Drive the Atlantic or Gulf coast in late fall and you might think it has snowed along the ditches. There, at the edges where the land hesitates and then spills into marsh and tidewater, a shrub throws up clouds of white seed fluff. That plant is Baccharis halimifolia—known to botanists as groundsel bush or eastern baccharis, and to south Louisiana grandmothers as manglier (mong-lee-AY).
On paper, they're just a salt-tolerant shrub in the aster family. In real life, they're a living medicine cabinet, a boundary marker, a source of forage for monarch butterflies, a toxic weed in cattle pastures, and the bitter tea that got many Cajun and Creole families through cold and flu season long before pharmacies were within easy reach.
This article is a long, wandering walk with manglier: their ethnobotanical history, medicinal folklore, modern scientific research, and the contradictions that cling to them like seed fluff to a wool coat. Think less clinical monograph, more porch conversation with plenty of side stories.
Quick note: This is a historical and cultural overview, not medical advice. Baccharis species can be toxic, especially to livestock, and traditional use does not guarantee safety for you. Always consult a qualified healthcare practitioner before experimenting with any medicinal plant.
What Is Baccharis halimifolia?
Baccharis halimifolia is a woody, often multi-stemmed shrub native to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America, from Massachusetts down through Florida and west to Texas, spilling over into Mexico and the Caribbean. They usually top out around 1–3 meters (3–10 feet) tall, forming dense rounded clumps that look almost like smoke when seed time comes.
You’ll spot them:
- Along the upper edges of salt and brackish marshes
- In back dunes just behind ocean beaches
- Around retention ponds and roadside ditches
- In disturbed, sandy, or salty soils where pickier plants give up
In other words: manglier is an edge specialist. They thrive in the in-between places—neither fully ocean nor fully upland, neither pristine wild nor human-tamed. Botanically, they're dioecious: male and female flowers live on separate plants. In late summer and fall, male shrubs carry yellowish clusters, while female shrubs erupt into white, cottony seed heads that make the plant look like they're wearing a cloud.
Ecologically, they're a workhorse:
- Their roots help stabilize eroding banks and disturbed soils.
- They are famously tolerant of salt spray and coastal storms.
- Their late-season flowers feed a wide range of pollinators, including migrating monarch butterflies looking for one last nectar bar before heading south.
And then there’s the human side of the story, where manglier steps out of the background and onto center stage as medicine.
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Names, Nicknames, and the Quiet Fame of Manglier
Plants collect names the way travelers collect stickers on a worn suitcase. Baccharis halimifolia has more than their share:
- Manglier – the Louisiana French/Creole name that now almost stands in for its medicinal persona.
- Groundsel bush or groundsel tree – common English names used along the coast.
- Sea myrtle, saltbush, high tide bush – all nodding to their salty haunts.
- Consumption weed – a ghost of an older medical language, when “consumption” was used for wasting lung diseases.
The word manglier itself carries stories. In modern Louisiana, it’s spoken with a kind of affectionate dread: the tea is infamous for its bitterness and equally famous for its reputation as “the thing you drink when you’re really sick.” Local accounts describe it as the go-to remedy when fevers climbed, lungs rattled, or “the sugar” (diabetes) needed reining in.
One Louisiana writer summed up local memory this way (I’m paraphrasing to keep things tidy): everybody agreed manglier tea tastes terrible, but it works.
That combination—disgusting flavor, strong effect—is almost a folk pharmacology principle. If it’s that bitter, it must be doing something.
Native American and Early Settler Uses
Long before European botanists wrote anything about Baccharis halimifolia, they were already woven into the medicine lifeways of Indigenous communities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Ethnobotanical accounts from the region, along with later Louisiana folk documentation, paint a consistent picture: the shrub was valued as a remedy for respiratory ailments, fevers, and various “winter illnesses.”
The basic pattern was simple:
- Gather leafy twigs from the shrub.
- Boil them into a strong, yellow-green decoction.
- Drink the bitter liquid, often in repeated doses when colds, flu, or “inflammation” took hold.
Early European settlers learned quickly from Native teachers which plants mattered when the nights turned cold and lungs turned tight. Groundsel bush slipped quietly into the shared pharmacopeia, one more shrub in the informal alliance between people and the plants along the tide line.
