Aloe Vera is one of those things that you can get very enthusiastic about and at one stage we couldn't move for them. Aloe Vera are a hardy and beautiful pot plant, they are also a living medical cabinet and a great beauty aid. Please read more about these extraordinary plants which can live up to seven years without water!
I use it to treat sunburn, grazes, insect bites, heat rashes, gargle sore throats all from Gel from my own plants. Aloe Vera is nature's first-aid kit.
Mexicans pin Aloe Vera above their doorways for luck.
History of Aloe Vera
Aloe Vera has been used by mankind for several thousand years and over the centuries there have been many references to Aloe Vera in many cultures: from the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, as well as in the literature of the Indian and Chinese peoples. Several famous physicians such as Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides and Galen, the father of modern medicine, who first described how the circulation worked, all used Aloe Vera as part of their therapeutic armoury.There are also many romantic tales about it, suggesting that the Egyptian queens Nerfertiti and Cleopatra used it as part of their regular beauty regimes. Supposedly Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. was persuaded by his mentor Aristotle to capture the Island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean for its famed Aloe supplies, needed to treat his wounded soldiers. Aloe is also mentioned in the Bible several times, for example, in St. John's Gospel, but this was in fact, Lignin Aloe, not Aloe Vera. Lignin Aloe is a tree whose scented bark was used for incense as well as an ingredient used in embalming the dead.
The true Aloe has been endowed with such marvellous properties that over the years around the world it has been given many wonderful names such as Burn Plant, Medicine Plant, Wand of Heaven and Plant of Life. The first reference to Aloe Vera in English was a translation by John Goodyew in A.D. 1655 of Dioscorides' Medical treatise De materia Medica which he wrote in AD 70-90.
Traders first brought Aloe Vera to London in 1693 and by 1843 considerable amounts were being imported to be made up into medicines. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries it remained one of the main popular prescribed and over-the-counter medicines.