Compound Class

Minerals

Inorganic elements plants concentrate from the soil — silica, zinc, and the trace minerals.

Overview

What Are Minerals?

Minerals are the inorganic elements a plant draws up from the soil and concentrates in its tissues — calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, silica and a long tail of trace elements.

Unlike every other class here they are not carbon-based molecules built by the plant, but simple elements taken from the ground, which is why a plant's mineral profile mirrors the soil it grew in.

Macrominerals & Trace Minerals

Minerals are divided by how much of them the body requires, not by chemistry:

Macrominerals: calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, sodium; needed in larger amounts
Trace minerals: zinc, iron, copper, selenium, manganese, iodine, chromium; needed only in traces

The distinction matters for safety: the margin between sufficiency and excess is generally much narrower for the trace elements.

Where Minerals Occur

Some herbs are notable accumulators, and this mineral richness underlies the traditional use of many leafy and root herbs as nourishing, remineralising tonics:

Horsetail and nettle

silica

Nettle, dandelion leaf and dark greens

calcium, iron, potassium

Seaweeds

iodine and a broad trace-mineral spectrum

Alfalfa and oatstraw

broad mineral profile

Pumpkin and sesame seed

zinc and magnesium

Because uptake depends on the ground, the same species grown on depleted soil will carry a thinner mineral profile.

Pharmacological Importance

Minerals act structurally and catalytically: calcium and silica build bone and connective tissue, iron carries oxygen, and zinc, magnesium, copper and manganese serve as cofactors for hundreds of enzymes.

As with vitamins, their therapeutic effect is largely a matter of correcting a shortfall — which is why mineral-rich herbs are classed as tonics and nutritives rather than as actives in their own right.

Toxicity & Safety

The pattern is one of dose-dependence. At dietary levels from plants minerals are generally safe and restorative, but they differ from most plant constituents in that many are outright toxic in excess.

Plants can also concentrate unwanted heavy metals — lead, cadmium, arsenic — from contaminated soil, which is the main reason herbal material is tested for them. A few mineral forms are locally irritant, notably the calcium oxalate crystals ('raphides') in some leaves and roots.

Source Plants

Herbs Containing Minerals

12 herbs

Plants in the materia medica documented to carry minerals, with the compounds each one is listed for. The bar counts how many DISTINCT minerals are on record for a plant, relative to the best-documented — it measures breadth of record, not potency, so a plant with one well-studied compound can outrank a richer source that has simply been analysed less. Where a measured concentration is on record it is quoted inline; most entries have none yet.