Decoding the world of healing plants while beginning to cultivate a personal approach to herbalism.
A few weeks ago I was driving fast through humid fog, heading north up NY State Route 28, running late to a guided medicinal plant walk. When I finally arrived, a group was already gathered at the meet-up spot. The walk’s leader, Poppy Jones of the Narragansett Nation, was explaining that for the workshop we’d simply walk up the trail, stopping whenever we saw a medicinal plant to discuss its healing properties.
Well, we didn’t get very far very fast. Before I’d fully caught my breath from my late arrival—before we’d even left the parking lot—we spotted three noteworthy plants: plantain, heal all, and mugwort. As the walk continued, we barely made it half a mile up the trail. Over the course of a couple hours, we found and discussed dozens of plants, including partridgeberry, witch hazel, nettles, solomon’s seal, trillium, foam flower, and reishi mushroom (not technically a plant, but that’s ok), to name just a sampling of what Poppy brought to our attention.
This is the first year I’ve really dipped my toe into herbalism, and Poppy’s wisdom in particular truly opened my eyes to just how many medicinal plants grow wild all over the Catskills. Now that I’ve begun recognizing the medicine and food growing literally everywhere I look, it’s hard not to think about healing plants constantly—both as an overlooked ally, and as something that goes beyond the study of their medicinal uses, and into a deeper topography of localized wellness.
So while the knowledge I gained from Poppy’s walk could fill its own entire newsletter, today I want to focus on something else: The reasons why most of us don’t already appreciate these beneficial plants, or even know them. When did this network of knowledge slip away from mainstream consciousness? And perhaps more importantly, how can we get it back?
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The practice of using plants as medicine is an ancient one, truly fundamental to the development of human civilization. But it’s also contemporary, and continues to evolve as various communities and cultures develop new ways of understanding, cultivating, and relating to plants. As a field of study, ethnobotany maps how our relationships with plants ebb and flow across time and locale. It also explores how, since our relationships with plants are “rooted in observation, needs, and traditional ways of knowing [that are] always changing,” the use of healing plants can only be understood in the context of our shifting social and cultural values.
It’s both exciting and devastating to map how the mainstream Western approach to using and appreciating plants has evolved over the past couple of centuries. While we’ve made great gains in life quality and expectancy thanks to the scientific developments that have enabled us to treat and eradicate many diseases, the scientification of medicine has also caused the average person to lose agency. We are now much less likely to know how and when to attend to our own health on our own terms. Instead, we’ve relegated that job to expertly trained doctors and all manner of other healers, and, unfortunately, to wellness-focused brands and corporations who claim their pills and products will cure what ails us.
But of course, medicine hasn’t always been something that was prescribed to us as patients, or sold to us as consumers. Often, medicine was more of an alchemical art or spiritual practice, merging medical and magical into one holistic personal experience.
Prior to the 19th century, medicine was made by both vocational healers and in a more DIY fashion. The efficacy of a plant was learned and shared through direct experience, meaning the healing process was one that needed to be intentionally felt into, experimented with, and—when something was effective—remembered.
The oldest written evidence of plant-based medicine was found on a 5,000-year-old Sumerian clay slab, and referenced over 250 medicinal plants while conveying a dozen “recipes” for drug preparation. But keep in mind, this evidence is dated to the same time that writing systems (and subsequently, recorded history) were being invented. Some of the first non-written evidence of prehistoric herbal medicine points to the discovery of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, which may have been used a good thousand years earlier, circa 6,000 BCE.
Humans have continually refined our approach to plant-based medicines as our cultures and societies have evolved, prioritizing different approaches based on various religious beliefs and cultural norms. Around the early 1500s, the Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher Paracelsus developed a concept that would later be called the “doctrine of signatures.” It purported that plants tend to look like the organ or ailment they’re able to treat, as “nature marks each growth… according to its curative benefit.” This anthropocentric theory essentially says that since “god” created plants for humans, he must have left clues to help us decipher his gifts. For example, the flowering plant called “eyebright,” which vaguely resembles a wide-open eye, was used for treating eye infections; lungwort, the spotted leaves of which could vaguely be said to resemble ulcerated lungs, was used to treat pulmonary infections.
