Tag: herbal medicine

Plants can change our perspective too! – but only if we understand them

For ages I’ve wanted to broaden my approach to plants when thinking and writing about them, and I’d very much like to move a bit closer to Geoffrey Grigson (whose brilliant book “An Englishman’s Flora” is about to be republished as “A British Flora”. I really love this book for its breadth and scope; escaping the stamp collector’s view of field botany (the rarer the better) and wandering in his usual provocative way through the countryside picking up fragments of folklore, old country names, culinary and medicinal properties. You can still pick up a second hand copy very reasonably although the reprint is only £25. I’ve got a worn out paperback and a large format hardback – both treasured possessions. He’s not the only natural history writer who’s spread his wings in this way, Richard Maybe is another and there are more. I should include the early works of Henry Williamson and in the same breath dare to mention my Mother who was brought up in the deepest Chilterns and who once told us about her first encounter with a flush toilet which so scared her she couldn’t use it. I would dearly love which ‘Lady’s Slipper’ she mentioned as her favourite flower – and which could have been a geographically unlikely appearance of the now extinct orchid or one of six other more common wildflowers with similar names. Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a fascinating account of the encounter of western botany with First Nation Canadian ethnobotany. Thanks to Grigson I now know why Latin names are so important. There are such fields, known as ethnobotany, folk taxonomy, phytonomy or ethnoecology which is an academic way of recognising that plants have cultural meanings too. In our laser focused reductive way we might grudgingly accept that plants are useful for giving us clues to molecules which might be useful in medicine but fall way short of recognising herbal medicine as a legitimate pursuit. By the way, I had a text yesterday advertising a T shirt with the slogan “All plants are edible, some of them only once!” .

Anyway I hope you catch my drift. I was first fascinated by plants because they so beautiful, and the closer I looked the more beautiful they became. Several years ago when I was young (ho ho) there was a company in Kingswood which was quite a big supplier of medicinal herbs. A friend of mine once showed me a printed sheet of testimonials they sent out with their products (which included a specially formulated smoking mixture for asthmatics!) One of their big sellers was evidently a herb called Golden Seal and I mistakenly thought it referred to Goldenrod. One of the testimonial letters described how the patient, after only a couple of days of taking the remedy, claimed to have coughed up a substantial tumour. That’s not an easy to forget image. Today when I was mulling over this piece I had a look in Mrs Grieve’s 1931 “A Modern Herbal” and she, like Grigson, lists the alternative names of Golden Seal and among them she reveals that she’s actually writing about Turmeric root which these days is something of a supposed miracle cure, ‘though falling short of projectile tumour expulsion. Those sneaky scientists while all-along decrying herbal medicine, have been scouring the old herbals for patentable synthetics. Tomorrow I’m expecting a second hand copy of the almost unobtainable Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe“. I get almost all my books secondhand these days. We’re soon off on another trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog and I’m hoping to persuade Madame to take a short drive to the village of Myddfai where I can breathe the same air as the famous physicians once breathed – hopefully without the addition of smoke particles from the fire around nearby Llangynidr Reservoir which we can even smell in Bath, fifty miles away. We have friends living just a few miles from there, and their smallholding narrowly escaped a previous very frightening wildfire.

There are a thousand extensions to plant hunting that can bring the plants alive for us. I’ve been recently mugging up on some of the science, having previously known nothing at all about DNA and molecular biology and it’s mind blowing and beautiful in the intellectual sense that scientists and mathematicians use. Reading the more controversial books of Stefano Mancuso, I didn’t know for instance that the animals – that’s all the animals amount to just under half of one percent of the total biomass of the earth, whilst plants amount to around 82% (90% before the industrial revolution), and we humans amount to …….. just 0.01%. We have seen the enemy, it is us!

