California Mugwort (Artemisia ) is a silvery green strongly aromatic woolly herb in the Sunflower family. It is similar to the European variety of Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris). Mugwort may be used to regulate and bring on menses in women, as an antiparasitic to detoxify the liver, to cleanse the blood, to improve digestion, to improve circulation, and as a compress for muscle spasm and pain being especially useful for overexertion.
Mugwort’s woolly fibers are made into moxa that is burned above areas of pain or “stagnation” as a stimulating therapy in Chinese Medicine. The Chumash Native Americans practiced a similar technique using Ca. Mugwort and used the plant to treat muscle and joint aches, poison oak rash, abdominal and menstrual cramping and pain, diarrhea, fever, and headache.
It has been used as an aid for lucid dreaming, dream recall, meditation, and working with the spirit world.
Refugio Gardens essential oils and hydrosols (therapeutic herbal waters) are distilled from highly medicinal plants native to Santa Barbara, California. These plants have a rich ethnobotanical history being used by the California Native Americans, Spanish settlers, and even physicians. Many are used for ceremonial, healing, and spiritual purposes and are considered sacred herbs.
The hydrosols are formed naturally through steam distillation of the herbs unlike other products labeled as “hydrosols” that consist of distilled water and added essential oils. A true hydrosol is a slightly milky solution that condenses along with the essential oil and consists of the distilled spring water, naturally occurring micro-droplets of the essential oil and other medicinal hydrophilic plant components.
“Hydrosols contain all of the plant in every drop, just like a hologram. Here we have the water-soluble components, the essential-oil molecules, the very fluid that was flowing through the plant cells when the plant was collected. It’s all there in a matrix of water that is so much more than water, one of the most recognized holographic substances in healing.”- Suzanne Catty
In Santa Barbara, California, there are numerous local wild endemic and naturalized medicinal herbs. Many of them are rarely used or only discussed as ethnobotany of the past. Refugio Gardens steam distills their own local essential oils such as White sage, Honeybutton sage, Hummingbird sage, Goldenbush, Woolly blue curls, and California Artemisia in small batches to ensure a highly therapeutic oil that can be used directly on the skin or in a diffuser to scent a room.