hello my name is Matthew Hunter with Legacy Wilderness Academy and I'm on a mission to document every edible and medicinal plant in the Southeastern us so Southerners can have greater access to nutritious food and free medicine in this video we're going to be looking at the sweet gum tree a common tree that's used in southern folk medicine to treat coughs colds and flu and an important Wildlife species for birds and butterflies we'll look at how to identify the sweet gum tree talk about its medicinal uses and look at how to prepare the plant into a
medicine but before before we begin I'll quickly mention that if you want to learn more about medicinal plants of the southeast make sure to download yourself a copy of my free guide to medicinal plants which you can find in the link in the description below this video sweet gum is one of the easiest Southern trees to identify the first thing we'll look at is the most distinct part of the plant the spiky seed pods which most people in the South call gumballs next we'll look at the leaves which are starshaped with five loes and they
also have teeth or serrations on the Ed es the Twigs of sweet gum have a very distinct feature they're covered in these ridges called Wings can make it look like there's something wrong with a tree but these are completely normal and they're not present on every single tree but it's a pretty common feature and the only other trees I know of that have These Wings Are The Winged Elm and the Cedar Elm neither of which have leaves that look like sweet gum sweet gum is commonly confused with Maple so I'll show you how you can
tell the difference if you look here at where these sweet gum leaves come out of The Twig you'll notice that they alternate in their Arrangement that means that no two leaves come out at the exact same point you have one and then another one and then another one sort of in this tiered arrangement we call that alternate Arrangement next we'll look at Maple notice in the center of the screen how the leaves of this maple tree come out at the same place along the twig we call that opposite leaf arrangement because they come out opposite
one another so the leaves of sweet gum are alternate and the leaves of maple trees are opposite scientifically the sweet gum is known as liquid Amber styra flua and at first glance that scientific name might just look like a bunch of gibberish but it's actually a reference to the main medicinal part of this tree the sap so that genus name liquid Amber is liquid and then Amber comes from an Arabic word meaning fragrance so think here of ambergris or perfume and then the styra flua is from the Latin styrax which means gum or resin that's
where we get the sweet gum name and then the flua is from the Latin fluxus which means flowing so then the scientific name liquid Amber styra flua means fragrant liquid flowing with resin roughly translated The Fragrant sap of sweet gum is how it got its nickname in early America American frankincense but more commonly it's known as storax so commercially storax is made from the Turkish sweet gum and that's really I think the only place in the world where it's still made commercially and historically that was the the number one place that it was sort of
exported from but I'm going to show you how to harvest your own liquid storax from the American sweet gums right around your home to tap a sweet gum tree you're just going to need a nice sturdy knife that can handle boning and your baton so this is a Bushcraft knife if you did it with maybe a knife that you just have laying around is probably going to break it but this knife was made for this type of activity okay so what we've done is remove sort of a horizontal Arc and this is very similar to
the way pine sap would be harvested it's also the way that rubber is harvested off of rubber trees and uh the idea is that the sap is going to flow out here we've also increased the surface area a little bit just with this little top section which is optional and then what I've done is I've put my knife down in these little cracks and peeled them back so that the sap as it falls out it'll hopefully fall into these cracks and we've done the same thing on this side and then it'll create like a little
trough and I'll show you the last thing we're going to do is put a little bottom section right here and I'll show you when we're done with that okay now that we've carved out the the bottom part of our tap here we're just going to put our little collection plate which is just a can that's cut in half and we'll go ahead and pop it in here I'll probably put on a couple more Nails here just to make sure that it's going to stay in place and as all that sap drips down it's going to
collect right here into this can okay so it's going to take a few weeks for that little can to start filling up so in the meantime we're going to take a look at one of the older cuts that I did so you can see the sap is all coming out here and I'm just going to scrape this off with a spoon it's starting to kind of Harden and this tap here was made uh a few weeks ago and you can see that I can get a little amount off of it not a whole lot but
um the smell of this is just so strong it really does smell like perfume and it just has this amazing smell this was used for incense and I believe it's also used as a tobacco flavoring I'm pretty sure it's still used that way but uh definitely historically it was all right so what I went ahead and did was I took the sap and put it on this little parchment paper and I also scraped some of the outer bark off where the sap was running over the bark because um we can actually use that as well
now you may be wondering does this harm the tree or does this kill the tree so there's a very small chance that it could kill the tree but I don't think it's probably going to kill the tree you know whenever you do this the main thing is that you don't do it all the way around the tree as long as thee is still able to get nutrients and moisture up um because you've like left part of it intact then it's there's a a very small chance it would kill the tree of course it could open
