Research Library · Plants & herbs · Video research · Planets & cycles
🍒 Hawthorn project — every summary and video → ☉ The Sun project — every summary and video → 🌿 Sajah Popham project — every summary and video →Hawthorn, the heart herb
Herbalist Sajah Popham's Sun-ruled tonic for the heart, the blood vessels and an anxious mind — checked against the small trials, the big one, and the EU's herbal monograph.
15 October 2026 8 min read ▶ 9-min video 7 sources · 4 peer-reviewed
In brief
Sajah Popham gives hawthorn to the Sun as the herb of the heart: a slow, food-like tonic that strengthens the heart muscle, eases the vessels and calms an anxious mind. The trials split the claim in two. In small trials of people with heart failure, hawthorn extract improved exercise and symptoms; in the one large trial, 2,681 people over two years, it didn't reduce heart events. The EU accepts it, by long use, for palpitations from mild anxiety and for mild stress and sleep. No trial supports it for ADHD in children.
Learn from the source
Sajah Popham
Herbalist and host of The Plant Path; founder of the School of Evolutionary Herbalism.
He teaches herbal medicine through the energetics of plants and people, and herbal astrology alongside it.
evolutionaryherbalism.com ↗ Every summary of Sajah Popham’s work →
Mars or the Sun?
The heart's herb
Ask herbalists for the number one heart herb, Sajah Popham says, and most will say hawthorn — Crataegus monogyna, “our heart trophorestorative par excellence”. Old astrology books give it to Mars, and Culpeper wrote “It is a tree of Mars”. Popham thinks that comes from its looks — the thorns and blood-red berries — and that a plant's shape alone is a weak reason to give it a planet. He gives it to the Sun, which rules the heart and Leo, and sees it as a “Mars eliminator”: its sour berries and flowers cool the heat and inflammation of Mars attacking the vessels.
For members
Read the whole summary
4 sections, 3 diagrams, the video with its chapters, 7 claims checked against the research, 7 sources with the names of the people who did the work and links to it — and downloads in PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
- 🔒 What the trials show
- 🔒 The heart and the mind
- 🔒 Hawthorn in the sky
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