Comfrey

Reduce pain, eliminate inflammation, boosts the immune system, promote health and growth, strengthen bones, heal skin, prevent cancer, and improve respiratory health.

Symphytum officinale roots have been used in the traditional Balkan medicine internally (as tea or tincture) or externally (as ointment, compresses,or alcoholic digestion) for treatment of disorders of the locomotor system and gastrointestinal tract. The leaves and stems have also been used for the treatment of the same disorders, and additionally also for treatment of rheumatism and gout.

Contraindications

Herbalists are divided on the internal use of this age old herb, on the one hand it has been used safely for centuries and on the other the pyrrolizidine alkaloids that are concentrated in the root and to a lesser extent the leaves have toxic effects.

Culpepper says:

‘The great Comfrey (“great” to distinguish it from the “Middle Comfrey” – another name for the Bugle) restrains spitting of blood. The root boiled in water or wine and the decoction drank, heals inward hurts, bruises, wounds and ulcers of the lungs, and causes the phlegm that oppresses him to be casily spit forth…. A syrup made there of is very effectual in inward hurts, and the distilled water for the same purpose also, and for outward wounds or sores in the fleshy or sinewy parts of the body, and to abate the fits of agues and to allay the sharpness of humours. A decoction of the leaves is good for those purposes, but not so effectual as the roots. The roots being outwardly applied cure fresh wounds or cuts immediately, being bruised and laid thereto; and is specially good for ruptures and broken bones, so powerful to consolidate and knit together that if they be boiled with dissevered pieces of flesh in a pot, it will join them together again.’

In the garden
Its long tap roots can go as deep as 10 feet enabling it to accumulate minerals in its leaves and it is great as a liquid compost, particularly for tomatoes.

Bees
The flowers are mostly visited by bumblebees

In agriculture
It has been promoted in the past as a forage crop. Comfrey is used as fodder for livestock and gardeners state that it enriches compost.

As a natural dye
To give an olive green.

The generic name ‘Symphytum’ is thought to be derived from the Greek symphyo: ‘to make whole’ and phyton: ‘plant’.

Similarly the common English name, comfrey, is thought to be corrupted from the Latin confero meaning ‘to gather together’ which metaphorically captures this healing action of the herb strengthening the tissues of the body. The same Latin word explains another obscure name of the herb – ‘great confound’.

Common comfrey or true comfrey, Quaker comfrey, cultivated comfrey, consound, boneset, consound, blackwort, bruisewort, knitbone, knitback, slippery root, Yalluc (Saxon), consolida, ass ear.

Miraculous stories of healing broken and sprained limbs in incredibly short periods.

An attempt at making stamp glue becomes fodder for livestock

Comfrey is mucilaginous, meaning that it secretes a mucilage which can be sticky. In the mid 1800’s, a Quaker, Henry Doubleday, the inventor of postage stamp glue, had run out of gum arabic for his formula. Mr Doubleday read an article on comfrey in the “Royal Agricultural Society’s Journal” of 1871 in which he learned that it possessed this mucilaginous property. And he believed that he could extract this substance to use as glue. When he sent to St Petersburg for some comfrey plants, the gardener sent him seedlings that had grown between the rows of the established perennials instead of larger, more established plants. These seedlings were the result of cross-pollination of two pure strains: comfrey from the Caucasus, and the native European comfrey. It is not known if Mr Doubleday was able to extract his glue-like substance from these comfrey plants, but it is known that he fed the comfrey to his livestock. It was a very hardy and prolific strain, yielding from 100 to 120 tons per acre; much more than the former yield of 31 pounds per acre with the plants in the British Isles. Because of the high yield and the nutritional profile of comfrey, Mr Doubleday grew comfrey to fulfill his dream to feed a hungry world.

It is native to Europe and is known elsewhere, including North America, as an introduced species and sometimes a weed.

Perennial flowering plant of the genus Symphytum in the family Boraginaceae.

The plant is erect in habit and rough and hairy all over. There is a branched rootstock, the roots are fibrous and fleshy spindle-shaped, an inch or less in diameter and up to a foot long, smooth, blackish externally, and internally white, fleshy and juicy.

Allantoin, mucilages, tannins, rosmarinic acid, silicic acid