Yarrow: History and Traditional Use

Table of Contents

1. Botany, Range and a Name from the Battlefield
2. The Shanidar Cave Question: Yarrow and the Neanderthals
3. Achilles, Dioscorides and Pliny: Yarrow in the Ancient Mediterranean
4. Woundwort, Nosebleed, Staunchweed: What the Folk Names Record
5. Herbals, Gruit and Household Use in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
6. Yarrow Stalks and the I Ching
7. Yarrow in Native American Medicine
8. From Achilleine to Chamazulene: The Chemistry Takes Shape (1846 Onward)
9. Monographs, Trials and Warnings: Yarrow in Modern Medicine
10. Yarrow Today
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections
13. Featured Videos

Botany, Range and a Name from the Battlefield

Yarrow is a tough perennial of the daisy family (Asteraceae, the family that also gives us chamomile, calendula and feverfew). It sends up wiry stems knee-high from a rosette of soft, feathery leaves, each leaf divided and divided again into a fine lace — hence the species name millefolium, Latin for "a thousand leaves," and the old English name milfoil. The flat-topped clusters at the top of the stem are made of many tiny flower heads, usually white, sometimes pink. Crushed, the leaves give off a dry, slightly sweet, medicinal scent that is the surest way to tell yarrow from the odourless plants it resembles.

It is native across the temperate Northern Hemisphere — Europe, Asia and North America — and grows from sea level to over 3,000 metres on roadsides, meadows and any disturbed ground with sun. That ubiquity matters: yarrow was never a rare drug traded across continents. It grew at the edge of the field, the camp and the battlefield, exactly where a bleeding wound was most likely to need it. Botanists treat Achillea millefolium as a broad species complex (A. millefolium s.l., "in the wide sense") with several chromosome races and chemical types, which is why its essential oil varies so much from place to place and why older reports of its chemistry sometimes disagree.

Both halves of its scientific name carry history. Achillea is the Greek hero Achilles, who by legend learned medicine from the centaur Chiron and staunched his soldiers' wounds with this plant. The English yarrow is older than the Latin, descending from Old English gearwe, cognate with German Garbe (as in Schafgarbe, the plant's German name). Carl Linnaeus fixed the binomial Achillea millefolium in his Species Plantarum of 1753.

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The Shanidar Cave Question: Yarrow and the Neanderthals

Yarrow's most famous historical claim is also its most contested. Between 1951 and 1960 the American archaeologist Ralph Solecki excavated Shanidar Cave in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan and recovered the remains of several Neanderthals. Soil from around one adult skeleton, Shanidar IV, dated to roughly 60,000 years ago, went to the French palynologist (pollen specialist) Arlette Leroi-Gourhan. In a 1975 paper in Science she reported dense clumps of pollen from several flowering plants — among them yarrow (Achillea), groundsel, grape hyacinth and a knapweed relative — and argued that whole flower heads had been laid in the grave. Solecki popularised the idea in Shanidar: The First Flower People, and the "flower burial" became one of the best-known images in prehistory.

The picture has since been challenged from two directions. In 1999 the archaeologist Jeffrey Sommer, in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, pointed out that a burrowing rodent native to the area, the Persian jird (Meriones persicus), hoards flower heads in its tunnels and could have carried enough plant material into the cave to account for the pollen. Then in 2023 a team led by Chris Hunt re-examined the palynology in the Journal of Archaeological Science: the plants flower at different times of year, so they could not have been gathered fresh together; pollen clumps of the kind reported are exactly what solitary ground-nesting bees pack into their brood cells; and ancient bee burrows are still visible in the cave floor. Bees, not mourners, they concluded, most plausibly put the pollen there — while allowing that some plant material may still have been placed with the bodies.

The honest position is this: yarrow pollen was genuinely found beside a Neanderthal burial some 60,000 years old, and a 1992 paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology went on to argue that the plants had been chosen as medicines. Whether anyone placed yarrow there at all, let alone for healing, is now doubted by most specialists. On present evidence its documented medicinal history begins not in the Palaeolithic but in the written record of the classical world.

