A Special Hemostatic: Bicolor Sea-Lavender (Limonium bicolor)
Erse Blood-Supplementing Grass (bicolor sea-lavender, Limonium bicolor) is the root or whole herb of Limonium bicolor of the leadwort family (Plumbaginaceae). Its flowers come in two colors—part pink, part yellow—hence the name "two-color blood-supplementing grass." Because it flowers profusely with bright colors, it has high ornamental value and is now also grown as a landscape plant.
In the Ming dynasty, Zhu Su first included bicolor sea-lavender in Save Famine Materia Medica (Jiuhuang Bencao) under the name "wild spinach," listing it as one of the plants edible to save lives in famine years. Bicolor sea-lavender also has aliases such as scorpion-flower vegetable, eyebrow-scorching flower, blood-supplementing grass, xuejianchou ("blood sees and fears"), broom grass, baldy flower, and fly flower.
Bicolor sea-lavender is a perennial herb reaching 30–60 cm in height, with the whole plant smooth and glabrous and a cylindrical root. It grows mainly on saline-alkali or sandy soils of plains, hills, and seashores, and is widely distributed in China's Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, and Xinjiang.
As its name suggests, bicolor sea-lavender has a blood-supplementing action; folk medicine holds that it supplements and boosts qi and blood, disperses stasis, and stops bleeding. It is used for post-illness weakness, epigastric pain, indigestion, women's menstrual irregularity, metrorrhagia, vaginal discharge, hematuria, and hemorrhoidal bleeding. This herb is not a common medicinal, so it is not sold in herbal pharmacies nationwide; it is used only in folk medicine, though some herb or flower dealers sell it online.
The most striking action of bicolor sea-lavender is not blood supplementation but hemostasis: it treats many bleeding conditions. It is reported that using 30g of bicolor sea-lavender root daily, decocted in water and taken in two doses (morning and evening), or using tablets 3–4 tablets three times daily, with five days as one course, treats functional uterine bleeding, menorrhagia, and uterine fibroids. Mild cases take one course; severe cases take 2–3 courses, achieving marked hemostasis. Bicolor sea-lavender also stops bleeding well from esophageal or gastric-fundus variceal rupture, or from gastric ulcer and gastric cancer bleeding. Treating 206 bleeding patients in total, the results showed effective rates of 92.1% for functional uterine bleeding, 95.6% for menorrhagia, 86.4% for fibroid bleeding, and 90% for gastric bleeding.
Bicolor sea-lavender is therefore often used as a hemostatic. The Northern Common Chinese Herbal Manual records: "Stops bleeding and disperses stasis; treats functional uterine bleeding, cervical cancer, and other bleeding." The Shaan-Gan-Ning-Qing Selected Chinese Herbs records it for "pyelonephritis and hematuria"; Inner Mongolia Chinese Herbs records it for menstrual irregularity and gastric cancer, using for gastric cancer "bicolor sea-lavender, Coix seed, and water caltrop, each 30g, decocted in water."
Modern pharmacological research confirms that both the water decoction and the ethanol extract of bicolor sea-lavender, given by gastric gavage, markedly shorten bleeding time in rats, though they have no significant effect on coagulation time; its hemostatic action may be related to promoting platelet adhesion and aggregation. Bicolor sea-lavender also has some toxicity: the single-dose oral LD50 in mice is about 60 g/kg; very large doses reduce mice's activity and speed breathing and heartbeat, sometimes making stools thinner. Mice given large doses mostly died of poisoning within 2 hours, convulsing all over before death. But for an adult weighing over 50 kg, the daily internal dose of 15–30g is very safe.