a new year month with woad
I’ve spent this first month of the year with woad, a herb that is all about cooling and purification. His leaves are long and blue-green, his flowers small and yellow and his seeds like tiny black tongues. He tends to grow around the edge of fields, around a metre tall, and is famous for blue dye the colour of summer skies. For stories of wild Celtic warriors going into war wearing nothing but complex blue patterns dyed onto their skin from woad. But there’s a lot more to woad. Beneath the indigo and green-blues lies a cooling calm, an assuaging of fire, deep stillness.
Woad (Isatis tinctoria) has long been naturalised in Europe, cultivated in Celtic lands before since pre-Roman times. He was the primary blue dye plant of Iron Age Britain and Gaul, producing the gorgeous pigment used on cloth. His name comes from Old English (wad, wadde) and Welsh (glaslys, ‘blue plant’) evoking colour and spirit. “Glas’ is not simply blue, but also green and fresh — the colour of life-force.
In Brittany, woad was known as pastel des teinturiers (’dyers’ pastel’), traded for pigment long into the medieval period. There are still woad artisans in France, but in the Middle Ages it was so prized that there were woad guilds with ‘woad barons’ who controlled the trade. The blue threads of the Bayeux Tapestry, the only colour that has remained fast over more than 900 years, are dyed with woad. The lucrative trade was diminished by the introduction of indigo, but the last woad mills in Britain were still producing dye for police and military unifroms into the 1930s. Long before that Druid Bards robes were dyed with woad.
Before and beyond its use as a dye, woad has always been a medicinal herb — strongly inflammation-modulating and viral protecting. His leaves are cooling and astringent. A poultice of fresh leaves applied to insect bites, swellings, and wounds reduces heat and infection. The roots are stronger, sometimes decocted for fevers, sore throats, and respiratory inflammation.
But he was never a household herb — like plantain or yarrow that anyone might reach for — but a plant of healers and dyers. A plant for purgo flammam et venenum in medieval herbals: ‘purging heat and poison’.
Woad is an intensely cooling, clearing, and descending medicine. One that helps energy settle downward — easing tension that’s risen up, calming the mind, helping digestion flow, or bringing excess heat or pressure down from the head or chest. Descending medicines help release — letting the breath, nerves, or gut relax and helping us to ground. There is a lot of power here and also the potential to push the body too far.
Woad works along the blood–lymph–immune axis, helping disperse heat, viral fire and toxic patterns. For someone prone to autoimmune inflammation, cooling can feel like a welcome call, but is also a razor-edge.
So often with a chronic illness pattern or after a severe bout of acute illness, we find ourselves depleted. I measure my depletion by how much I’m craving warming herbs and spices. When the terrain is already deep in winter, depleted, cold or fatigued, woad’s coldness can be a step too far, slowing the metabolism too much.
Internally, woad is often better suited as a crisis herb, not a tonic. Where there’s fever or a glandular flare, it can be wonderfully effective for short periods or tiny doses, resetting runaway immune fire. Cooling, detoxifying and resolute.
I’m rarely drawn to deeply cooling herbs unless they are used with others to balance the cold. Yet back in October, when depletion and lupus symptoms were about the worst they’d been, woad began whispering to me. I took a little time off, but knew I’d have to let go and sink into deeper rest, which I did in December and the beginning of this month. And as that nourishing period lengthened, woad kept whispering.
I have the tincture in my apothecary, but had never used it. It’s strong purgative and antiviral activity always make me feel he’s a little too much, quite aside from the cold. But while I crave internal warmth, I love winter’s coolness — not only the temperature, but the colours of light and land, soft grey and muted blue skies, the summer’s greens hushed with colours of bark and mulched leaves… I love the short days and long evenings (I’m a night owl by nature), the dusk skies and the vibrance of stars and moon as the owls glory in their nocturnal feasts in the garden.