I’ve been amazed at the lukewarm manner in which governments have brushed aside the statistics of global catastrophe. Now, here in Bath and in the midst of the fifth heatwave of this drought plagued summer we are advised to close our windows because of the health risks associated with PM 2.5 particles travelling in the wind from South Wales. Newspapers of a certain kind continue to write about the lovely summer weather while Madame and me, among thousands of other gardeners and farmers, have struggled to keep our plants alive, and the local media are filled with rage at the local authority whenever they try to reduce and control traffic pollution. I’m reminded of William Cobbett’s quip that “they demand change but without alteration”

God alone knows how many trips I’ve made backwards and forwards to the allotment water troughs with a two gallon watering can in each hand – that’s forty pounds weight – in the face of appeals to restrict our water consumption. The upside is that we’ve been feasting on the sweetest sweetcorn, the shiniest aubergines and the richest tomatoes not to mention all the other unobtainable herbs and vegetables. As the difficulties multiply, my admiration for the adaptability of our plants increases. Some of us have wondered in Sunday Schools what the biblical manna might have been, but the more I learn about it the more I understand that the plants which keep us and every other living thing on earth alive do it all by turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar. That beats Moses and his stick any day!

Back home I turn to my books and discover a dark secret

Gypsywort on Monmouth and Brecon canal

My granny often said “curiosity killed the cat” – it was one of many ways she would close down a conversation just as it was getting interesting. As for me I seemed to leak curiosity from every pore and so it was a push-back I knew well. The campervan has many virtues but its fatal deficiency is that I can only take very few books with me and so the real research begins when I get home, and this time I came home with a question – “why Gypsywort?”. Many plant names reference a particular use – like butterbur, milkwort, pilewort, fleabane; or a place – Jersey, Argentine, Cheddar- I could go on for pages – but gypsywort unusually references an ethnic group. Why’s that? I wondered.

I’ve got a dozen or more herbals of various vintage on my shelves, and so I soon discovered that the plant is well recognised as a dye (black, grey or blue ). It’s also known as a treatment for thyroid problems, diabetes and as a sedative. It’s also very potent (dangerous when used carelessly – before you ask). My copy of Gerard doesn’t even mention it – not all modern versions are complete, and none of the others suggest anything other than medicinal uses and occasionally as a dye. So I turned, as I always do with any question of plant names, to Geoffrey Grigson’s wonderful encyclopaedia of English folk names – “The Englishman’s Flora” where the true reason leaked out like effluent .

The story that gipsies [sic] stain themselves with Lycopus europaeus runs from one book to another, beginning with Lyte’s translation of Dodoens , 1578: ‘The rogues and runagates, which name themselves Egyptians, do colour themselves black with this herb’.

And so it goes on; half a page of bilious historical references to gypsies without a shred of evidence that they ever dyed their skin. The word ‘runagates’ caught my ear; so very close to ‘renegades’ its almost a homophone. Unusually, Grigson doesn’t list any alternative names but in the US and elsewhere it’s known as Bugleweed, and in some places water horehound – surely worth adopting here. True Gypsies, Romanies, wouldn’t need to dye their sin because they have naturally darker sin. It’s said that they ultimately came from India – who knows?

Anyway, it’s a lesson in how deeply embedded racial and ethnic prejudice can be even in a remote subject like herbal medicine or field botany. So – with reference to my previous post – even if Gypsies did use gypsywort they only shared it as a herbal medicine with the world and his wife, (even pale skinned rabble rousing populists) and it grows on the sides of canals and rivers because (like me) they find it a very congenial place to be.

Follow the raggle-taggle gypsies O!

29th July 2025

Gypsywort on the Monmouth and Brecon canal

Contrary to the opinions of those who know nothing and prefer to rise above the facts, Gypsies, Romanies as they prefer to be called are a good deal more sophisticated than most people imagine and have an enviably long oral history and tradition that can’t easily be researched by outsiders because it’s not written down. As one of those outsiders what little I know comes from my association with them whilst I was a parish priest. I got to know one family very well and we liked and respected one another. One young woman joined the congregation and despite having been taken out of school as soon as she reached puberty, she had a razor sharp mind; clever, thoughtful and highly intelligent. I won’t go any further, we’re still in touch.

Anyway, my object here is not just to write about the Romany traditions because, being on the outside, I know next to nothing about them. What I do know is that there is a folk medicine associated with travelling people, similar possibly to the Welsh traditions associated with the Physicians of Myddfai and based on streams of human knowledge and experience that could even be traced back to Greece and India.

Look through any list of British plant names and you’ll see lots of plant names ending in “wort”. It’s not the case that every plant with the same “wort” name ending had medicinal uses, some were used in foods and as flavourings; but it’s safe to assume that these plants were singled out for some usefulness which we occasionally no longer know. The herbal medicines of travelling people to which I want to add the owners and crews of narrow boats working the canal system must have been centred on what was “to hand” as they moved about the country. It wouldn’t be impossible to imagine that, as they travelled, they scattered seeds and useful plants on the roadsides and towpaths either in throwing out waste or providing later for their own use when they needed them.

