Photo: NasserHalaweh, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
White Ginger Lily
Hedychium coronarium
Also known as Butterfly Ginger Lily, Garland Flower, Cinnamon Jasmine, Mariposa
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Across the eastern Himalayas and into Southeast Asia, healers have long turned to the rhizome of Hedychium coronarium much as they would ginger, simmering it into warming decoctions for coughs, colds, and the deep ache of rheumatism. In Ayurvedic practice it has traditionally been counted among the remedies for fever and inflammation, valued for the same peppery warmth that makes its ginger-family cousins so useful. The flowers, meanwhile, earned their own quiet fame, prized for centuries as a source of perfume and worn as an offering of fragrance rather than medicine. In Cuba, where the plant became the national flower, it carries a second layer of history entirely, remembered less for the sickroom than for the story of a nation.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Remedies & preparations
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- ✦Ginger
- ✦Turmeric
- ✦Tulsi (Holy Basil)
- ✦Culinary ginger (Zingiber officinale)
- ✦Turmeric
“When a cold settles into your chest and you want the comfort of an old warming decoction and a fragrant evening steam.”
During Cuba's fight for independence, legend holds that women hid secret messages for the rebels folded inside the petals of this flower, which is how it became the country's national bloom, the mariposa, or butterfly.
The rhizome has a long culinary and tonic tradition in small amounts, though fresh sap can irritate sensitive skin. Avoid medicinal-strength use during pregnancy and breastfeeding, since safety data is lacking.