it to pest or diseases or something like that so there's a small chance but it's unlikely the main issue here is the visual impact so you definitely don't want to do this anywhere that's in view of the public because putting a scar on a tree especially on public land is considered vandalism and even on private land it's just ugly so we're on private land today so there's a you know no issue we're like way back and in this area sweet gum is very abundant so it's a renewable resource not a real big deal keep in
mind too you can also use other parts of the street for medicine you can use the bark which was used historically there are there's at least I think one record of the roots being used but mostly it's the bark the leaves and also the gumballs which we're going to look at as well before we talk about that though let's jump into the medicinal uses of the sweet gum if we wanted to speak in Broad terms we could say say that sweet gum or American storax is used medicinally for three primary purposes the first use is
that it was used to treat a wide array of various skin conditions things like cuts it was used for poorly healing sores or ulcers and it's also an anti-fungal so it's been used for various fungal infections especially those common in children it's also used for things like psoriasis and eczema so the way this would have been done is by melting down the sap and dissolving it into lard or beef Tallow or in the modern day of course you would just make a Sav or ointment out of different types of vegetable oils and you can use
other parts of the tree for this purpose as well not just the sap secondly s Sweet Gum what is an important remedy for dissenter and diarrhea historically this is in part due to its astringent or tightening drying action on tissues so it was used for this purpose in both adults and children and for sort of General stomach problems in children also the antibacterial properties are probably coming into play a little bit here helping to deal with the root cause of the dissenter or the diarrhea the third primary use of sweet gum and the one that's
the main focus of this video is that sweet gum has been used historically for treating coughs bronchitis and is a mild expectant to help expel sticky flim from the lungs it's also been used in southern folk medicine to treat cold and flu and it's very very likely that this plant is actually antiviral because numerous constituents in it have been tested for their antiviral properties and show promising results these include things like gallic acid and cinnamic acid as well as tpin like alphap pining delemon and turpine foral there was also a really interesting study done in
China where 439 herbs that are used in traditional Chinese medicine were screened for their antiviral uh properties those 439 herbs five were shown to be antiviral at least in the uh parameters uh of this particular study of those five herbs shown to be antiviral one of them was the Chinese sweet gum or liquid Amber formosana and so although all of these studies don't outright prove that sweet gum is an antiviral plant given the fact that it um has been used in traditional folk medicine as a cold and flu remedy the fact that it was used
in the 1800s for coughs and used in other places in the world like in Central America for coughs where by the way sweet gum also grows our exact same species grows in Central America all of these things put together strongly suggest that sweet gum is an antiviral and it's been used by professional herbalists like Daryl Patton and Tommy bass for this use uh for decades so like I said the sap of sweet gum was the part of the plant that was used the most throughout history and should be considered to be the the strongest part
of the plant medically speaking however other parts of the plant can also be used and the late Appalachian herbalist Tommy bass said he really liked to use the leaves of the plant and he would also use the bark but he would only do that in the winter time when the leaves were unavailable that makes a lot of sense because whenever you boil the leaves you can see that on the surface of the water there's like this sort of oil or resin that kind of floats to the top at least I'm assuming that's what that is
and it doesn't really show up whenever you make the bark tea in my experience now Tommy bass's appr princess darl Patton actually prefers to use the immature gumballs of the plant now that makes a lot of sense because whenever you uh pick the gumballs you can feel like a the sticky resin or sap that gets left over on your hand sometimes when you when you pick them and so those immature gumballs are going to appear around the month of June and could be harvested throughout the summer until they turn brown in the fall and they're
usually really hard to reach so you have to wait until a storm kind of blows through and um make some fall to the ground so I'm going to show you how I harvest the bark of this tree and then we're going to go to the kitchen and I'm going to show you how to make a medicine out of the bark the leaves the gumballs and the sap stick with me okay so to harvest sweet gum bark you can either take a branch off of a larger tree and just cut it cleanly off with a saw
or in this case there's a whole lot of little sweet gum saplings around here so we're just going to take a whole tree and uh the very first thing I do maybe just to clean up the the side branches while it's still in the ground it just makes it a little bit easier all right now we'll just go ahead and you know trim up the rest of these branches and then we'll start peeling the bark off now the bark is going to come off a lot easier in the springtime and it's also going to be
I think probably more powerful in the springtime it's kind of more dry right now and kind of sticks to the uh really sticks to the wood and you know another thing is that the smell of these leaves is much more resinous than the bark and so just by smell Alone um I would guess that the leaves would be more powerful than the bark even though the bark and the sap were the two things that were used the most historically but you know as as a herbalist we can sort of you can you can usually kind