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Achilles, Dioscorides and Pliny: Yarrow in the Ancient Mediterranean

Homer's Iliad makes Achilles a healer as well as a warrior — in Book 11 the wounded Eurypylus asks for the remedies Achilles learned from Chiron — but the poem names no plant. Later tradition filled the gap with the story that Achilles carried yarrow to Troy to stop his men's wounds bleeding (a separate strand, told by the Roman mythographer Hyginus, has him heal King Telephus with scrapings from his own spear). These are myths, recorded here as myths; what they show is that by the Roman period a wound herb was firmly attached to the hero's name.

The two great pharmacological writers of the first century CE both mention it. Dioscorides, the Greek army physician whose De Materia Medica (c. 50–70 CE) remained Europe's standard drug reference for fifteen hundred years, describes in Book IV a plant he calls Achilleios, grouped with the sideritis or "iron" wound herbs: shoots about a span long, thin small leaves, and a white flower head that turns golden with age. Its ground-up foliage, he says, closes bleeding wounds, calms inflammation and reduces haemorrhage, including from the womb. Most scholars identify this with yarrow, though the identification rests on the description rather than on certainty, and yarrow appears under no clear name in the earlier Hippocratic writings.

Pliny the Elder, in Book 25 of his Natural History (completed shortly before his death in 79 CE), states that Achilles, "the pupil of Chiron, discovered a plant to heal wounds, which is therefore called achilleos." Pliny is less help than he seems, because he offers several candidate plants for the name, including a sideritis and a "Heraclean panaces," and not all of them can confidently be called our yarrow. Still, the essentials of yarrow's later career are present in these two authors: a plant named for Achilles, gathered by soldiers, pressed on bleeding wounds. That is the tradition the Latin name herba militaris, "the military herb," carried through the Middle Ages.

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Woundwort, Nosebleed, Staunchweed: What the Folk Names Record

Few herbs wear their history so openly in their names. Maud Grieve's A Modern Herbal (1931), which gathered the English folk names still current in the early twentieth century, lists for yarrow: milfoil, old man's pepper, soldier's woundwort, knight's milfoil, herbe militaris, thousand weed, nose bleed, carpenter's weed, bloodwort, staunchweed, sanguinary, devil's nettle, devil's plaything and yarroway; in the American Southwest Spanish speakers added plumajillo, "little feather." Read as a group they are a small social history — the "devil's" names recall yarrow's place in English love-divination and witch lore, and the rest are about blood.

The largest cluster is about bleeding. Soldier's woundwort, knight's milfoil and herba militaris preserve the Achilles tradition. Staunchweed, bloodwort and sanguinary (from the Latin for blood) describe the styptic use — a styptic being anything that checks bleeding when pressed on a cut — and carpenter's weed names the trade most likely to need one. Nosebleed is the most curious, because the tradition ran both ways: a leaf pressed to the nostril to stop a nosebleed, and a leaf rolled and pushed into the nose to start one, on the old idea that letting a little blood relieved a headache. Grieve records both.

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Herbals, Gruit and Household Use in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Through the Middle Ages yarrow stayed what Dioscorides had made it: a wound herb crushed fresh onto cuts or made into an ointment, and a bitter tea for the stomach and for fevers. The Anglo-Saxon name gearwe shows English speakers knew it a thousand years ago. John Gerard's Herball (1597) describes common yarrow under the name milfoil — "very many stalks coming up a cubit high," with leaves "cut in the sides sundry wise." Nicholas Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653) files it as "Nose-bleed, Milfoil and Thousand-leaf," places it under the astrological rule of Venus (the framework Culpeper used for every plant), and gives the familiar uses: an ointment of the leaves for "green wounds," ulcers and fistulas, and a decoction in white wine to check excessive menstrual bleeding and the "bloody flux" (dysentery). Grieve adds that Highland Scots were still making a yarrow wound ointment in her day.