There’s a well recognised problem that maps of plant distribution are liable to reflect the distribution of field botanists as much as the distribution of plants, and so I have to confess that our own records feature large numbers of canal and riverside plants because that’s where we most often walk. On the other hand, the kind of plants we most often record are specialists for that kind of environment so with that in mind I can say that I’ve only ever seen Gypsywort on the canalside towpaths, and it does have some interesting medicinal properties still being exploited for the treatment of breast complaints, thyroid problems and as a sedative. Later on in our walk yesterday we found Water Figwort –

  • another plant used to treat skin complaints including haemorrhoids, hence the name figwort, because this complaint was so common and piles were known colloquially as “figs”. Then there was Purple loosestrife, which was used to treat diarrhoea with its (unproven) antibacterial properties but I can’t find any reference to sedative properties so the strife was probably at the other end, so to speak.
Imperforate St John’s wort.

Imperforate wasn’t, it seems, used to treat melancholy but it was part of a treatment for TB and kidney complaints – very common ailments of poverty. Of course like drystone walling and unicycling it’s all very well having the kit but you really need the expertise as well – but travellers and bargees didn’t have much choice and so were necessarily using these herbal remedies because there was no other show in town. I wonder if anyone ever took a companionable stroll down a riverbank and recorded what a bargee and a Romany had to say about the plants they found. Sadly mutual distrust would have made such a conversation impossible and now it’s probably too late; but I’d really be up for that walk! These days plants are spread around today by cars and boots, not to mention nurseries and “wildflower meadow” seed mixes, much as they were spread in wool shoddy, ships’ ballast and manure in the past and so it’s getting harder to track how things get to where we find them, and so we’ll probably never know whether there’s a significant correlation between canal flora and bargee medicine. As for Romany medicine there’s still a small chance of uncovering some of the lore – in fact I’d be surprised if big pharma hadn’t skulked around the margins looking for something new to patent, but for now it’s more the sense of history that engages me. Our regular 5 mile stroll around the riverbank and the canal towpath is – in Alan Rayner’s neat distinction – a walk in nature rather than a walk through it, and is also a walk in history in the very same sense. “If these stones could talk” we sometimes say without thinking that indeed these stones, these plants do talk in their own quiet stoneish and plantish ways. I’m seized with the desire to understand more deeply how these plants were used, when they were used and whether they worked beyond the placebo effect. What’s certain is that when a plant is steeped in wine or boiled in water, all manner of active ingredients apart from the target property are released and mingled into the dose. Our reductionist ideology wants to reduce everything to one solitary potency but that’s never the way plants work. I caught my GP scanning through his computer during a consultation when suddenly the Gemini AI symbol appeared. I challenged him gently over it and he confessed immediately that he often uses AI as an aid. That’s only OK as long as you can absolutely trust the veracity of the data it’s working with.

AI can accomplish in seconds what folk traditions take decades or even centuries to establish and prove – and that’s a good thing. What’s lost is the sense of connection to the sources and the loss of deep experience in building connections.

It’s not natural!

Whitefield, Dyrham Park in June 2022

Most of my least favourite expressions come with the word “natural” stitched in like a lucky charm. Actually I could put that more strongly if I said that natural is a thoroughly mischievous, occasionally dangerous word in the armoury of some commentators. Advertisers, of course, like to use the word at least three times in any label concerning food or beauty products. ‘Natural’ medicine claims a get out of jail free card by using the word all the time. I always used to counter it by mentioning Foxgloves as a natural product capable of doing great harm except that I now take Digoxin which is a synthesised version of the same thing and so I’m obliged to admit that some natural products are only dangerous if not properly prescribed. Maybe I’ll move the critique to Hemlock Water Dropwort for which there are no uses that wouldn’t lead to a grisly death.

Anyway my target today isn’t herbal medicine or even rejuvenating creams and psychotropic substances. My target is the use of the word natural as part of a slam-dunk argument in favour of whatever beige, magnolia or vanilla flavoured eight figure referenced point on the broad surface of the sexual behaviour of all living things the speaker happens to inhabit.

