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What is it?

The bark from a large species of cherry tree that can grow up to 30 meters tall. The taste of Wild Cherry is distinctive and recalls the flavour of bitter almonds.

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How has it been used?

Wild Cherry has been used for nervous heart palpitations and for irritable digestive disorders but its primay modern and traditional use has been for the treatment of unwanted and unhelpful coughs.

Wild Cherry is probably the strongest natural cough reliever there is. In practice that means that Wild Cherry will almost always be used for what is termed a ‘dry, unproductive cough’.

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Personal experiences

I rate Wild Cherry very highly for its ability to help with horrible coughs. I've had patients who have come in after one, two or even three months of an intensely irritating and unproductive cough who find to their delight that their herbal treatment starts to turn matters around in less than a day or two.

There have also been times that I have used Wild Cherry when the cough has not been dry or useless but just when a person is exhausted by the process of trying to clear their clogged lungs and they desperately need some respite. Coughs can be profoundly debilitating, they involve an enormous amount of effort, muscular contraction and general restlessness.

A cough is a blunt instrument in many ways. It can be set on full throttle by the tiniest of particles in the lungs. Even long after an infection has been resolved, toxins left over by the bacteria, or even damaged lung or bronchial tissue itself can act as the signal to the brain saying “there’s something in here and you have to cough it out no matter what the cost!’ Sometimes the cost is too high, when people get exhausted they can become vulnerable to other, potentially even more serious problems.

You must not heat Wild Cherry, the main ingredients that help soothe and reduce a cough, the cyanogenic glycosides, can be damaged by heat (incidentally those are the same constituents that give Wild Cherry its almondy smell. In practice that means I nearly always use Wild Cherry as a tincture and have found that up to 6-8mls a day of the tincture may be how much you need for the average adult to settle their hyper-reactive cough reflex down. However this is not a medicine that works by taking big doses of it once or twice a day, you need to drip Wild Cherry in with small amounts and you need to do it frequently to turn things around. Measure treatment lengths in days. Wild Cherry combines perfectly with Licorice root and Marshmallow for dry and sore lungs and with Elecampane and Mullein for a weakened or congested respiratory system.

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Excerpt from Felter & Lloyd's Kings Dispensatory from 1898

Wild cherry bark has a tonic and stimulating influence on the digestive apparatus, and a simultaneous sedative action on the nervous system and circulation. It is, therefore, valuable in all those cases where it is desirable to give tone and strength to the system, without, at the same time, causing too great an action of the heart and blood vessels, as, during convalescence from pleurisy, pneumonia, acute hepatitis, and other inflammatory and febrile diseases. Its chief property is its power of relieving irritation of the mucous surfaces, making it an admirable remedy in many gastro-intestinal, pulmonic, and urinary troubles. It is also useful in hectic fever, cough, colliquative diarrhoea, some forms of irritative dyspepsia, whooping-cough, irritability of the nervous system, etc., and has been found an excellent palliative in phthisis, the syrup being employed to moderate the cough, lessen the fever, and sustain the patient's strength.

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