09/18/2025
🌿 Huai Mi / Pagoda Tree Bud / Sophora Flos Immaturus 🍃
If you’ve wandered NYC streets in late summer, you may have passed beneath a Pagoda Tree, its creamy flowers blooming high above—one of the few trees to flower this time of year. Known as Huai Mi in Chinese medicine, it's the flower bud, not the blossom, that holds medicinal value.
Huai Mi cools the blood, clears heat, and stops bleeding. It’s often used for bleeding from the Large Intestine—especially hemorrhoids—but also for nosebleeds, uterine bleeding, or coughing of blood. And like several other heat-clearing herbs, it may help with headaches, red eyes, and dizziness due to rising Liver heat. 🔥🌬️
This herb is a potent reminder of how Chinese medicine connects what blooms around us to what’s happening inside us. But please—leave the prescribing to trained practitioners. These powerful plants require care and precision to use safely.
🌸 Spot any pagoda trees in bloom this week? Or have you ever noticed their knobby seed pods scattered in fall?
