Yarrow: a quiet goddess subdues half a planet

During my time in Alaska, while I was enjoying the ubiquitous glories of the vast stands of fireweed, I noticed something unusual. Almost always, among the blazing fireweed were a few stems of yarrow. A white, sometimes pale pink flower, shaped like a flattened umbrella, with stalks of feathery leaves.

Except for some pink ones, whose twilit luminosity attracted me, I almost never took pictures of it. After weeks of this, I got intrigued. Not so much by the yarrow, but by my lack of interest in it. I take pictures of every flower I come across. Why not yarrow?

We pay a lot of attention to the more beautiful, fiery goddesses. It’s easy to see fireweed — lush, fertile, gorgeous — as the queen of her surroundings. Aphrodite cloaked in magenta.

Yarrow is almost invisible with such a companion. Even without fireweed around, yarrow is an unassuming plant. Pretty, but not showy, and not photogenic. Flattish circles of tiny individual flowers are hard for the camera to do justice to. Yarrow, with its lack of contrasting color and texture, is challenging.

Having ignored yarrow for most of my trip north, it then kept tugging at me once I got back to California. Its official name is Achillea. Why, I wondered, did Carl Linnaeus name quiet yarrow after an ancient Greek hero? One known as much for rage as courage?

Legend has it that Achilles used yarrow to staunch the blood of his wounded enemy-then-ally, Telephus, though the Iliad never mentions yarrow. But it was enough for Linnaeus. Yarrow leaves have traditionally been applied to the skin to stop bleeding. So it’s a plant he could have used.

It must have been popular for many millennia before the twelfth century BCE Trojan War. 50,000-year-old Neanderthal teeth have been found to have yarrow grains have in their tartar. It has known medicinal properties but is not known for significant nutritional value. Thus, researchers concluded the Neanderthals were up on their available medications. 

Native Americans had many uses for yarrow, including steeping the leaves for a tea to lower fever, help with sleep, and settle the stomach. Its ability to heighten the effects of alcohol prompted the Vikings to use it in beer brewed to be drunk at weddings. Which gives one a hair-raising slant on Viking nuptials.

The whole northern hemisphere could have benefited from the use of yarrow, and most likely did. It is native virtually everywhere north of the equator and is a pharmacopeia in itself. Its very usefulness would have helped its spread, as travelers carried it with them.

A member of the vast, happy Asteraceae family, the flowers are formed by its family’s signature two structures. A disk floret in the center holds a cluster of flowers. These are surrounded by ray florets, looking like petals, but each a flower.

The quarter-inch yarrow flowers cluster with many others to form a head. These branch out from a stiffly erect, rather brittle stalk covered with delicate, finely cut leaves.

All achilleas share these traits, but there are genetic variations. These have allowed them to adapt to higher and lower altitudes, dryer and wetter climates, differences in light and nutrients.

Yarrow’s adaptability is helped by its intriguing genetic promiscuity. Animal offspring get a pair of chromosomes, one from each parent. But plants can have multiple copies of their chromosomes, a state called polyploidy. Those with four copies are tetraploids, six are hexaploids, eight are octoploids.

Animals would not mate across such variation. Plants, and especially yarrow, do, complicating the effort to sort them into species. Experts have, at different times, classified Achillea millefolium as 40 different species. Then later changed their collective minds and lumped all variations into one, retreating into the umbrella term “species complex.”

So most likely all the yarrow I’ve seen in my life, including the cultivars for gardens, are versions of Achillea millefolium. The second name references its “thousand leaves”. Acchilea millefolium borealis means it’s the northernmost species.

My growing interest in a plant I spent the summer overlooking reminds me of a moving interview with actor Dustin Hoffman. Before committing to his role as Dorothy Michaels in “Tootsie”, he wanted to know if he could pass as a woman. He went to the make-up people at Columbia Pictures to see if that was possible.

Once they had done their magic, he said, “Great, now make me beautiful.” He was dumbfounded when they said that was the best they could do. He went home in tears at his own blindness and was in tears recounting the story.

He said he thought of himself, in that guise, as an interesting woman. But then he pictured himself meeting her at a party. He realized sadly that he would have ignored her in preference for someone more conventionally showy. The fireweed in the crowd.

Now I know that yarrow is that interesting woman. A determined and talented plant, adaptable to every circumstance except standing water or extreme desert. Her leaves are full of minerals for browsers. My ancestors relied on her to lower fevers, relieve stomach cramps, and kill bacteria in their cuts.

Knowing all this doesn’t make yarrow stand out from showy neighbors. But it changes the way I see it. My experience of it is richer, layered. Connecting me to its energies in a way that relying on its surface charms had not.

It brings me into the long history we humans have shared with it. Then further back into the hundreds of millions of years it bloomed on this planet. Long before beings like me were here to be aware of it. Eons of blowing in the wind. Soaking up rain. Creating a banquet of food and medicine from the sunlight falling on its leaves and the minerals seeping into its roots.

This is how we release all bias. Knowledge is not only power, it’s love.

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