Maybe you've heard of echinacea, or perhaps you have a friend that pops some echinacea whenever they feel a cold coming on? It is true that various echinacea preparations are valued by herbalists to ward off colds or shorten the duration of them but here are some other facts about echinacea that you might just find interesting and useful.

1. The the full botanical name for echinacea is ' echinacea purpurea'.
2. Echinacea grows in many suburban gardens, and is commonly called 'purple coneflower'.
3. Did you know that the "purpurea" of Echinacea purpurea, means purple?
4. The word 'echinacea' means hedgehog or sea urchin, referring to the spiky cone-shaped disk of the flower.
5. All nine species of the genus echinacea are exclusively from North America and most are from the central prairies.
6. With their drought tolerance, upright growth habit and reliability, echinacea can find a place in just about any reasonably sunny garden.
7. All echinaceas were prized by native North Americans for their medicinal properties. In particular, narrow-leafed coneflower was used by the Plains Indians to treat cough, sore throat and pain. Legend has it that it was first noticed when elk would seek out the plant when they were sick or injured.
8. Learning from the indigenous peoples, settlers relied on echinacea as an anti-microbial and a painkiller.
9. Because echinacea is an herb, it didn't require rigorous testing the way a drug would in order to be sold to the public. At the same time, its widespread use makes it unpatentable, so the investment required to test its medicinal usefulness could never be recouped by any laboratory.
10. Echinacea is also highly hybridizable, so up to a dozen new garden varieties come to market every year.