JUNIPER
Juniperus communis
COMMON NAMES: Juniper bush, juniper berries.
FEATURES: An ornamental evergreen of the pine family with trees and shrubs of about forty species. The
common juniper (Juniper cornmunis) is a smaller species, usually less than 25 feet tall, and many of its
numerous varieties are less than 10 feet. This shrub is common on dry, sterile hills from Canada south to
New Jersey, west to Nebraska, and in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico.
The leaves open in whorls of three, are glaucous and concave above, keeled underneath. Flowers in
May, with fleshy fruit of dark purplish color, ripening in the second year after the flower. Every part of the
shrub is medicinal, and the French peasantry prepare a sort of tar, which they call huile de cade, from the
interior reddish wood of the trunk and branches. This is our popular juniper tar.
MEDICINAL PART: Ripe, dry berries.
SOLVENTS: Boiling water, alcohol.
BODILY INFLUENCE: Diuretic, stimulant, carminative.
USES: If we may speak of the conditions of internal accumulative filth we would suggest juniper berries
as an agent used for fumigating the system to ward off contagion. Sebastian Kneipp, in My Water Cure
(1897), says this about the berries: “Those who are nursing patients with serious illness as Scarlet fever,
small pox, typhus, cholera, etc. and are exposed to contagion by raising, carrying, or serving the patient,
or by speaking with him, should always chew a few juniper-berries (6–10 a day). They give a pleasant
taste in the mouth and are of good service to the digestion, they burn up as it were, the harmful miasms,
exhalations, when these seek to enter through the mouth or nostrils.”
Persons with a weak stomach should chew five softened berries a few days in succession, increasing
the amount one a day until fifteen berries a day are taken. Then decrease the amount by one berry a day for
five more days. Obstinate stomach troubles have been relieved by releasing pressures that cause stomach
tissue weakness, indigestion—in general, poor assimilation. For sluggish conditions of the kidneys,
juniper berries will be found most serviceable; they increase the flow of urine but should not be used