of guess which is the strongest part by The Taste and the smell of different plants bark doesn't have a whole lot of smell so now all we're going to do is just strip off this bark and um the outer bark is so thin that we'll just leave it on but we're really going for the inner bark here all right here's the bark and you can just dry this out on your counter if you want to it dries out pretty quick and next let's go ahead and go to the kitchen and I'll show you how to
make a medicine okay so let's say it's the bark that you want to turn into a medicine let's look at that first with any type of medicinal bark it's going to be the inner bark that we're using but in the case of sweet gum the outer bark is so thin you can see I can just scrape it right away that it's not worth separating the two okay and so we're going to be making a decoction a decoction means we're going to be boiling the plant for 15 to 20 minutes or simmering it and you do
that with barks and with roots because you know just a a typical tea like this is not going to steep well enough so we have to boil it to extract those medicinal constituents so with the sweet gum we're going to be doing about 1/4 cup of the bark and this is the fresh bark so you could do a/4 cup of the dried bark and since it's going to shrink a little bit I'll go ahead and do a heaping 1/4 cup of the fresh bark but that's going to be the rough correct amount and we're going
to do that for every two cups of water okay so here's a/4 cup it's 1/4 cup for every two cups of water so now we'll go ahead and add two cups of water and next we're going to let that that simmer like I said for about 15 to 20 minutes all right now that we've made our sweet gum bark decoction the dosage I'm going to be using for cold and flu is 1/2 cup two to three times a day so let's go ahead and pour ourselves a/2 cup and that's how I would dose that personally
next we'll look at how to make a medicinal preparation of the leaves so the rough amount that I will use is about eight average size leaves per cup of water and for these we don't have to boil them for the full 15 20 minutes in fact we could just steep them if they were dried being that these are fresh we're going to give them a gentle boil so we're going to simmer them for about 5 minutes and here I have 16 average leaves some are bigger some are smaller and all I'm going to do is
Crush these up real coarsely they don't have to be you know probably don't even really need to crush them up but we'll go ahead and toss those in the pot and that's going to be two cups of of water and we're going to give this a simmer for about 5 minutes okay so here's my leaf tea and I'm going to do the same exact dose as I did with the bar dark decoction 1/2 cup two to three times a day for cold flu or coughs whereas a mild expectorant to help expel fim from the lungs
all right the last thing we're going to do is make a tincture with the immature gumballs and so a tincture is an alcohol extract so to do this these are really hard so we're going to use that same baton method that I that I used earlier and I'm just going to place the knife on top of one of the gumballs and I'm going to split these all up and then we're going to put them in this jar and cover it with 95% pure grain alcohol all right now that we've chopped them all up we'll go
ahead and put them in the jar this is like a a whole herbal medicine making class you're getting here decoctions tinctures Got The Whole Nine Yards going here okay maybe we'll take out a little bit leave a little room at the top now uh we're going to go ahead and pour the alcohol in matter of fact though before we do we're going to put in the special ingredient the storax that we harvested or the sweet gum sap that we we harvested earlier let's go ahead and put that in too this is going to give our
tinure added boost it's like the strongest part of the plant I think is the sap all right now here we have that 190 proof or 95% alcohol this is a offbrand but the typical brand you would use is ever clear so we'll go ahead and add it in we're just going to fill it to the very top and make sure all of these gumballs are covered and uh this is going to sit for about 4 to 6 weeks and we're going to be shaking it every day add a little bit more and then once this
is done I'll be doing well I may adjust it slightly if that storax is too strong but uh I'm planning on doing about 30 drops say three times a day or maybe more um for cold and flu symptoms so there we go lastly sweet gum is an important Wildlife tree for birds and pollinators one report said that 34 species of moths and butterflies use the Sweet Gum as a larval host species meaning that they lay their eggs on the tree and the caterpillars eat the leaves so it's very important for moths and butterflies Birds also
rely on the seeds of sweet gum in particular you may see goldfinches hanging upside down from the the Twigs feeding on the seeds inside of the gumballs in the fall and win months this tree is also important for the iconic and critically endangered ivory build woodpecker the ivory build woodpecker is the largest woodpecker in North America many people believe it to be extinct but it's very likely still inhabiting the remote Southern bottomland hardwood forests of the South and in the only long-term study ever done on this bird it was shown that they feed on sweet
gum more than any other tree in the forest not on the seeds of sweet gum but on the the grub worms that are found hiding underneath the bark so not on the tree itself but on the insects that use the sweet gum so a very important tree for that critically endangered bird and actually we moved to the southern us back to the southern us cuz that's where I'm from originally of course to search for the ivory build woodpecker and to prove that it is indeed still alive so that's just a little um thing that maybe
you didn't know about me but I hope you've enjoyed this video on the suum hopefully you'll view it not as a trash tree like most people do but as an important medicine and Wildlife species so again my name is Matthew Hunter if you want to learn more about medicinal plants of the southeast make sure to download my free guide which you can find in the link in the description below and also make sure to check out some of my other videos like my edible and medicinal plants top 20 video which you can find right here
I'll see you in the next one have a good day
