How to grow your health with plants you grow or encounter

Frank Touby —

If they weren’t for real, someone would have invented the names of the authors of Power Plants. The book is about plants you encounter in your daily life, or could encounter.

The subtitle is, Simple Home Remedies You Can Grow.

But the book also covers, from A to Z, many plants you will just encounter in your yard or on a walk in the woods or through a park.

Its authors, with the improbable names of Frankie Flowers and Bryce Wylde are real people. Okay. Frankie is actually Frank Ferragine, but he’s known Canada-wide as Frankie Flowers because his passion is horticulture.

Wylde is a health-and-wellness expert and a specialist in alternative health regimes.

So their book takes such unlikely plant pests as stinging nettles. The juice is an external treatment for snake bites and scorpion stings but is also used as a kidney tonic. It’s root is said to be comparable in efficacy to the drug finasteride in treating enlarged prostate.

Hawthorne berries are used as a cardio tonic and the flowers are also used in similar ways to strengthen the heart.

The book is rife with such tidbits throughout its 407 pages. It’s published by Collins, a Harper Collins publishing company imprint.