Useful and medicinal properties bearberry bear( bear eye)
Family Heather - Ericaceae
The generic name comes from two Greek words arktos - a bear and a staphyle - a grape brush. Species definition - from Latin words uva - grape brush and ursus - bear. The name "bear brush" or "bear grapes" indicates that bears eagerly eat the fruits of the plant.
Botanical Description. An evergreen shrub with an ascending stalk, which at the bottom takes root, forming accessory roots. The lower stems are covered with a multilayer dark brown bark that is easily peeled off. The shoots have a length of 25-130 cm. The leaves are regular, with short petioles, thick, leathery, glabrous, oblong-obovate, glistening from below with mesh venation.
Flowers are pale pink, water-lily, collected in short little flowering drooping brushes. Calyx is five-toothed, remains with fruits. Corolla on top with five-toothed limb. Stamens 10, with expanded to the base and pubescent filaments. Pestle 1, with the top
five-cavity ovary. Fruit is a red globose pyatosemyannaya drupe with powdery inedible flesh.
Under normal conditions, flowering is rare or unpronounced, and the plant multiplies, mainly vegetatively, gradually growing, forming curtains.
Blooming is observed in May - July. Fruits ripen in July - August.
Geographical spread. It grows in dry light pine and deciduous( especially birch) forests, on felling areas, in young pine plantations, on the coastal dunes, on the gravelly slopes of the mountains.
occurs in the forest zone of the European part of the USSR, Siberia and the Far East, as well as in the Caucasus and the Carpathians.
When organizing wildlife preserves with bearberry sites, it should be borne in mind that it is a light-loving plant, and without sanitary cutting of trees, lightening of the places of growth, the stocks of raw materials are significantly reduced.
Collection and drying. Collect the bearberry in April-May before flowering and at the beginning of it or in August-November from the beginning of the ripening of the fruit and until the appearance of the snow cover. In case of untimely harvest, the leaves become brown during drying. Olive part of the plant branches up to 3 cm long is cut with scissors, pruner or knife. Repeated procurement of raw materials in this case can be made after 3 years. When harvesting, all above-ground unrefined shoots, the restoration of thickets occurs slowly and return to collect the raw materials in the same place can only be in 5-6 years.
Dry the collected shoots in attics, under canopies, unfolding them loosely, or in dryers at a temperature of 50-80 °.After drying, the leaves are cut or threshed, and the stems are discarded. Remove and blackened or browned leaves. For cleaning from the crushed parts, the raw material is sieved through a sieve with a hole diameter of 3 mm.
Medicinal raw materials. Finished raw material - the bearberry leaf( Folium Uvae ursi) consists of small, leathery, dense, fragile leaves 1-2.2 cm long, 0.5-1.2 cm wide. Leaves obovate, less often elongate-oval with very short petioles. Venation mesh. The color on top is dark green or reddish,
from below is lighter. The smell is absent, the taste is strongly astringent, bitterish.
Art.285 GF X allows: moisture not more than 12%;ash not more than 4%;leaves that have lost their normal coloring, no more than 3%;other parts of bearberry and dead leaves not more than 4%;crushed parts passing through a sieve with a hole diameter of 3 mm, not more than 3%;organic impurity not more than 0.5%;mineral impurity not more than 0.5%.
The organic impurity includes parts of other plants and, in the first place, leaves of cowberry - Vaccinium vitis-idaea L. Cranberries are very similar to bearberry, and inexperienced collectors can collect it together with bearberry. Cowberry leaves are almost the same size or somewhat larger;thick, leathery, elliptical or.obovate, but with a folded down edge. On the underside of the sheet, numerous dark dots are clearly visible( without a magnifying glass) - glands.
Chemical composition. The bearberry leaf contains 8-16% of arbutin glycoside, methyl arbutin, free hydroquinone, 30-35% of hydrolysable tannins, gallic, ellagic, quinic, formic and ursolic acids, ellatanine, gallotanin, flavonoids: hyperoside, quercetin, isokvecetin and myricetin;triterpenes uveol and others.
Action and application. Glycoside arbutin has an antiseptic and diuretic effect. In the kidneys, it is split into glucose and hydroquinone. The latter belongs to the group of phenols and therefore exhibits bactericidal properties. It is impossible to appoint a bearberry in acute kidney diseases, as it irritates the kidney tissue, but in the composition of charges, where the concentration of arbutin is insignificant and the action of biologically active substances is enhanced, it can be used. A relatively small diuretic effect is due to the fact that hydroquinone irritates the kidney tissue and lowers the sugar content in the blood after the nutritional load.
Assign a leaf of bearberry in the form of broth at the rate of 10 g. Per 200 ml of water for 1-3 tablespoons 3-4 times a day for cystitis( bacteriuria).