This entertaining thought came to me as the result of my ID binge this week, trying to sort out a group of very similar looking plants. I’ve always known that living things have evolved a multitude of ways of reproducing themselves, and that getting it on is very different between, let’s say, a Red Campion and a tangle of Couch grass. Obviously I have my own preferences as a human, and so I’m particularly glad not to be a fern whose reproductive journey is so complicated that it can only be described with the aid of diagrams which explain that the parents never actually meet one another but have to wait for an intermediate stage involving sperm, gametophyte and moisture to happen in a quiet place somewhere else. Others involve the birds and the bees but not in a fun way and yet others seem to be able to produce males and females on different plants or even in some separatist communities only to produce females. Other living things change sex for reasons unknown to science or Sunday School teachers. In fact, flicking through the glossary of my most respectable flora and reading between the lines of Latin camouflage ; it looks as if Nature more closely resembles the 1930’s Berlin depicted in “Cabaret” than the chaste discourse of a Jane Austin conversation. I’d say it’s a jungle out there if that too didn’t carry a 12 bore normative shotgun.

So natural is not a word I need to use very often. It’s too much like putting a smudge of makeup on after a particularly big or bad night out. If someone asserts that something isn’t natural I wonder which of the multitude of other naturals this particular behaviour is being teased out from. The core of the argument is this; if we are trying to situate ourselves within the natural world instead of above it then we surely have to accept that we also share the diversity of its reproductive and affective means. We have to accept that the natural world is more diverse and much more dangerous than the skinny latte version of our so-called human nature that does far more to promote hatred than it does love.

Adder, basking on the road to Porthor beach, Lleyn in June 2021

Toadflax poetry

Clockwise, Common Toadflax, Common Toadflax, Ivy Leaved Toadflax, Purple Toadflax, the white form of Ivy Leaved Toadflax growing on the walls of St David’s Cathedral in Pembrokeshire.

Palimpsest

Lovely word – “Palimpsest”, but not so lovely when you’re trying to type it into your mobile on a crowded train with no air conditioning and whilst being distracted by the sheer strangeness of your neighbours. We were coming back from Salisbury after a boozy lunch with friends, Madame was snoring gently beside me and I was gazing out of the window enjoying the hallucinogenic feeling of passing through fields and cuttings at 70 miles an hour. Opposite were a couple of very young women curled up together on the seat with their arms around one another in a kind of blissful sleep. Trains are more often very restless places these days. Mobile phones and laptops were playing their part in protecting people from relaxing and enjoying the experience, but I had just one word to type before it fled my memory altogether.

More often than not, for me, a potential post is just a formless and disorganized cloud of ideas until a single word or thought provides the catalyst which crystallizes the whole piece into (I hope) some kind of order. And so, in no particular order there were dozens of Purple Toadflax plants flowering in the back lane to the allotments. The walls around here are always covered with Ivy Leaved Toadflax and I’ve had a rather distressing difficulty in remembering the English name of plain old Toadflax because my mother usually called it “Bacon and Eggs” and I associated it with Snapdragons – from which there was no way back to its proper name.

English plant names are a delight and a minefield because so many of them are local or regional and all too often entirely different plants have the same English names. Small wonder that most botanists prefer the laser precision of Latin binomials to the poetics of local names. Linaria vulgaris is what it is and no other plant, relative, offspring or imposter will be allowed to claim the throne unless the DNA matches. Nonetheless, the evocative English names draw me in. “Why Toad?” “Why Flax?” – I wonder as I stroke their leaves and drink in their intense colour and faint perfume.

It’s not hard to see that these old names are evocative; suggesting ancient uses in healing such as Pilewort or brewing with Mugwort, or perhaps warning of danger – for instance, Fools’ Parsley – or descriptive like Jack go to bed at noon, whose flowers close up at mid day; Cuckoo pint (Cuckoo’s pintle) with its bawdy references to cuckoldry; Pissabed (Dandelion) which had always been used as a diuretic. I could go on almost forever but the best collection of these old country names is undoubtedly Geoffrey Grigson’s “An Englishman’s Flora” which you’ll probably find for 50p at an Oxfam shop somewhere near you.

The Old Hands Cafe. In 1971 you could buy a cheap lunch of cottage pie and chips, big enough to feed you for 2 days!