Beyond the medicine chest, the plant also had utilitarian roles. In some coastal communities, its twiggy stems were tied into rough brooms—used to sweep porches and kitchens clean. It’s a small detail, but telling: an everyday object you hold in your hand, made from the same plant you might simmer when your child spiked a fever.
Manglier in Louisiana’s Kitchen Medicine
It’s in south Louisiana, though, that manglier takes on an almost mythic everyday status. If you hang around long enough, you start to hear the same kinds of stories:
- Grandmothers who harvested manglier from ditches and marsh edges every fall.
- Big enameled pots of bitter tea simmering on the stove when “something was going around.”
- Children who learned that if the manglier pot came out, you were officially “sick-sick,” not just faking to skip school.
Folk practitioners, including Creole and Cajun traiteurs (traditional healers), used manglier tea for:
- Colds and flu – especially when symptoms were deep in the chest.
- Pneumonia and “consumption” – illnesses with long, wearing coughs.
- Fever and chills – to “break” the fever and provoke sweating.
- Kidney inflammation – part of formulas for painful, inflamed kidneys.
- “Sugar” (diabetes) – as a daily or periodic tea to “clean the blood” and help with blood sugar control.
Modern herbal write-ups and local interviews echo these same uses. Manglier appears as a classic “bad flu” plant—one you don’t necessarily drink every day, but reach for when things get serious.
Taste-wise, nearly every source agrees: manglier is brutally bitter. People describe it with the kind of half-joking trauma reserved for childhood medicines—castor oil, cod liver oil, and manglier tea forming a kind of unholy trinity. But they also describe fevers breaking, chest tightness easing, and long nights of sweating out illness while the smell of that tea hung in the house.
Over time, the plant became an emblem of something bigger than their own leaves: cultural self-reliance. In communities that have often faced limited access to healthcare or long histories of being mistreated by institutions, knowing how to find and prepare manglier is a quiet form of power.
Folk Pharmacology: What Manglier Is “Doing,” in Human Terms
Traditional healers didn’t talk about cytokines or adiponectin. They talked about heat and cold, dampness and dryness, strong blood and “bad” blood. Within that framework, manglier slots into a familiar role: a cooling, drying, bitter tonic.
From a folk-medicine perspective, you could say:
- Its bitterness works on the liver and digestion, “clearing out” stagnation.
- Its intensity helps “cut through” thick phlegm and heaviness in the chest.
- Its overall energy is cooling, making it suited for hot, inflamed states: fevers, red throats, inflamed kidneys, “hot blood.”
None of that language shows up in journals like Biology or Nutrition Research, but it does show up in kitchens, backyards, and the quiet advice passed from one generation to the next.
Modern Science Catches Up: Pennington Biomedical and Beyond
At some point, the right scientist sat down with the right elder, and the story of manglier made its way into the lab. In the 2010s, researchers at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, working with collaborators at Rutgers, began systematically screening local medicinal plants for effects on inflammation and metabolic disorders like Type 2 diabetes.
Manglier didn’t just hold their own—they stood out.
Key study: Boudreau et al., Biology (2018)
In 2018, Anik Boudreau and colleagues published a paper in the journal Biology titled “Groundsel Bush (Baccharis halimifolia) Extract Promotes Adipocyte Differentiation In Vitro and Increases Adiponectin Expression in Mature Adipocytes.”
In plain language, they found that an ethanolic extract of manglier:
- Encouraged fat cells in lab models to develop in a healthier, more functional way.
- Increased levels of adiponectin, a hormone that improves insulin sensitivity and has anti-inflammatory effects.
- Had previously been shown (in earlier work) to dial down certain inflammatory responses in immune cells.
The research doesn’t tell us to chug roadside tea. It does something subtler: it confirms that the plant has real pharmacological teeth in pathways directly related to insulin resistance and chronic inflammation—exactly the kind of issues folk practitioners have been aiming at with manglier for generations.
A 2014 screening study by some of the same researchers found that B. halimifolia extracts reduced inflammatory responses in macrophages and helped counter fatty-acid–induced problems in muscle cells. Again, the lab language is dense, but the story underneath is simple: this is not a placebo shrub.
