Elecampane

Inula helenium, elecampane or horseheal, is a tall, robust herbaceous perennial in the family Asteraceae, native to Europe and temperate Asia and long naturalised in the British Isles and eastern North America, where it grows in damp meadows, hedge banks, abandoned farmsteads and along roadsides. The plant rises 1 to 2.5 metres from a stout, branched, aromatic, fleshy yellowish-brown rhizome with a bitter, camphoraceous taste. The very large basal leaves are ovate-elliptic, 30 to 80 centimetres long, irregularly toothed, with cordate bases on long winged petioles, dark green and rough above and densely white-tomentose beneath; cauline leaves become progressively smaller, sessile and clasping. From mid- to late summer the stout, longitudinally furrowed flowering stem bears few but large, solitary or loosely corymbose, bright golden-yellow flower heads 6 to 10 centimetres across, with very numerous narrow ray florets surrounding a darker disc of tubular florets. The dried rhizome and root, rich in the sesquiterpene lactone alantolactone and the polysaccharide inulin, has been used medicinally since classical antiquity.