Yarrow had a second, less medical life in the medieval brewhouse. Before hops became the universal bittering agent, northern European ale was flavoured and preserved with a herb mixture called gruit. The archaeobotanist Karl-Ernst Behre's 1999 review of beer additives in Europe, drawing on written sources and on plant remains from excavations, lists yarrow among the plants used, alongside bog myrtle and marsh rosemary. The right to sell gruit was a valuable monopoly of bishops, abbeys and towns, and the slow switch to hops between about the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries — hastened in Bavaria by the 1516 purity ordinance permitting only barley, hops and water — pushed the older herbs out of commercial brewing. The memory lingered: Grieve notes that in Sweden yarrow was called "field hop" and had been used in beer.

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Yarrow Stalks and the I Ching

Half a world from Troy, yarrow had an entirely different job. The I Ching (Yijing, the "Book of Changes") is China's oldest divination text, with roots in the Western Zhou period (from the eleventh century BCE), and the classical way to consult it is with a bundle of fifty dried yarrow stalks. The method is a form of cleromancy — producing apparently random numbers to read the will of heaven. The stalks are divided and counted off in a fixed sequence until a number from 6 to 9 remains; done six times, the numbers build one of the sixty-four hexagrams, 6 and 8 drawn as broken lines and 7 and 9 as solid ones. The procedure is set out in the "Great Commentary" (Xici), one of the classical appendices to the text; historians note that while stalk divination is ancient, the detailed method used today is a later reconstruction, and coins have long been the everyday substitute.

One precision is worth adding. The Chinese character shi (蓍), the divination yarrow, is usually identified by botanists with the East Asian Achillea alpina (A. sibirica), a close relative, rather than with A. millefolium itself; in practice any straight yarrow stalk serves. Yarrow was also an auspicious plant in Chinese tradition, paired in old texts with the tortoise shell, the other great instrument of divination.

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Yarrow in Native American Medicine

Because yarrow is native to North America as well as Eurasia, Indigenous peoples had their own long relationship with it, independent of the Achilles tradition. The best single record is Daniel Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany (1998) and the online database built from it, which compiles uses reported in the ethnographic literature nation by nation. At the time of writing it lists 366 recorded uses for Achillea millefolium from dozens of nations, and Moerman ranks yarrow among the handful of plants with the most recorded uses on the continent. Wendy Applequist and Moerman's 2011 review in Economic Botany, pointedly titled "A Neglected Panacea?", is built on those records.

The uses cluster in ways an Old World herbalist would recognise. Dermatological use — leaves chewed or mashed and pressed onto cuts, sores, burns and bruises — is the largest category; fevers and colds, treated with a hot infusion of the flowering tops, come next; toothache, earache, headache and stomach complaints are all well represented. From the ethnographic record: the Navajo (Diné) counted yarrow among their "life medicines," chewing it for toothache; the Chumash applied the mashed plant to cuts; the Miwok used it for pain and head colds; the Cherokee drank a yarrow tea for fever; and some Ojibwe inhaled the steam of the leaves for headache. The Northern Cheyenne still grow it in a tribal botanical garden in Montana.

Two cautions apply. The written record of Indigenous plant use was mostly set down by outside ethnographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it is partial and flattens practices specific to a people, a season and a ceremony into a list of "uses." And a use being widespread is a reason to study a plant, not proof that it works. Even so, the convergence — wounds, bleeding, fever, stomach — between peoples who had never heard of Achilles is one of the more persuasive facts in yarrow's history.

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From Achilleine to Chamazulene: The Chemistry Takes Shape (1846 Onward)

Yarrow entered the laboratory in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the same wave of plant chemistry that isolated morphine, quinine and salicin. In 1846 an Italian chemist named Zanon reported a bitter, reddish-brown principle from the herb, which he called achillein, together with an "achilleic acid." Both were later corrected: in 1857 Heinrich Hlasiwetz showed the acid to be aconitic acid, already known from other plants, and in 1870 Adolf von Planta showed that achillein was an alkaloid (a nitrogen-containing plant base) identical with the achilleine of the alpine musk yarrow, Achillea moschata. Achilleine became the constituent to which the dispensatories of the period attributed yarrow's blood-staunching reputation. Whether it deserves the credit is still unsettled; the modern literature treats yarrow's effect on bleeding as plausible but under-studied.