LSU AgCenter and extension work
The LSU AgCenter has since written publicly about manglier as a plant whose traditional reputation for treating “inflammation and the sugar” is now backed by modern science, specifically citing its ability—under lab conditions—to combat insulin sensitivity and obesity-related inflammation.
Extension articles and popular science pieces now routinely mention manglier when discussing native plants with potential roles in metabolic and inflammatory conditions, always with the important caveat that human clinical trials are still limited or absent.
Meanwhile, small companies and local herbalists have begun selling packaged manglier teas and extracts, often explicitly referencing the Pennington Biomedical work and the peer-reviewed research to support what grandmothers have been saying for a long time.
Not Just Medicine: A Coastal Guardian
Even if it had never seen the inside of a lab, Baccharis halimifolia would earn its keep along the coast. Conservation and land-management sources highlight several ecological roles:
- Erosion control: Its root systems help hold soil in place along marsh edges, pond margins, and disturbed sites.
- Habitat structure: Dense thickets offer emergency cover for animals like muskrats during storm tides.
- Pollinator support: Late-season blooms provide nectar and pollen when many other plants are done for the year.
- Salt and wind tolerance: It survives conditions that would kill many ornamental shrubs, making it useful in coastal landscaping.
Several native plant nurseries and coastal restoration groups now encourage planting groundsel bush in appropriate areas to support biodiversity and stabilize shorelines, especially as storms intensify and shorelines slump away.
The Shadow Side: Toxicity and Invasiveness
No plant with real power is simple, and manglier is no exception.
Toxicity to livestock (and potentially people)
Multiple agricultural and invasive-species references note that B. halimifolia:
- Is toxic to cattle, sheep, and other livestock when eaten in large amounts, causing neurological and digestive symptoms such as staggering, trembling, convulsions, and diarrhea.
- Contains cardiotoxic glycosides believed to underlie these effects.
- Produces seeds that are considered toxic to humans by some horticultural sources.
Livestock rarely eat enough of it in the wild to be poisoned—apparently, they aren’t fans of the taste either—but in overgrazed or drought conditions, it can become a real problem.
For humans, the takeaway is clear: just because something is “natural” and “traditional” does not mean it is safe to self-dose without guidance. Respect is part of the relationship.
Beloved at home, banned abroad
In North America, groundsel bush is a native shrub—sometimes weedy, often useful. But when it was introduced as an ornamental to parts of Europe and Australia, its very strengths turned it into a problem. It has become an invasive alien species in several countries, forming dense thickets that displace local vegetation and complicate grazing.
The European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO) and various national agencies list it as an invasive plant of concern, and it is regulated or banned from sale in some regions.
So we’re left with a plant that is:
- A cherished native medicine and coastal shrub in Louisiana.
- A toxic invader in parts of Europe and Australia.
- A research subject in labs linking it to inflammation, insulin resistance, and adipose biology.
Same plant, different stories, depending on where you stand.
How to Talk About Manglier Responsibly
It’s tempting, in the age of wellness marketing, to crown any promising plant as a miracle cure. Manglier deserves something more grounded and more respectful.
A few things we can say with honesty:
- Traditional depth: Native American, Cajun, and Creole healers have used manglier for generations, especially for respiratory infections, fevers, and metabolic complaints such as “sugar.”
- Scientific support: Lab studies (not yet full-scale human trials) show that extracts of B. halimifolia can dampen inflammatory signals and improve certain markers related to insulin resistance in cell models.
- Real risks: The plant is known to be toxic to livestock, and some parts are considered toxic to humans in large doses. Its use should never be casual or uninformed.
And a few things we shouldn’t claim:
- That manglier cures diabetes, cancer, or any specific disease in humans.
- That drinking folk-style tea is equivalent to using standardized extracts studied in the lab.
- That “natural” automatically means “safe,” especially without respect to dose or individual context.
A better way might be this: see manglier as a teacher. It teaches resilience along the coast. It teaches that elders’ knowledge can anticipate lab findings by centuries. And it teaches that every medicine worth anything comes with responsibilities attached.
FAQ: Baccharis halimifolia, Manglier, and Groundsel Bush
Is manglier the same thing as groundsel bush?
