Wildflower Herbal Salve Recipe

How to make a herbal healing salve recipe using foraged wildflowers from your lawn and pure oils. Once made, you can use it as a gentle skin medicine for treating bug bites, stings, rashes, and irritated or inflamed skin. Begin by drying, then infusing the dandelion, plantain, and daisies in oil.

It’s spring, and the garden, along with its wild plants, is lush and green. It’s now, when leaves and flowers are at their best, that we can harvest some of them for natural skincare. Have a wander around and see what you can find. You can harvest chickweed for eczema cream, nettles for shampoo bars, and yarrow leaves to make a powder that stops bleeding.

If you have dandelion, common daisies, and plantain, pick them to make an all-purpose salve. It’s great to keep on hand for the inevitable skin wounds and irritations that will happen at some point. You first use them to make an infused oil, and after it’s strained, gently melt it with nourishing cocoa butter, protective beeswax, and spring-inspired essential oils. Two of the herbs in this recipe can also protect the skin against some UVB light.

What is a Salve?

Herbal salves are probably the most popular homemade skin medicines. They’re long-lasting, oily products with healing herbal properties that you rub onto your skin. You make them by first infusing herbs in a carrier oil. Carrier oils, such as olive oil, are liquid at room temperature and soak into dried herbs, extracting their medicinal properties.

That finished medicinal oil is often called an infused oil, and we melt it with waxes and/or solid oils to create a salve. It has a thick, balm-like consistency and should be semi-solid at room temperature.

Once cooled and hardened, you can scoop it out to rub on skin conditions such as minor wounds, eczema, diaper rash, dry skin, and more. Salves are easy for beginner herbalists to make, and because they do not use water, you don’t need a preservative. Having a few different salves in your herbal first aid kit will be incredibly useful when your skin needs relief and healing.

Dandelion Benefits

Though many extraordinary skincare herbs can be grown in your garden, common weeds can be just as therapeutic. They can soothe irritated skin, calm insect bites, and even protect your skin from UV light and premature skin aging. That’s the case with extracts of dandelion flowers and leaves ¹, and that’s not all they can do.

Dandelion extract is also used to help calm irritated skin, promote collagen production, and fight free radicals ². Dandelion is relatively easy to identify for most people, with its yellow lion’s mane-like flowers and toothed leaves.

Daisy & Plantain Skin Benefits

Two types of plantain grow as wild plants in temperate regions: Plantago lanceolata and Plantago major. You can use the leaves of either or both for this recipe, as they have the same pharmacological uses in skincare. Plantain³ is primarily used for its astringent and calming properties and is incredibly useful for burns, nettle stings, bug bites, and skin inflammation.

Identifying this plant is also easy, and it grows in compacted soil, such as lawns, pathways, and road edges. Both types grow as rosettes of leaves, with Plantago lanceolata having long, lance-like leaves and Plantago major having oval, paddle-like leaves. Both have stringy parallel veins through them.

The common daisy, Bellis perennis, is another wildflower that grows prolifically in lawns in spring. Also called the English daisy, it can be collected and used in UV-protecting skincare products. They could also reduce melanin (dark patches) formation ⁴ and inflammation and have antimicrobial properties. Common daisies are low-growing in lawns with flowers no more than about an inch in diameter. The petals are white, sometimes with a pinkish tinge, and the flower has a yellow center.

Use Dried Herbs to Make Infused Oil

The base of this salve recipe is a herbal-infused oil that you make using foraged plants. This oil is one of the main ingredients in making the salve. When making it, it’s important to use high-quality ingredients and ensure that the herbs are completely dry.

Fresh plant material contains a small amount of moisture that can introduce microbes into the oil. You do not want microbes floating around in a product you plan to apply to open skin. It could cause infection, and even the tiniest amount of moisture can cause oil to go rancid. That means it goes off, and you’ll have to discard the product. Rancid salve or oil is damaged and can smell musty or even as strong as oil paints.

Another reason to use dried herbs is that their medicinal properties are intact and concentrated while the plant material is reduced. You can get much more dried plant material in a jar than fresh, meaning a more potent homemade infused oil. Dried herbs are often half the size and weight of fresh.

Foraging for Medicinal Plants

Though there are some fantastic retailers of dried herbs, the absolute best are those you harvest and process yourself. You know exactly when they were harvested, how they were dried, and if the soil around them was free of weed killer and other garden chemicals.

Each of the three herbs in this recipe, dandelion, plantain, and daisies, is at its best in spring. That’s the best time to harvest them! Pick them in the late morning on a bright, dry day. You’ll need enough, in equal quantities, to fill a pint-sized jar. Bring them back home and spread them on a cloth in the shade for up to an hour to give any tiny insects a chance to escape.

After that, quickly dry them in a warm but dim place until they are crispy and completely dry – air drying should take about a week. I have a drying rack that I often use for this, but if I’m in a hurry or expecting humidity, I also use a food dehydrator. A few hours at 100°F (40°C) does the trick.

Customizing This Herbal Salve Recipe

Salves are easy to make, even for beginners, and gentle enough to be safe for most people. The recipes are also flexible, so you can change or replace ingredients if you’d like. For example, if you’re allergic to ragweed, then you shouldn’t use dandelions or daisies on your skin. You could replace them in this recipe with more plantain or other skincare herbs such as comfrey leaf. Comfrey is a wonderful skin-healing herb for bruises, scrapes, and sprains.

The base oils and waxes in this recipe are interchangeable, too. Although beeswax is a popular wax for making homemade salve, you can substitute it for carnauba wax. Carnauba wax is plant-based and vegan, but needs at least two to three days to set solid. The cocoa butter can be replaced by beeswax (1/4 of the amount) and another butter (3/4 of the amount), such as shea butter. If you have any questions about making the salve, leave a comment in the section below.

More Herbal Recipes

• Cold Sore Lip Balm Recipe
• Three Ways to Make Calendula Oil
• Healing Plants to Grow in a Salve Garden
• Hawthorn Tincture Recipe

1. Yang, Y. and Li, S.S. Dandelion Extracts Protect Human Skin Fibroblasts from UVB Damage and Cellular Senescence. Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, 2015. Source ↩︎
2. Siukan Law, Chuiman Lo, Jie Han, Albert Wingnang Leung, Chuanshan Xu. Traditional Chinese Herbal, “Dandelion” and Its Applications on Skin-Care. Traditional and Integrative Medicine, Volume 6, Issue 2, Spring 2021. Source (pdf) ↩︎
3. Abdolkhalegh Keshavarzi, Hashem Montaseri, Rahimeh Akrami, Hossein Moradi Sarvestani, Fateme Khosravi, Sara Foolad, Mitra Zardosht, Saeid Zareie, Mohammad Jamal Saharkhiz and Reza Shahriarirad, Therapeutic Efficacy of Great Plantain (Plantago major L.) in the Treatment of Second-Degree Burn Wounds: A Case-Control Study. International Journal of Clinical Practice, 2022, 4923277, August 2022. Source ↩︎
4. Vivian Maria Souza de Carvalho, Joyce L. Covre, Rebeca D. Correia-Silva, Izabella Lice, Mab P. Corrêa, Andréia M. Leopoldino, Cristiane D. Gil. Bellis perennis extract mitigates UVA-induced keratinocyte damage: Photoprotective and immunomodulatory effects, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology, Volume 221, 2021,112247. Source ↩︎