Midday flower

Mesembryanthemum cristallinum (noonday flower)

From the roadside to the production of care products

Article published in NNA-NEWS on July 22, 2018 by NNA correspondent Cornelie Unger-Leistner.

FEATURE | The inconspicuous noon flower is used to treat skin diseases. But its story is far from over, as NNA reporter Cornelie Unger-Leistner discovered on Lanzarote.

Nobody wants to have it in their garden, but a small, inconspicuous plant from Lanzarote is currently making a name for itself as a skin care product for people suffering from skin diseases: the noon flower, or Mesembryanthemum crystallinum in Latin. NNA reporter Cornelie Unger-Leistner was present at the harvest on the Canary Island.

PUERTO DEL CARMEN/LANZAROTE (NNA) – Dr. Andreas Portsteffen is a pharmacist at Herdecke Community Hospital. He has been coming to Lanzarote on and off for around ten years, actually on vacation, but he uses the opportunity to procure a valuable raw material for his pharmacy there: Squeezed juice from the noonday flower, which is then processed in Herdecke into cream, lotion, bath additive and hair care products. You cannot buy the wild plant.

I meet the pharmacist at Finca Lomos Altos, where there is a normal wine press in a whitewashed laboratory room. Baskets of the fleshy, juicy plants of the noon flower go into this press, transforming them into an incredibly green juice. What remains is a kind of pomace, which also has the color of chlorophyll.

Volunteers have been collecting the plants for four days and are now in the process of sorting them. “The noonday flower is also something special for botanists, its metabolism processes water and salt in a special way,” explains Portsteffen as he operates the press.

The green juice is salty when you taste it, it looks better than it tastes. However, the leaves of the ice plant can also be used in salads; they are decorative and provide an interesting flavor enhancer. Gourmets can get even more out of the midday flower, which is also known as ice plant in gastronomy: in addition to the aforementioned addition as a salad, a steamed version such as spinach is also recommended in recipes. The inhabitants of Lanzarote have always used this mineral-rich plant as a vegetable or in salads.

External applications

In the laboratory room at Finca Lomos Altos, however, the focus is now on external applications.

There is increasing demand for the care products made from the noonday flower in Herdecke. The helpers have already collected 150 kilos of plants, which are then used to make 100 liters of pressed juice. “That will be enough for us for the next two years, so far – because consumption is rising.”

People suffering from atopic dermatitis in particular use the products made from the midday flower. The University of Witten-Herdecke conducted a survey among them and 70 to 80 percent of users confirmed that the products have a skin-improving effect. “We can’t talk about a healing effect because it’s not a remedy, which would also be far too expensive and too complicated to obtain approval. That’s why our products have been certified as skin care products in accordance with the Cosmetics Ordinance,” explains Portsteffen.

Some of the pressed juice is immediately bottled and sent to the Centro de Terapia Antroposófica in Lanzarote, where it is used as a bath additive. Alcohol is added to most of the juice to preserve it, which is then shipped to Herdecke. The green color disappears over time due to exposure to air and the canisters contain a light brown liquid. The products from the Mittagsblume are then cream-colored and nothing resembles the impressive chlorophyll-colored pressed juice that could be admired during production.

Waltraut Marschke

Discoverer of the plant’s positive effects: “I thought it could be a remedy for the skin”

The gardeners on the Finca Lomos Altos leave the inconspicuous plants, which can be found everywhere on the wastelands in Lanzarote, in certain places because they know that they are sought after as raw materials for the Herdecke pharmacy. The pharmacists at the community hospital got the idea from a letter in the spring of 1994: Waltraut Marschke, a nurse and long-time head of nursing at a Swiss retirement home, contacted the pharmacy and sent a report on her experiences with the midday flower. Waltraut Marschke had got to know Finca Lomos Altos and its founders Lilo and Enrique Winzer a few years earlier and was involved in the development of the therapeutic agent on the volcanic island.

Today, the old lady herself lives in a retirement home in Switzerland, but still comes to harvest the midday flowers every time and helps to process them. She remembers: “At the beginning of the 1990s, I took part in various colloquia at the Herdecke Community Hospital. This made me wonder how all these skin problems of our time could be cured.” Waltraud Marschke always spent her vacations on Lanzarote and helped out in the therapeutic center. One day, while out walking, she noticed the midday flower with its fleshy leaves and crystal-clear efflorescence. “I thought it could be a remedy for the skin. I crushed the plants and added them to the bath water – that’s how I gained experience with them, discovered their positive effects and was then able to pass them on to the pharmacy in Herdecke”.

Positive forces of nature

Waltraud Marschke shows the helpers what to look out for when collecting the plants on the finca: “It’s best to leave wilted leaves out straight away, then you have less work when picking them. The plants should be as large as possible so that the smaller ones can still grow for the next harvest.

The color of the midday flower petals can be very different – ranging from lush green to dark red to orange. There are hardly any flowers to be found in spring, they are delicate white and star-shaped. During processing, the helpers experience that the juice of the plant nourishes the skin: When picking and chopping the plants, it flows over the hands, which afterwards feel as if they have been treated to a good hand cream.

Lunch flower and aloe vera are examples of the positive powers that nature makes available to people on the Canary Island of Lanzarote. From Waldtraut Marschke’s point of view, volcanic earth, which is used in therapeutic packs, is also one of them: “I hope that knowledge about these special remedies will continue to be cultivated on the island and that it won’t be forgotten at some point – that would be a real shame.”

But that is not the end of the story of the midday flower. The Wala company also uses it in its skin care products. Dr. Hauschka Skin Care launched a whole series of medicinal skin care products in 2009, comprising five products and the extract of the ice plant contained in them is produced using a special rhythmic process.

Hidden possibilities

Again, these are care products and not remedies, but on Wala’s homepage, the midday flower can still be listed as a medicinal plant. There you can also read a description of the plant by the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), who wrote about it: “The freshly squeezed juice of the herb, which has a disgusting watery taste, has been praised … as a diuretic, diluting remedy for dropsy and urinary retention.”

And we learn that the noonday flower originally came from South Africa, made its way to Europe and America in the 18th century and finally to the Canary Islands in the 19th century, where it found the best living conditions. In the 19th century, the plant even brought about something like economic prosperity in the Canary Islands, as its ashes were exported to Europe for soap production. However, this changed when soda ash could be produced chemically. A look at the production conditions of Wala creams and lotions shows what possibilities could still be hidden in the small midday flower today: Wala obtains the raw material for the creams and lotions from the original country of origin, South Africa. And there it does not have to be collected by helpers as wild herbs: Its lush green leaves – which are also much larger – adorn the fields of the Waterkloof farm in the Cape Province where the midday flowers are grown.

Infinite history

A vision for cultivation on Lanzarote too? It could be that the story of the inconspicuous noon flower, which belongs to the Aizoacceae family, derived from the Greek “aizoon”, meaning to live forever, is still not over, an indication of the flower’s ability to survive even under extreme conditions.