Yes. In Louisiana, “manglier” almost always refers to Baccharis halimifolia, the same shrub widely known as groundsel bush, groundsel tree, or eastern baccharis. Some local products and websites explicitly list both names together to avoid confusion.
What did people traditionally use manglier for?
Native American, Cajun, and Creole healers used manglier tea for colds, flu, pneumonia, fevers, inflamed kidneys, general “inflammation,” and chronic issues like “sugar” (diabetes). The tea was known to taste terribly bitter but was trusted when other options were scarce or ineffective.
What does modern science say about manglier?
Studies led by researchers such as Anik Boudreau at Pennington Biomedical and Rutgers University show that ethanolic extracts of B. halimifolia:
- Reduce certain inflammatory responses in immune cells.
- Promote healthier fat-cell development and increase adiponectin, a hormone that improves insulin sensitivity.
These are preclinical results—promising, but not yet definitive proof of benefit in humans with specific diseases.
Is manglier safe to use at home?
That’s a question for a qualified herbalist or healthcare professional who can look at your specific situation. We know that:
- Groundsel bush is toxic to livestock in large amounts.
- Some horticultural and invasive-species sources consider its seeds toxic to humans.
- Traditional use involves carefully prepared teas, not casual nibbling of raw leaves or seeds.
So no—this is not a “throw a handful in your smoothie” kind of plant.
Is Baccharis halimifolia good for pollinators and wildlife?
Yes, in its native range. Groundsel bush provides late-season nectar and pollen, helping butterflies, bees, and other insects when many other sources are gone. It also offers shelter for small mammals during storms. However, in regions where it’s invasive, land managers may prioritize native shrubs that serve similar roles without displacing local flora.
Why is Baccharis halimifolia considered invasive in some countries?
Outside North America, especially in parts of Europe and Australia, B. halimifolia has escaped cultivation and formed dense thickets that crowd out native plants. Its abundant wind-dispersed seeds and wide ecological tolerance give it an advantage, leading to its listing as an invasive alien species by organizations such as EPPO and various national weed-management agencies.
Closing Thoughts: A Liminal Shrub for Liminal Times
In the end, the story of Baccharis halimifolia isn’t just a story about a plant. It’s a story about thresholds.
The shrub lives on the literal threshold where land leans toward water. Its seeds ride the wind between here and there. It shelters animals when storms cross the line between routine and disaster. It crosses other thresholds, too: from Native knowledge to settler practice, from grandmother’s kitchen to sterile lab bench, from cherished native to reviled invader, depending on which shore you’re standing on.
As science continues to pry apart the molecules in manglier, there’s a quiet satisfaction in knowing that, for once, the lab is running to catch up with the story rather than the other way around. Somewhere along a Louisiana bayou, there’s still an elder who can walk straight to the right shrub, snap off a handful of twigs, and make the tea that got them, and their grandparents before them, through more winters than any paper in Biology can count.
If we’re wise, we’ll keep listening to both: the grandmothers and the journals, the marsh and the microscope, the plant and the people who have known it longest.
Selected References & Further Reading
- Boudreau A, Fuller S, Ribnicky DM, Richard AJ, Stephens JM. Groundsel Bush (Baccharis halimifolia) Extract Promotes Adipocyte Differentiation In Vitro and Increases Adiponectin Expression in Mature Adipocytes. Biology. 2018;7(2):22.
- Boudreau A, et al. Screening native botanicals for bioactivity related to inflammation and insulin resistance. Nutrition Research. 2014.
- LSU AgCenter. Manglier: From Medicinal Roots to Garden Beauty. Extension article summarizing traditional use and Pennington Biomedical research on insulin sensitivity and inflammation.
- USDA NRCS. Groundsel Tree – Baccharis halimifolia L. Plant Guide outlining distribution, ecological uses, and livestock toxicity.
- EPPO, CABI, NSW WeedWise, Invasive Species Northern Ireland – various profiles on the invasive status and impacts of B. halimifolia outside North America.
- Wild Herb Academy. Sea Myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia), The Overlooked Coastal Herb – an herbalist’s take on traditional tea use and habitat.
- Various popular summaries (Yerba Mate Culture, Brewed Leaf Love, ManglierTea.com, Blackbird Botanica) echoing Louisiana folk practice and modern research on manglier tea.
