Useful and medicinal properties of cornflower blue( pale)
One-two-year herbaceous plant up to 50 cm tall, slightly cobwebby-fibrous. The root is weak, rod-shaped, branched. Stalk straight, branched. Basal leaves petiolate, regular, whole or trilobate, obovate-lanceolate, sessile. The cauline leaves are linear or linear-lanceolate, sessile. Flowers in baskets, singly located on long peduncles, outer - infertile, blue, funnel-shaped, internally tubular, violet - fertile. Wrapper basket of leaves of various shapes: outer ovoid with a filmy rim, internal lanceolate with a filmy appendage. Fruit is a brownish-gray seed with a tuft. Blossoms in June-July.
It grows like weed in crops and on steam fields, meadows in all regions of Russia.
Medicinal raw materials are marginal funnel-shaped flowers. The flowers are collected during the full flowering period. Flowers are pulled from the ripped baskets and immediately dried in a dark, well-ventilated room. Finished raw materials - blue flowers - should not contain flower baskets more than 1%, faded flowers - more than 6%.
In flowers of cornflower contains bitter glycoside cetaurin( cunin), cyanin( coloring matter), etc.
In medical practice, flowers are used as infusion or as a mild diuretic and cholagogue: 1 teaspoon of flowers brew a glass of boiling water, insist 20 minutes,cool and drain. Take 1/4 cup 20 minutes before meals 3 times a day. In addition, the flowers of cornflower are included in the diuretic tea.
In folk medicine, cornflower flowers are used as a choleretic, diuretic and diaphoretic remedy: in dropsy, jaundice, inflammation of the kidneys, bladder and colds;with cystitis, nervous diseases, with uterine bleeding;at the fright of children, they drink it with a decoction and bathe in it, with toothache;in the face, smoke
with smoke from burned inflorescences;from tuberculosis, with bloody urine, possess an antispasmodic property.
Decoctions of marginal flowers are often used as eye lotions in some eye diseases as anti-inflammatory, and sometimes as a cauterizing and disinfectant. Decoction of flowers is applied externally with chicken blindness. At treatment it is necessary to observe a diet: often to eat in a liver, cod-liver oil.
Application
Decoction: 1 teaspoon of flowers for a glass of boiling water;To use on 1/4 glasses 3 times a day, it is external to apply as a lotion.
Infusion: 1:10.
Liquid extract on 40 ° alcohol: 1:10.
Vasilek is a part of diuretic tea with the following composition: cornflower flowers - 1 part, licorice root - 1 part, bearberry leaf - 3 parts.