Today we know many of the alleged signatures to be ineffective, even dangerous. However, the idea still holds value in offering a way to bestow knowledge by making it feel familiar, and by bringing plants into relation with our own bodies. Even though the remedies of the doctrine don’t all hold up today, I like how it makes herbal medicine feel like an accessible language, where the plants are capable of doing the teaching—and it’s up to us to follow their guidance. As Amanda Fortini writes in the NYTimes, “Traditional cultures have long revered plants and herbs as teachers and guides, and even today, [many] have been inspired by the principles of the doctrine of signatures, viewing it as a means of hearing what nature has to say, of decoding her secrets.”
I am drawn to this idea of decoding. There’s no doubt that plants present us with a potent force for treating not only symptoms, but promoting an overall experience of wellbeing—i.e. treating the mind, body, and spirit holistically as an ecosystem of interrelated components. And at a time when access to high-quality healthcare is limited, we would be smart to decode the depth and breadth of what nature has to offer us, often free of charge and in abundance. But this Indigenous knowledge, in all its wise specificity, has become diluted and distended by modern approaches. In having access to so much, we now know too little; we’ve been overwhelmed by abundance to the point of ignorance.
Of course, this is why the pharmaceutical industry was born: To package medicine in scientifically engineered, uniformly produced, easy-to-distribute doses, so that access to life-improving healthcare could be made universal. While necessary and overwhelmingly good, this evolution also made our approach to healing less relational and personal, and more transactional and commodified—resulting in the fact that we, the average lay-people, are no longer capable of decoding anything medicinal at all.
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In the first years of the 19th century, a German apothecary assistant figured out how to isolate the analgesic, sleep-inducing compound of the opium poppy to create morphine, naming the compound after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. From that breakthrough onwards, we continued to build a scientific understanding of how and why specific plant-derived compounds are effective at treating certain health problems—leading to an ever-expanding roster of highly regulated and widely dispersed pharmaceutical products.
While many of these modern-era drugs are now made with synthetic compounds, we still rely heavily on plant-derived compounds (around 11% of drugs considered “basic and essential” still originate in flowering plants; aspirin is just one prime example). Of course, to create pharmaceuticals plants must be refined, tested, processed, and packaged for longevity—which, again, makes it possible for doctors to treat patients in predictable and controlled [and legally airtight] ways.
While herbal remedies no longer tend to be our go-to choice for treating disease, there’s a growing interest in studying their efficacy and including them in healing regimens. This is because many plant-based medicines have been proven to ameliorate a variety of ailments, while simultaneously contributing to our overall health. Plus, plants just generally fortify and enliven us. Eating a primarily plant-based diet boosts your immune system, reduces inflammation, and decreases your overall cancer risk. Eating living, fermented plants like pickles and kimchi can help protect you from microplastics.
Then there are all the health benefits of gardening. In the UK, doctors are sometimes encouraged to prescribe gardening prior to offering pharmaceuticals, as “there is increasing evidence that exposure to plants and green space, and particularly to gardening, is beneficial to mental and physical health, and so could reduce the pressure on the [over-extended] National Health Service.”
Collectively, we would benefit greatly by developing deeper, more intimate and well-studied relationships with plants—especially when viewed as a way for each of us to consider our own health needs, and attend to them ourselves (in ways that safely pair with any other medications we might be taking). But of course, it’s not all that simple. While the plants themselves are abundantly accessible, learning to practice herbalism requires time, attention, resources, and guidance. I’ve lived in the woods for six years now, and I’m just barely starting to understand the healing properties of the dandelions bursting through our gravel driveway, and the mullein growing out of the side of our house.
I’ve always considered myself a plant enthusiast, but before I had my own yard and garden, I’d never come to know plants, at least not in any sort of practical or close-knit way. This is pretty typical: most of us feel an affinity for trees, flowers, and the random greenery that exists beyond our doorstep, but naming them individually—and knowing their histories and uses, especially—is quite another story.
As it turns out, there is a[n unfortunately ableist] term to describe this widespread lack of knowledge: Plant blindness. This refers to a form of cognitive bias in which humans tend to ignore plant species, and are generally unable to recognize the importance of plant life to the biosphere and, in turn, to human life itself.
