9 Medicinal Flowers Used in Chinese Herbal Medicine

While you might think of cooking herbs like rosemary and thyme when you hear about herbal medicine, Chinese herbal medicine actually refers to a wide range of substances that come from nature. These could be plant parts such as leaves, stems, roots and flowers, as well as minerals and animal substances.

In Chinese, hua means flower, and many flowers have been used for thousands of years for their medicinal qualities. The active ingredients in these flowers are typically extracted by boiling the plant material in water and drinking the liquid, a process know as decoction. While these flowers can be decocted alone or drunk as a tea, they are more typically used in combination with other herbal substances in a formula. Modern preparation methods concentrate these medicinal liquids into pills or powder to make them easier to consume.

While there are dozens of flowers used in Chinese medicine, here are 9 of the most common ones you might be familiar with: