You’ve heard that you need Vitamin C, so you eat oranges regularly and figure you’re doing a good deed for your body, right?
Why do you even need Vitamin C?
According to the pharmacy aisle at Walgreens, you NEED vitamin C to stop your cold and if you don’t take their products you’ll never get better! Of course, that’s hype. Eating an orange is not going to stop a virus in its tracks.
However, Vitamin C does help strengthen your immune system. It also aids in collagen production for your skin, helps reduce cancer and heart disease, and helps make anti-stress hormones like serotonin and oxytocin.
And there are much better sources than oranges (imported throughout most of the country) that you can find in the wild!
Pine and other conifer tree needles (except for Yew, which is toxic) are high in Vitamin C, so much so that when scurvy-ridden sailors landed on the shores of America in the 1600s, Native tribes fed them tea made from pine or hemlock (tree) and cured them from the terrible disease that was rotting away their gums and flesh.
Nature is here to take care of us, if only we’re willing to listen.
What else has high levels of Vitamin C? Rose hips! Every August I take a trip down to the beach to forage wild invasive Rosa rugosa hips. These bushes were brought over from Asia as an ornamental plant with the dual purpose of having edible fruits nearly as big as tomatoes and flowers that are used to make jelly and rose water. Both the flowers and hips are enormous!
There are other varieties of wild roses in my area, mainly the terribly invasive Multiflora rose and sometimes the dainty Dog rose. Multiflora rose hips are super tiny and therefore more difficult to process in any useful way. I rarely harvest them but they can be helpful in a pinch as part of a tea or syrup blend if you can’t find larger hips.
I made a video of my most recent rose hip foraging excursion you can watch here:
Rose hips are such a medicinal powerhouse that during World War II, when it was dangerous to import citrus fruits from around the world, the British government ordered rose hip syrup to be manufactured in large quantities to be passed out for their national health plan, mostly to children who were at the highest risk for vitamin deficiencies. [Source]
Rose water is a common ingredient in skincare products and is a fabulous gentle astringent for your face. I use it every morning as the secondary part of my skincare routine, after my face oil has sat on my skin for a few hours.
Rose hips make a delicious natural candy and lend themselves well to teas or syrups. I add it to my homemade herbal cough syrup every winter.
Learn more about preventing viral infections and healing your winter colds and flus in my No-BS Guide to Staying Well This Winter class. Winter will be here before you know it! You need plenty of Vitamin D and Vitamin C to keep your immune system healthy and now is the best time to be preparing your herbal medicine cabinet by harvesting rose hips.
And because Vitamin C is such a critical piece of maintaining beautiful skin, I invite you to check out my Bring Your Beauty Back mini class on healing and reviving your skin.
Note: When you click the links you get access to extra lessons and resources!