Photo: Bernd Haynold, CC BY 2.5 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Green-flowered Wintergreen
Pyrola chlorantha
Also known as Green Wintergreen, Greenish Wintergreen, Green Pyrola, Small Pyrola, Greenish Shinleaf
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Long before it had a Latin name, green-flowered wintergreen was quietly gathered by northern peoples wherever it grew, its small round leaves valued for their cooling, astringent bite. Several Native American nations used pyrola leaves as a poultice or wash for cuts, sores, and swellings, and steeped them into a mild tea thought to ease bladder and kidney complaints. It traveled into early North American folk medicine under names like king's cure and pyrola tea, prized less for drama and more for its steady, gentle usefulness in the home medicine chest. Because it never grew abundant enough to be commercialized, it has remained a quiet forest herb, known mostly to those who walked the same pine woods season after season.
How to grow & use it
✦The full apothecary for Green-flowered Wintergreen
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- ✦Remedies & preparations
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- ✦Uva Ursi (Bearberry)
- ✦Plantain
- ✦Yarrow
- ✦Uva Ursi
- ✦Wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens)
“For the small green flicker in the hush of a pine wood, and the gentle wash a forest floor seems to ask for.”
Despite the shared name, green-flowered wintergreen has nothing to do with the wintergreen flavor in old-fashioned candy and oil of wintergreen, that comes from Gaultheria procumbens. Pyrola's own quiet trick is botanical rather than culinary: it taps into underground fungal threads connected to nearby forest trees, drawing part of its nourishment from them, which is part of why it is so rarely found outside the deep woods.
Contains arbutin, the same compound found in bearberry, which the body converts to hydroquinone, so internal use should be occasional and short term only. Avoid during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and if you have kidney disease.