Catsfoot

Botanical: Antennaria dioca (GAEERTN.)
Family: N.O. Compositae

• Description
• Medicinal Action and Uses
• Constituents
• Doses

It is the only British species, a small perennial with tufted or creeping leafly stalks and almost simple flowering stems, from 2 to 5 inches high. Lower leaves obovate or oblong, upper ones linear, white underneath or on both sides. Flowers early summer white and pinky, dioecious. In the males, inner bracts of the involucre have broad white petal-like tips, the females inner bracts narrow and white at tips, florets filiform with long protruding pappus to the achenes. Taste astringent odour pleasant and strongest in the female heads, male plant has white membraneous scales and the female rosecoloured. Gerard alludes to it as 'Live for ever,' and says:

'When the flower hath long flourished and is waxen old, then comes there in the middest of the floure a certain brown yellow thrumme, such as is in the middest of the daisie, which floure being gathered when it is young may be kept in such manner (I meane in such freshness and well-liking) by the space of a whole year after in your chest or elsewhere, wherefore our English women have called it "Live Long," or "Live-for ever," which name doth aptly answer thiseffects.'

Another variety of Cudweed was called 'Herbe Impious' or 'Wicked Cudweed,' a variety

'like unto the small Cudweed, but much larger and for the most part those floures which appeare first are the lowest and basest; and they are over topt by other floures, which come on younger branches, and grow higher as children seeking to overgrow or overtop their parents (as many wicked children do) for which cause it hath been called "Herbe Impious." '

---Constituents---Resin, volabile oil tanin and a bitter principle.

---Doses---For a mouthwash: 1 OZ. Cudweed, 1 OZ. Raspberry Leaves, 1 OZ. Tincture of Myrrh. As an infusion: 1 OZ. herb to pint boiling water is given internally in wineglassful doses and applied externally, as a gargle and as a fomentation. Fluid extract: Dose, 1/2 to 1 drachm.

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