The plant's most striking chemical feature was noticed before it was understood. When yarrow or German chamomile flowers are steam-distilled, the oil that comes over is a deep blue. In 1863 the London perfumer Septimus Piesse named the pigment azulene, from the Spanish azul, having obtained it from yarrow and wormwood as well as chamomile. Its structure defeated chemists until 1936, when Alexander St. Pfau and Plácidus Plattner in Zurich worked out the fused five- and seven-membered ring that makes azulenes blue; the specific pigment of chamomile and yarrow oil, chamazulene, was characterised in the years that followed. A further twist: chamazulene does not exist in the living plant. It forms during distillation from a colourless precursor, the sesquiterpene lactone matricin, so the blue oil is in a real sense a product of the still rather than of the flower.

The twentieth century filled in the rest. Chandler, Hooper and Harvey's 1982 review in Economic Botany brought the ethnobotany and the phytochemistry together for the first time: a variable essential oil (chamazulene, camphor, 1,8-cineole, sabinene and others, by chemical race), bitter sesquiterpene lactones (achillin and related guaianolides), flavonoids such as apigenin and luteolin, tannins, phenolic acids and the alkaloid fraction. Benedek and Kopp's 2007 review, subtitled "recent findings confirm the traditional use," argued that the flavonoids and dicaffeoylquinic acids account for the antispasmodic (cramp-easing) and bile-stimulating effects behind its use as a digestive bitter. The same sesquiterpene lactones that make yarrow bitter would also explain its main safety problem, described below.

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Monographs, Trials and Warnings: Yarrow in Modern Medicine

Yarrow never left the pharmacopoeias of continental Europe, and in the late twentieth century its traditional uses were written into regulatory monographs. Germany's Commission E — the expert panel that assessed herbal drugs for the federal health authority — published its monograph on yarrow herb (Schafgarbenkraut) in the Bundesanzeiger in 1990, approving it internally for loss of appetite, dyspeptic complaints and mild cramp-like gastrointestinal complaints, and externally, as a sitz bath (a shallow warm bath of the hips, traditionally 100 g of herb to 20 litres of water), for pelvipathia vegetativa — painful, cramp-like pelvic conditions in women without a structural cause. The wound-healing use, notably, was not among the approved indications.

The European Medicines Agency's Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products (HMPC) went further. Its European Union herbal monograph on yarrow herb, first adopted on 12 July 2011 and revised on 23 September 2020, lists four traditional-use indications, each justified "exclusively based upon long-standing use": temporary loss of appetite; mild, spasmodic gastrointestinal complaints including bloating and flatulence; minor spasm associated with menstrual periods; and the treatment of small superficial wounds. The regulator thus accepts the Achilles tradition as a tradition — enough to license a tea or tincture with that claim — while recording that no "well-established use" based on trials has been shown. The monograph also states that safety in pregnancy and breastfeeding has not been established and advises against use then, and restricts oral use to adults and adolescents over twelve.

Clinical trials have arrived only recently and remain small. A double-blind randomised trial published in 2015 in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology found that a yarrow preparation reduced the pain of primary dysmenorrhoea (period pain) compared with placebo, in line with the menstrual-spasm indication. The same year a double-blind randomised controlled trial in the European Journal of Oncology Nursing reported that adding yarrow distillate to a standard mouthwash reduced the severity of chemotherapy-induced oral mucositis (painful mouth inflammation). Both are single, modest studies, and the regulators' "traditional use" wording remains the fair description of the evidence.

The modern chapter also brought a warning the old herbals lacked. Yarrow is an Asteraceae plant, and its sesquiterpene lactones are contact allergens. In 1991 Björn Hausen and colleagues, in Contact Dermatitis, isolated the specific sensitising compounds from yarrow — a previously unknown peroxide lactone they named α-peroxyachifolid, with related guaianolides — placing yarrow firmly among the plants (with chamomile, feverfew, arnica and chrysanthemums) that cause allergic contact dermatitis in people sensitised to the family. The EMA monograph accordingly lists hypersensitivity to Asteraceae as a contraindication and records skin reactions as a known adverse effect. For a wound herb applied to broken skin, this is the single most important piece of modern knowledge about it.

