Focus on Fennel

Sweet Fennel – Foeniculum vulgare

What a wonderfully weird plant Fennel is. 

It’s feathery delicate foliage adds texture and hight to your herb garden, with tiny yellow flowers in umbrella like clusters. Which create a perfect pillow of nectar to entice pollinators in abundance, especially bees, hornets and hoverfly’s, who love the pollen these little flowers provide.

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Culinery Herb

Fennel flowers, seeds and leaf are edible, commonly used with pork, fish, in salads, the seeds in curry.

Fennel tea is also refreshing and very beneficial, easily made from the crushed seeds and boiling water or widely available as dried herbal tea.

Essential Oil – Sweet Fennel

 

Fennel essential oil can be added to a carrier oil for massage, to a burner to fragrance your space or to bath water. The benefits of fennel are many, cleansing, calming, at the forefront of it’s medicinal properties. Its fragrance clean, sweet earthy, spicy and peppery with uplifting and refreshing qualities.

• Detoxifying – used in lymphatic drainage massage.
• Diuretic – rids the body of toxins and a good urinary-tract antiseptic
• Digestive problems, flatulence, stomach pains, cramps and bloating.
• Aids weight loss and treatment of cellulite
• Fennel is cleansing, purifying and revitalizing.
• Promotes the production of breast milk (galactagogue)
• Regulates menstrural cycle
• Regulates and reduces the fluctuation of hormones during the menopause.
• Clears the head and promotes mental focus and concentration.
• Fennel is protecting, grounding, calming, warming, a tonic and gives strenght in adversity.

Contraindications: Fennel essential oil must not be used throughout pregnancy or by sufferers of epilepsy.