Humming Bird Tree
Sesbania Grandiflora as it is called Agathi in Tamil is used in cooking in
The tender leaves, green fruit, and flowers are eaten alone as a vegetable or mixed into curries or salads. Flowers cooked with green peas serves as a tonic for weakening hearts. Tender portions serve as cattle fodder, (overeating is said to cause diarrhea). Ripe pods apparently are not eaten. The inner bark can serve as fiber and the white, soft wood not too durable, can be used for cork. The wood is used, like bamboo, in Asian construction. The tree is grown as an ornamental shade tree, and for reforestation
Eating Agathi keerai has a lot of benefits -Pepper vines (Piper nigrum) are sometimes grown on and in the shade of the agati. According to NAS (1980a), this small tree produces firewood, forage, pulp and paper, food, and green manure and appears to hold promise for reforesting eroded and grassy wastelands throughout the tropics. It combines well with agriculture in areas where trees are not normally grown and becomes an important fuel wood source. Dried and powdered bark is used as a cosmetic in Java.
Allen and Allen enumerated three undesirable features (1) short lived (2) shallow-rooted and subject to wind throw, and (3) prolific seeder, the pods often considered a litter. An aqueous extract of bark is said to be toxic to cockroaches.
Folk Medicine
The juice from the flowers is used to treat headache, head congestion, or stuffy nose. As a snuff, the juice is supposed to clear the nasal sinuses. Leaves are poultice onto bruises. Rheumatic swellings are rubbed with aqueous decoctions of the powdered roots of the red-flowered variant.
In Siddha we do not recommend these leaves when under gong any treatment for it has a great effect in reducing the medicinal effect. It has to be eaten as any dish once a month to neutralize the body. This is recommended to reduce biliousness; so for giddiness and over hypertention this herb is recommended.
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Yunani consider the tonic leaves useful in biliousness, fever, and nyctalopia. Indians apply the roots in rheumatism, the juice of the leaves and flowers for headache and nasal catarrh. Mixed with stramonium and pasted, the root is poulticed onto painful swellings. In
Malayans apply crushed leaves to sprains and contusions. They gargle with the leaf juice to cleanse the mouth and throat. In small doses, the bark is used for dysentery and sprue, in large doses, laxative, in still larger doses, emetic. Pounded bark is applied to scabies.
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