow, a native plant across California and beyond.

Yarrow, or achillea millefolium, has made much of the planet its home. It emerges along city streets, lawns, parks, and the wet understory of forests. It ranges across Europe, to much of Asia and the Americas. Its fragmented leaves look like small ferns, and the tiny flowers that make up the plains of white we see as we pass by in the spring have been used for centuries as a medicine for injuries, headaches, and colds. Yarrow’s other common names, like Soldier’s Woundwort, attest to this. However, yarrow is becoming very invasive in Australia where it was introduced by British colonizers. Its scientific name, given by Linnaeus, the grandfather of animal taxonomy, comes from Achilles who was said to have used the herb to treat the wounds of his soldiers in battle. 

Closer to home, it has been used as a tea, a poultice dressing for injury, and a cure for fever by indigenous people across the Americas. Once, during a dance party where we drank yarrow infused beer, someone told me that it was chewed by indigenous communities in the Pacific northwest before battles, but I couldn’t confirm this story. In fact, I found few stories of the plant in many local histories, California or otherwise, although I’m certain they exist. I’m inclined to believe this ancestral knowledge of the plant may have been written-off by the proselytizing Catholic and Protestant priests who would have been familiar with the herb from Europe thinking, perhaps, that they brought it. 

Despite the diversity of places it lives—from sea level to mountain tops, in landscaped gardens to the cracks in concrete sidewalks, yarrow being an omnipresent survivor of whatever the world throws its way—it hides behind its own ubiquity. So next time, passing a crack in a street, or some overgrown lawn, or a beautiful garden, look out for yarrow’s soft green leaves that have healed and protected people for millenia, the world over.