The Magic of Joe Pye Weed

About two months ago, I bought a little cottage at the bottom of a hill, sitting outside a small village. It’s a super rural area, long-time coal country in the northern foothills of Appalachia, and the biggest excitement around here is when visiting ATV riders go zipping up the road through my holler or my neighbor’s rooster gets loose and refuses to return home. The nearest grocery store is fifteen miles off, and if I want to get super fancy and visit a home improvement store, it’s a good 45 minutes each direction. We have two police officers, a single pizza joint, and a Dollar General, and that’s pretty much it. I love the cozy quirkiness of the house I live in, the welcoming kindness the folks around me have shown to this odd redheaded tattooed stranger, and the natural beauty of the hills surrounding me.

One of my favorite things to do around here is explore the local plant life — there are things growing nearby that I never saw living “in town” just thirty miles northwest of here, and the place is ripe for wildcrafting. The hillside on the back of my property sports mullein, wild strawberries, pokeweed, Queen Anne’s lace — and that’s just the stuff I can reach without rappelling upwards to the top of the ridge. A stroll up the road, alongside the creek, reveals more of the above, along with chicory, a mulberry tree or two, wild onions, coneflower, a variety of lilies, and Joe Pye weed, which is abundant along all of the backroads down here.

Joe Pye has some handy magical properties, so I decided to go ahead and harvest a bit of it out of the corner of my lot — there’s enough there that I could gather it every day through the end of September and still not run out, so I’ve got several bundles hanging up to dry on the herb rack in my mudroom. It’s a perennial, a late-blooming wildflower that runs rampant through these hills in the late summer and early fall. The tiny pinkish-purple flowers grow in clusters, and the soft vanilla-like aroma is apparently really attractive to butterflies, because I typically see the Joe Pye around here covered in monarchs as well as blue and yellow swallowtails.

According to legend, Joe Pye gets its name from a Native American healer from New England during North America’s early colonization period. The story is that Joe saved the (white) settlers from a variety of illnesses, including a typhus outbreak or two, by treating them with medicine made from this particular weed, Eutrochium purpureum. However, a 1945 article in The Scientific Monthly by Frank G. Speck and Ernest S. Dodge, On the Fable of Joe Pye, Indian Herbalist, and Joe Pye Weed, point out that the existence of Joe Pye is likely to be a colonial version of urban legend, handed down through New England oral history from one generation to the next.

Other names, depending on where you live, include gravel root, queen-of-the-meadow, purple boneset, trumpet weed, and kidney root.

Regardless of whether Joe himself was a real person, colonial settlers did know about the value of this plant. Teas made from the flowers were used to combat fever, rheumatism, and gallstones, as well as kidney related issues like UTIs and fluid retention; it’s well known as a diuretic. So, from a magical perspective, I’d certainly consider it — like so many wild herbs — a worthy ingredient in healing spells and rituals.

I’ve also seen people using it in magic aimed at earning respect — whether the target is someone whose love you hope to earn, or a person you’d like to look up to you on a professional level. In some magical traditions, it’s considered lucky for gamblers to carry Joe Pye weed when they play games of chance. Back in the 1930s, ethnobotanist Huron H. Smith wrote:

The Forest Potawatomi use the flowering tops of the Joe Pye Weed as a good luck talisman. When one is going to gamble he places the tops in his pocket and then is sure to win a lot of money.

Other magical uses include taking control, particularly of job situations like getting a raise or promotion. Use Joe Pye for healing anger over past relationships, and letting go of anxiety over current or future ones.

For more on Joe Pye weed:

• How to Grow Joe Pye Weed
• Garden’s Eye View: Wildflower Tale – Joe Pye
• Scientific Monthly: On the Fable of Joe Pye, Indian Herbalist, and Joe Pye Weed
• New World Witchery: Gravel Root/Joe Pye Weed
• A Modern Herbal: Gravelroot