We take in healing in so many ways, through all the senses. Blue dye was symbolically rich: a symbol of truth, endurance, and spiritual protection — from the Virgin’s robes to Celtic associations with sovereignty and depth, the ‘glas’ of renewal. Woad was not only used internally to purify and cool, but also externally to mark and protect.
Colouring the skin signalled both courage and immunity and if warriors did go into battle covered in woad, as Caesar wrote in Gallic Wars, then it may also have been for its styptic properties, staunching blood and healing wounds. In both Brittany and Britain, woad was worked into charms againsfever and plague, its leaves hung over doors or burned in protective rites. He is as much a spiritual herb of clarity and purification, as physical.A blue thread of calm.
Knowing I’d be back to work and busyness this month, woad seemed like the perfect bridge from winter rest to winter activity, holding on to grounded calm. His inner nudge was my body wishing for cool clarity and release and I’d need that again, as we all will, but with gentleness and containment.
During this month I’ve relied on a trusted group of balancing, nourishing and warming herbs in a daily tincture. During winter my body has swung between heat and chill, inflammation and fatigue. Taken at a medicinal dose woad would quench the surface heat but worsen the inner cold. What my body needed and what my core herbal practice aims for is to work with harmonising and anchoring herbs. Those that moderate inflammation while rebuilding tone and warmth underneath. Those that rekindle circulation.
But on days when inflammation stirred I’ve taken just two drops of woad. It’s not a medical dose. When we are attending deeply to a plant, listening to a voice beyond the noise of our heads, drop doses can be incredibly effective. Signal can be so much deeper than volume, a healing whisper that isn’t a push.
A whisper whose cool, lucid voice clears away detritus, asking me not to over-heat, not to go down the path of working till burn-out. A whisper so many of us need to listen to.
And woad also lends himself well to topical use when the skin flares with inflammation, heat, or irritation. This is a gentle way to draw on his energy without dropping the body’s overall temperature or energy.
Although woad is distinctly cold, he is onlyslightly moistening, tending to clear heat and damp rather than replenish fluids, but on skin, where the heat is dry and irritant, the cool is spring water over a fevered stone. And if it’s not held in drying alcohol, but in moistening oils and butters, the final balm is emollinet and will help with moisture as well as cool soothing. So I made a balm
Cool blue balm
Ingredients:
10 ml of concentrated woad tincture or woad infused oil
1/4 cup shea butter
3 tbsps of infused oils (I use rosehip and calendula oil which was macerated in the summer sun. You can buy both from herbal suppliers or simply use olive oil or an oil that your skin likes — almond or jojoba…)
10 drops vitamin E oil (lots of herbal suppliers have this and it keeps balms fresh for longer)
3 tbsps of beeswax pellets
up to 10 drops maximum of skin-cooling essential oils (I tend to use lavender and chamomile. Yarrow is also good and frankincense is lovely for skin, but under ecological pressure, so I would only use when necessary and take great care with sourcing)
Method:
Since tincture is alcohol-based, it will separate out if you stir it into your waxy base so first evaporate off the alcohol. Gently heat the tincture in a small pan over water or bain-marie until the alcohol dissipates and you’re left with a slightly thicker extract.
Set aside and in another pan or bain-marie heat together the shea butter, beeswax, infused oils (or oil of choice) and vitamin E.
Take off the heat, stir in the woad so that it’s evenly dispersed and add essential oils:
blue chamomile 5 drops
lavender 5 drops
Pour into small jars or tins
Let it cool and set and keep in a cool, dark place. It will last a few months and is helped by the vitamin E oil.
Using the balm has been soothing for the skin, but also became a ritual of spending time with this often overlooked herb. Woad’s association with Druid bardistry is a deep connection to creativity, to story-telling and poetry. Returning to work this month, woad has been an anchor to my own writing. A blue sky of cool, airy thought to immerse within. A warrior spirit wrapping a protective boundary around my writing time, because, as St Augustine says:
time doesn’t take any time off
Augustine Confessions, Book 4:13
Woad resonates with Mary Oliver writing in Upstream:
My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. … The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.