Unsurprisingly, as industrialized culture has increasingly encouraged us to live our lives separated from the rich world of plants, we have lost direct touch with some of our most generous allies. What’s worse, our lack of plant-specific awareness contributes to the fact that, overall, two times more plants have gone extinct than birds, mammals, and amphibians combined. As Christine Ro writes for the BBC, “plant blindness results in a limited interest in plant conservation,” which is a problem because “plant research is critical to many scientific breakthroughs, from hardier food crops to more effective medicines.”
In a less and less certain future, we truly need the wide world of plants, with all their potent-yet-mysterious powers. It’s a bit ironic, actually—the fact that, in industrialized nations, humans are inhabiting our deepest-ever state of disassociation from the realm of plants, while simultaneously living at a time when science continues to prove, over and over again, just how important plants are. And with more information-sharing technologies than ever before, we enjoy unprecedented access to a multiplicity of deeply cultivated tools and networks created with the intention of spreading plant-related knowledge—plant ID apps, digital resources and classes, community forums, and of course, so many books—literally everything we could possibly need to remedy our plant blindness.
It all makes me wonder if perhaps it is this very word, “everything,” that is the problem. We are simply overwhelmed and overstimulated, and don’t know how to weave plant-based medicine into the precarious, barely stable frameworks of our everything-laden lives. Also, to “heal” we are taught we must be able to know what is “wrong”—but how can this be possible when our unwellness is systemic, swirling, and forever ballooning? When there is no one thing to pinpoint, because the part of us that needs healing is, well… everything?
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I think I am feeling drawn towards learning herbalism because of its overall sense of simplicity. For me at least, as a beginner, I am forced to keep things simple. Reading about plants and learning to work with them feels a bit like learning to speak a new language, where the only way to get started is with the words that are already on my tongue.
As I consider which plants to try growing, or what kind of tea to brew on a given day, I have the opportunity to tune into how I am feeling, to look around at what’s available to me, and to follow a simple thread of curiosity around what might make me feel better. There’s something comforting about this process, as I am allowed to center my own curiosity, optimism, and intellect as I work to align myself synergistically with my growing community of plants. While getting to know their names, purposes, and healing properties, I am simultaneously looking to understand how to help them thrive, either in my garden or in their own natural environment. It feels like a way to form a close and blooming sense of kinship within my own locale. The plants in my yard are becoming my allies, and in turn, I hope to become theirs.
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In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes about moving into an old house with a wild garden, and working to familiarize herself with all the wonderful mysteries lurking in the overgrowth:
Each new plant I discovered, inspected, and finally identified was like a stitch in a tapestry, populating the formless space. What had been generic green became specific, but an individual with its own idiosyncratic history and appearance. And as I did this work I changed too, my own history and mental landscape enlarging to encompass the garden I was making.
I love the idea of seeing gardening and DIY herbalism as personal practices of wayfinding; as worldbuilding, even, within our own mental and topographical landscapes. In my first year attempting to grow, forage, and prepare medicinal herbs for my own consumption, I’ve felt a new world opening. As Poppy recommended, I’ve started with the native plants growing around me that are easy to identify and prepare, and which don’t have toxic look-alikes. (Not poisoning myself is honestly the first step towards successfully practicing herbalism, it seems.) I’ve also added some new easy-to-grow herbs to my garden—feverfew, amaranth, chamomile, nasturtium, California poppy, to name a few.
With plants—medicinal as well as edible and ornamental—there is always more to learn; more uses, properties, histories, and communities to discover. To be clear, I currently have no idea if the daily concoctions I’ve been brewing are helping me on any kind of cellular level. I still drink a lot of coffee and take my prescribed antidepressants. Also, I am incredibly new at this, which is to say: I don’t know much at all. But, it sure feels nice to be learning.
As I start to understand just the very basics of these ancient practices, I see that herbalism is not at all like popping a vitamin or taking an Advil. Honestly, it is more like meditating or journaling—like a practice that reveals more over time. As I go deeper, I can’t help but feel that I am tapping into a larger collective desire to know the world as it once was, and as it could be again. I’ve also realized we haven’t lost all this Indigenous knowledge and wisdom—we’ve simply stopped paying attention to it. But with a little intention and some help from our guides—the plants themselves, our networks of information, and especially people like Poppy—we can still get it back. Because miraculously, it still grows in abundance.
