Beautiful bee-friendly flowers, healing leaves and a highly nutritious plant food. There’s a lot to love about comfrey. As an organic gardener, I have long been aware of the virtues of comfrey. Common comfrey has been cultivated as a healing herb since at least 400BC, with the leaves used to make a tea to soothe all kinds of ailments. Its botanical name is Symphytum officinale meaning ‘growing together of bones’, and its common name in English is ‘Knitbone’.
Common comfrey is a rhizomatous herbaceous perennial – a member of the borage family – with hairy darkpurple, pink or creamy yellow. They appear in May, often earlier now in our milder winters, flowering right through to a hard frost.
