Imphepho: The Everlasting Flower and Ancestral Incense

ANCESTRAL WISDOM · METAPHYSICAL WELLNESS · SACRED PLANTS & SPIRITUAL WELLNESS

The Flower That Refuses to Die

Helichrysum is a genus of some six hundred species, and the name it carries in English tells you what people noticed first. Immortelle. Everlasting. The flower heads dry without losing their color — pick one, forget it in a drawer for a year, and it still looks alive. Every culture that has lived alongside this plant has drawn the same conclusion from that one stubborn fact, and every one of them built a practice around it.

In the Mediterranean, the species is Helichrysum italicum, and its documented uses run toward the body: allergies, colds, cough, skin, liver and gallbladder complaints, inflammation, sleeplessness, recorded across Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bosnia and Herzegovina in a 2014 review in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. That is the plant most people mean when they say helichrysum, and we have written about it at length elsewhere on this site.

This piece is about the other one.

Imphepho: The Smoke That Carries a Message

Helichrysum odoratissimum grows across southern Africa — from the Soutpansberg in Limpopo through the highlands of Mpumalanga and the uplands of KwaZulu-Natal down to the Western Cape, and on into Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. In isiXhosa and isiZulu it is imphepho. In Afrikaans it is kooigoed, bedding-stuff, because people slept on it. The South African National Biodiversity Institute’s National Herbarium records the use plainly: the leaves and stems are widely burned as incense to invoke the goodwill of the ancestors, and the smoke is sedative.

Read that again, because a national herbarium does not usually write sentences like that. The ancestral function is not folklore appended to a medicinal plant. It is the primary documented use, recorded by botanists, sitting in the same paragraph as the plant’s distribution range.

A 2026 review in the journal Plants says the same thing in the language of pharmacology: the Zulu use the leaves and stems as incense to invoke favor from the ancestors, and healers inhale the smoke to enter a trance. The same review catalogues the plant’s antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antituberculosis, antioxidant and antidiabetic activity. One plant, two literatures, no contradiction between them.

What the Laboratory Found in the Sacred Plant

Imphepho is not the only Helichrysum species held this way. A 2021 review of four South African species — H. petiolare, H. cymosum, H. foetidum and H. pandurifolium — describes them being taken as teas or prepared as burnt-offering smoke to disinfect the rooms of the sick. H. foetidum appears in the record twice over: used to induce a trance, and used as a wound dressing in circumcision ceremonies.

Notice what that pairing means. The plant was carried into the most consequential rite a young person undergoes, and it was carried there both as ritual and as a dressing for an open wound. Whoever chose it was not choosing symbolically. They were choosing something that kept wounds from turning septic, in a language that did not need the word antimicrobial to act on the knowledge.

The same review reports what modern assays found when they went looking. H. cymosum scavenged free radicals better than butylated hydroxytoluene, the synthetic antioxidant used to keep packaged food from spoiling. Its isolated compound helihumulone showed potent antifungal activity at a minimum inhibitory concentration of 0.03 to 0.063 mg/mL. H. petiolare essential oil showed anti-inflammatory activity with an IC50 of 23.05 µg/mL.

None of this makes the practice true. The practice was never waiting on the assay. But it does dispose of the idea that the smoke was only ever a gesture.

Why Scent Arrives Before Thought Does

There is a reason a practice built on smoke outlasts a practice built on words, and it is structural. Of all the senses, smell takes the shortest road into the parts of the brain that handle feeling and memory. Venkatesh Murthy, who chairs molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, puts it in one sentence: the olfactory signals very quickly get to the limbic system. Odour goes from the olfactory bulb more or less straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus — emotion and memory — without the detour that sight and sound take.

So when someone lights imphepho and says the ancestors have come near, they are describing something that is happening. A scent tied to a grandmother’s house does not remind you of her by degrees. It puts you in the room. The smoke is not a metaphor for memory. It is a mechanism for it.

This is the shape of the thing we keep finding. Science does not arrive to grant permission to ancestral practice. It arrives late, describing in its own vocabulary what the practice had already organized itself around.

Imphepho Is Not Sage, and It Is Not a Product

Imphepho is now sold internationally in bundles, often shelved beside white sage and palo santo and described with the same flat vocabulary of cleansing. That framing loses almost everything. Imphepho is not a general-purpose air-clearing herb. In the traditions that carry it, it is addressed to specific people — your dead, by name, in your language — and it is burned by someone standing in a particular relationship to them.

There is a further confusion worth naming, because the labels invite it. Imphepho is now steam-distilled and bottled as an essential oil, sold as African immortelle. That oil is real and it does come from this plant — but a distillate rubbed into skin is not the practice this article has been describing. The tradition burns the dried plant. The smoke is the medicine, and the smoke is the message.

It matters more than a pedant’s point, because the word helichrysum on a label covers both this species and its Mediterranean cousin. Two bottles carrying that name can hold entirely different plants, from entirely different places, carrying entirely different histories. The botanical name is the only thing on the packaging that tells you which one you are holding.

That is a real distinction, not a gatekeeping one. Learning what a practice is for is the opposite of being excluded from it. If you are outside the tradition and drawn to this plant, the honest starting point is the same as with any inherited medicine: find out whose it is, learn what it was doing, and let the answer change how you handle it. A plant that has been someone’s telephone to their dead for centuries deserves more than being repackaged as a mood.

There is also a supply question worth carrying. Wild-harvested ritual plants that find a global market tend to get stripped from the places that depend on them, by people who will never burn a leaf of it. Buying from growers and practitioners inside the tradition is not a sentimental preference. It is how the plant stays in the ground where it belongs.

Everlasting Was Always the Point

Return to the one stubborn fact the plant is named for. It dries without dying. The color holds. Pick it and it keeps.

Of all the plants available to carry a message to the dead, people across southern Africa reached for the one that does not wither — and then they burned it, turning the thing that lasts into smoke that rises. That is not an accident of botany. That is a whole theology in a gesture: what continues does not continue by staying still. It continues by being given away, by rising, by becoming the air a room breathes. The ancestors are not somewhere else. They are in what you inherited and what you do with it.

Our grandmothers knew which plants to trust before any bottle told them so. The everlasting flower was one of them, and the reason is still growing on the hillsides of KwaZulu-Natal.

If someone in your life burns herbs for their dead and has never seen it written down as knowledge, send them this.

Sources

1. Swelankomo, N. (2004). Helichrysum odoratissimum. National Herbarium, South African National Biodiversity Institute
2. Ramadwa, T.E. & Meddows-Taylor, S. (2026). Helichrysum odoratissimum (L.) Less: A Review of Its Volatile and Non-Volatile Compounds, Ethnomedicine, Pharmacological Properties and Evidence on Safety Trials in Humans. Plants
3. Ekpo, O. et al. (2021). Medicinal Properties and In Vitro Biological Activities of Selected Helichrysum Species from South Africa: A Review. Plants, 10(8), 1566
4. Antunes Viegas, D. et al. (2014). Helichrysum italicum: From Traditional Use to Scientific Data. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 151(1), 54–65
5. Harvard Gazette (2020). How Scent, Emotion, and Memory Are Intertwined — and Exploited

Related Reading

• ‣ Helichrysum Essential Oil: A Natural Healing Marvel
• ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory: What Your Body Remembers
• ‣ The Body Keeps the Ancestors
• ‣ African Lunar Traditions: The Moon in African Spirituality

I am because we are. What rises from the fire was never only yours to carry.