January/February 1997
By Steven Foster
For countless Americans, myself included, aloe vera was the first encounter with a medicinal herb. As teenagers in coastal Maine, my friends and I would head for the beach on a warm spring day to start renewing our suntans, and after frying our pallid winter skin, we’d rub aloe gel on each others’ blistered backs.
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Aloe gel is perhaps the most widely recognized herbal remedy in the United States today, used to relieve thermal burn and sunburn, promote wound healing, and moisturize and soften skin. Everyone who uses it seems convinced that it works, and its millennia of use for the same conditions support that assumption. In addition, recent research suggests that aloe gel can help stimulate the body’s immune system.
One of the additional beauties of aloe is that it is easy to grow and to use.
Growing Aloe Vera
For a fresh aloe source, your best bet is that plant on the windowsill. Happily, aloe thrives on neglect, but this tropical or subtropical native can not tolerate temperatures much below 40°F. Even a light frost will reduce it to a blackened, oozing mass of dead tissue.
My plants do well in a bright window out of direct sunlight. The soil should be well-drained and porous—a coarse, sandy potting soil that’s not too rich seems to suit aloe best. Overwatering and poor drainage are the greatest threats to this plant.
If you leave an aloe undisturbed in a slightly oversized pot, it will soon produce suckers that, when they’re a couple of inches tall, can easily be separated from the main plant and replanted. You can also cut off an overlong stalk and simply plant it in a pot. It will root readily.
The leaves can be cut with a sharp knife at the base of the plant, wrapped in cellophane, and stored for a week or two at 50° to 70°F (the refrigerator is too cold). Better yet, use the leaves fresh.
Aloe is commercially produced in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas, Florida, Mexico, and some of the Caribbean islands, where it has the sandy, chalky soil, good sunshine, and freedom from frost.
More On Aloe As Medicine
In the mid-1930s, researchers enthusiastically reported aloe’s quick and complete healing of skin burns caused by X rays and ultraviolet and gamma rays. The public became aware of their findings in Gertrude B. Foster’s classic, Herbs for Every Garden (Dutton, 1966). Foster also noted that aloe was grown as a landscape plant in the tropics and as a houseplant in temperate climates. Although commercial development of aloe vera was already under way, its popularity exploded in the 1970s.
Two products in current use are derived from aloe leaves. The clear gel that forms naturally in the hollow interior of the leaf is the familiar product used to relieve burns and wounds, whereas specialized resin canal cells in the thick leaf epidermis produce a bitter yellow juice that is the source of the laxative drug aloe. Although they share certain components, these two products are distinctly different and should not be confused.
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