Rosaceae
Filipendula ulmaria
Meadowsweet · Queen of the meadow
- Part used
- floweraerial
- Native range
- Europe and western Asia; naturalised in North America
- Morphology
- A perennial of damp ground to a metre and a half, with pinnate leaves and dense creamy froths of small almond-scented flowers.
- Also known as
- Spiraea ulmaria
What is in it
Evidence
Very little controlled evidence. Salicylate content provides a plausible basis for the traditional fever and pain use.
Safety
Shares salicylate cautions: avoid in salicylate sensitivity, in aspirin-sensitive asthma, and in children and adolescents with viral illness because of Reye syndrome risk.
Interactions: Additive with anticoagulants and other salicylates
Regulatory: Permitted as a food flavouring and as a listed medicine ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Used across Europe for fever, pain and digestive complaints, and as a strewing herb — it was reportedly Elizabeth I’s favourite for that purpose. Also traditional in mead and beer flavouring.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Aspirin is named after this plant, not after willow.
When Bayer marketed acetylsalicylic acid in 1899 they built the name from acetyl and Spiraea, the genus meadowsweet then sat in — salicin had been isolated from it as well as from willow, and Spiraea ulmaria was the more convenient reference. The plant has since been moved to Filipendula, so the drug is named after a genus its source plant no longer belongs to.
It is a small thing, and it is a neat illustration of why this collection checks its names: even a household word can be a fossil of a taxonomy that has since moved on.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.