However some country names come loaded with so many wonderful associations that metaphor hardly fits the bill, and these Toadflaxes are better explained by the rather academic word – palimpsest – which sounds much more obscure than it really is. Here’s an example from Bath; the so-called ghost sign. When we were students here, there was a cafe called “Hands” in the Abbey courtyard. They’d never painted out the old sign for “Hands Dairy” which is still there today and neither have any of the succession of tenants since the cafe closed down and any number of different businesses took it on. A palimpsest is just the academic word for something which has been overwritten by something newer. Across history, writing materials were expensive and hard to come by, so recycling was the norm. The Romans re-used the little tiles used for sending messages, for instance. Scholars of ancient texts often have to read through several layers to try to separate the wood from the trees.

Some plant names like Toadflax are exactly like that. I’ll adapt the term palimpsest to emphasise the haunting thought that far from being a simple metaphor, behind the vernacular name there is a whole hidden history; a cloud of references to another way of life, to skills now almost extinct and an industry that even used its low grade waste to clothe slaves.

So firstly, why Toad? Well, for once we know exactly how and when the term entered the English language because it came by means of William Turner in 1548 when he translated the German name into Todes Flax. It’s all in Geoffrey Grigson’s book by the way. Its principal crime was to closely resemble the flax used for producing linen cloth (until it flowered). It’s also an invasive weed that, like bindweed, will grow from any stub or fragment of rhizome and was once a persistent weed of commercial Flax fields. So that’s the flax part explained, but why “Toad” or “Todes”? Well there’s a thought that the snapdragon shape of the flowers which gape wide when squeezed, somehow resemble the gape of the toad’s wide mouth.

But etymology is only a part of the fun, because beyond the name lies the industry. Fully grown flax was not cut but uprooted and dried. The seeds were removed by a process called rippling and then the plants were retted in water so that the woody layers were separated from the fibres. Trust me, this will have been a very smelly process indeed because it relied upon bacteria or fungi to do the rotting. The rest of the process is best described by quoting from the New England Flax and Linen website.

After retting, the straw is then put through three different mechanical processes. The first is called braking or breaking, where the bundles of flax are crushed and the woody material is broken up. The second is scutching or swingling, where the fibers are vigorously whacked with a wooden blade to remove the remaining woody material. Finally, the fiber is hetcheled or hackled by drawing the fibers through a set of sharp tines. The shorter fibers are removed, the thin strands of fibers are separated, and the fibers are aligned lengthwise. The shorter fibers are known as tow, and the long fibers are called line. At this point the fiber is ready to spin into thread and subsequently woven into cloth.

Braking, scutching, swingling, hetcheling and hackling; tow and line – these are wonderful lost words, lost procedures and lost skills from the flax weaving industry. They evoke the stink and noise of so many pre-industrial processes so let’s not get too whimsical about the pristine rural life. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live next door to a tannery or a dye works.

Pale Flax – the precursor of the commercial species, growing wild in Cornwall.

There are many plants still growing wild in the UK that are the sole remnants of once common processes and industries and whenever we stumble across them they contain a powerful sense of history. Woad and Weld, Dyers Greenweed and Madder are as evocative to me as any Cornish winding engine or pithead. Plants and their uses are the faint traces of a whole culture and we would do ourselves no favours if we reduced them all to Latin. There’s very little difference in biodiversity between so-called brownfield and greenfield sites whatever the developers may claim. Of the Toadflaxes there are (according to the Book of Stace) eight wild species and fifteen garden escapes, the Ivy Leaved Toadflax belongs to a different family – Cymbalaria – and of all those, only one was economically important; the blue flowered Linum usitatissimum which provides both flax for weaving and also linseed oil when the seeds are pressed. As the Latin name suggests – it’s the useful one.

The dye plant Weld, growing in a wildflower mix on the riverbank in Bath in 2019.

Oh no! not another post industrial site?