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Yarrow Today

Yarrow today is at once one of the most familiar and one of the least studied European medicinal herbs: sold as a tea herb, tincture, bitter blend, sitz-bath and wound-wash preparation and as a steam-distilled "blue yarrow" essential oil, licensed across the European Union as a traditional herbal medicine with the EMA's four indications, grown by gardeners as a drought-proof, pollinator-friendly perennial, and still pressed onto a cut in the field exactly as Dioscorides described.

The historical record and the modern evidence line up in an interesting way. Every tradition that met yarrow reached for it first for bleeding and wounds and second for fever and the stomach; today's regulators have licensed exactly those uses, but on the basis of tradition, because the trials that would settle the question have mostly not been done. What is firmly established is the chemistry that makes the tradition plausible, and the one real hazard, Asteraceae allergy, that the old herbalists could not have known. That is where two thousand years of written use, and one disputed cave, have left the herb of Achilles.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the ethnobotanical and pharmacological reviews of yarrow, the three key papers in the Shanidar Cave debate, the history of beer additives, the identification of yarrow's contact allergens and the first randomised trials. Historical primary texts named in the article are not cited here.

1. Applequist WL, Moerman DE (2011). Yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.): A Neglected Panacea? A Review of Ethnobotany, Bioactivity, and Biomedical Research. Economic Botany. — doi:10.1007/s12231-011-9154-3
2. Chandler RF, Hooper SN, Harvey MJ (1982). Ethnobotany and phytochemistry of yarrow, Achillea millefolium, Compositae. Economic Botany. — doi:10.1007/bf02858720
3. Leroi-Gourhan A (1975). The Flowers Found with Shanidar IV, a Neanderthal Burial in Iraq. Science. — doi:10.1126/science.190.4214.562
4. Sommer JD (1999). The Shanidar IV ‘Flower Burial’: a Re-evaluation of Neanderthal Burial Ritual. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. — doi:10.1017/S0959774300015249
5. Hunt CO, Pomeroy E, Reynolds T, Tilby E, et al. (2023). Shanidar et ses fleurs? Reflections on the palynology of the Neanderthal ‘Flower Burial’ hypothesis. Journal of Archaeological Science. — doi:10.1016/j.jas.2023.105822
6. Behre K-E (1999). The history of beer additives in Europe — A review. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. — doi:10.1007/BF02042841
7. Benedek B, Kopp B (2007). Achillea millefolium L. s.l. revisited: Recent findings confirm the traditional use. Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift. — doi:10.1007/s10354-007-0431-9
8. Hausen BM, Breuer J, Weglewski J, Rücker G (1991). alpha-Peroxyachifolid and other new sensitizing sesquiterpene lactones from yarrow (Achillea millefolium L., Compositae). Contact Dermatitis. — PubMed PMID: 1868717
9. Jenabi E, Fereidoony B (2015). Effect of Achillea millefolium on Relief of Primary Dysmenorrhea: A Double-Blind Randomized Clinical Trial. Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology. — PubMed PMID: 26238568
10. Miranzadeh S, Adib-Hajbaghery M, Soleymanpoor L, Ehsani M (2015). Effect of adding the herb Achillea millefolium on mouthwash on chemotherapy induced oral mucositis in cancer patients: A double-blind randomized controlled trial. European Journal of Oncology Nursing. — PubMed PMID: 25667123

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Yarrow ethnobotany and traditional use
2. PubMed: Yarrow history of pharmacology

External Authoritative Resources

• European Medicines Agency — Millefolii herba (yarrow herb) European Union herbal monograph
• EMA/HMPC — EU herbal monograph on Achillea millefolium L., herba, Revision 1 (2020, PDF)
• Native American Ethnobotany Database (Moerman) — recorded uses of Achillea millefolium
• Grieve M (1931), A Modern Herbal — Yarrow
• Kew — Plants of the World Online: Achillea millefolium

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Connections

• All Herbs
• Yarrow Hub
• Yarrow Benefits
• Yarrow: Wound Care and Bleeding
• Comfrey
• Self-Heal
• Calendula
• Chamomile
• Feverfew
• Epistaxis (Nosebleed)
• Dysmenorrhea
• Wound Healing

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