Useful and medicinal properties of the wood billet( mallow forest)
One- or two-year herbaceous plant up to 90 cm high. Root stem, branching. Stalk erect or upright, hairy. Leaves alternate, long-petioled, 5-7 lobate, crenate along margin, round-cordate in outline. The flowers are white or pinkish, 2-3 in the axils of the leaves. The fruit is dry, in the remaining calyx, it breaks into kidney-shaped achenes. Blossoms from July to September.
Malva forest is an ordinary plant in many regions of Russia. It grows like a weed near houses, fences, along roads and across fields.
In the South-East, the mallow forest is replaced by mallow, small and, more rarely, mallow, neglectful, ubiquitous and also suitable for therapeutic purposes.
For medicinal purposes, flowers are used, sometimes the leaves and roots of the plant. Flowers are harvested when they have acquired a pink color, but have not yet completely dissolved, roots - in autumn or early spring.
Flowers and leaves contain a large amount of mucus, carotene, vitamin C, sugar, coloring matter.
A mall in folk medicine is used mainly as a softening anti-inflammatory drug - inside with diseases of the larynx, trachea, pneumonia, inflammatory diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, bronchitis, laryngitis;with a painful dry cough, catarrh of the throat and a husky voice - like rinsing. Often for greater efficiency, the flowers and leaves of the woods marshmallow are combined with the flowers of buckwheat, coltsfoot, wild poppy and herbage.
When used internally, the preparation of flowers and leaves of the mallow reduces irritation, inflammatory reaction, reflexively weakens the secretion of the bronchial glands.
Slime, possessing a large adsorption surface, acts antitoxically, weakens the irritating effect of other substances.
Flowers and leaves are used together with the grass of a blackberry( wormwood), chamomile and a grain of oats in the form of baths with an increase in the spleen( tumor of it).
Application
A strained broth( 15 g per 200 ml) is drunk in the larynx, trachea and lung diseases for 1 glass 5 times a day.
Decoction mix 1( used in the same diseases): flowers of the woods paddy, buckwheat, coltsfoot, wild poppy and herbage are mixed equally, 50 g of the mixture are brewed in 5 glasses of water and drink 1 glass 5 times a day.
Decoction-2( for baths with enlarged spleen): 200 g of leaves and flowers of the forest marshmallow, 150 grams of herbage, chamomile and oatmeal;mix 25 cups of boiling water, insist during the day, boil in the evening, poured into a bath and add the right amount of water. The bath is taken at night.