Life Everlasting

Life everlasting is a daisy-family plant of eastern North America, a biennial up to about a metre tall that grows in dry, sandy, open places such as clearings, fields and the edges of woods. In its first year it makes a tight rosette clothed in woolly hairs; in its second it sends up a stem of narrow leaves crowned with clusters of small flower heads, white with yellowish or brownish tips, and its leaves and stems are thick with white wool. Carl Linnaeus described it in 1753 as a Gnaphalium, and it was moved to Pseudognaphalium in 1981. Many Indigenous peoples used it in medicine: the Cherokee for cramps, colds and coughs, the Choctaw for lung pain and colds, the Koasati for fevers. It was also a guard against the unseen. The Creek washed people afflicted by ghosts with a decoction of it, and the Menominee burned it to drive ghosts out and to bring back a lost mind. Because the flowers keep their beauty when dried, everlastings came to stand for long life and immortality. Kynes gives it to earth and Saturn, for banishing, courage, healing, protection and purification: a little bag of the dried flowers kept on the person shores up courage, and the dried flowers cleanse parts of a home troubled by an unwanted spirit.