Afon (river) Cothi

We were looking for a couple of not too far apart campsites in mid-Wales and decided to combine a third trip to Rhandirmwyn with a few days on the National Trust site in Dolaucothi, where there’s a chance to visit a gold mine that was first opened by the Romans. What we didn’t realise until we read the information boards at the campsite was that the site itself is built on a disused opencast mine. Having said that, there’s not the remotest sign of its previous history – excepting the horrendous difficulty of getting a peg into the ground. I guess potential visitors are put off by the lack of facilities – no showers or loos – and possibly by the apparent absence of even a pub in the village. We did take a look for it but notwithstanding the sign offering a warm welcome for visitors it looked as if it had died in its sleep during the lockdown. We only have three neighbours on the site and they’re all the frantically energetic types, burning off the miles on their bikes in the intense heat.

Last evening we sat entranced by the sounds of Ravens in the midst of a fierce dispute. A Song Thrush dazzled us with his repertoire of short phrases and squeaks from an oak tree just above our heads – I particularly liked the cover version of the Red Kite call worked into the more fruity flutey bits – I bet that’s a great pulling phrase for the females. A buzzard that looked more like an eagle ranged over us in his imperious way and then dived like a stooping peregrine at some unfortunate animal beyond the trees. A robin perched, waiting for careless crumbs; a tree creeper crept up a nearby tree and a Green Woodpecker took off behind the campervan. It’s a post-industrial arcadia. Today we took the official walk alongside the river Cothi and Madame spotted a Pied Wagtail in the stream. Ten minutes later she spotted what she was sure was a red squirrel. This was an unconfirmable sighting because it was so brief and against the light, but the Dolaucothi Estate is a part of the project to protect and restore the Red Squirrel population hereabouts and we’re barely half a mile beyond the boundary. The last time we saw Red Squirrels was on a campsite down in Les Dombes in France.

The trip to the gold mine happens tomorrow and interestingly the acting warden of the campsite also doubles up as a guide there. We chatted for a while and he said they do Victorian tours as well as Roman tours and so it sounded to me as if the mines were re-worked by the Victorians who were often careless about the polluting effects of mine waste. So – there being no cloud without a silver lining – I’ll be looking out for any specialist plants growing amongst the slag. I did a quick check on the species list for this immediate area and it’s surprisingly small when compared with the whole county list.

These sites are marvellous evidence of the capacity of the natural world to heal itself after the grave damage caused by industrialisation. However this has taken a century or more to accomplish and with a looming climate catastrophe we just don’t have that much time.

I had a revelatory moment during the Song Thrush performance when I turned off my new hearing aids (God bless the NHS) and I realized that I couldn’t hear the song at all. At the last test the technician told me I am now moderately to severely hearing impaired. I know that when she fitted the new ones I boasted that I’d just keep them in all the time like I did last time. She gave me one of those undefinable looks and said she thought I’d take quite a while to get used to them. As I left the hospital I was almost overwhelmed by the noise and for a couple of weeks I was absurdly emotional when I heard quite ordinary sounds that I’d not heard for years. Even the sound of a kettle boiling in the kitchen would be unendurable. Now, taking them out at night is a nasty shock.

The photo on the right is of a Lady Fern; markedly softer than the Male Fern or Bracken. I hardly know a thing about the Pteridophytes mainly I suppose because they all look the same until you look at them properly. On the left are three photos of Wood Avens – Geum urbanum, also known as Herb Bennet. Now Bennet is often spelt Benet and is a contraction of Benedict – the founder of the Benedictine order of monks. This made me sit up because next week we’re going on a field trip to woodland on the site of an ancient friary, with the intention of searching out medicinal plants that may have survived the centuries since the dissolution of the monasteries.

The drug companies and the medical profession are outwardly dismissive of herbal medicine, but that doesn’t stop them from trialling the plants used by traditional herbalists in search of useful chemical compounds because, as we all know, plants are little organic chemistry laboratories and many of the most powerful drugs are derived from plants, or synthesised to imitate the work of nature. It’s baking hot here and Madame is snoozing outside under the awning. Later this week we’re moving across to Rhandirmwyn where there’s a tasty abandoned lead mine. It’s also going to rain. I love these post industrial places – they’re so beautiful – honestly. My cup overfloweth!

Rain starts thoughtful play

IMG_3033There’s nothing doing on the rain soaked allotment at the moment but, or rather so, The Potwell Inn kitchen is a fragrant place  since I started a few small scale experiments on medicinal herbal extractions. My recently acquired teetotal credentials are getting a bit dented by the amount of time I spend in the supermarket searching for extra strong vodka, but it seems easier to get hold of pure alcohol for tinctures in America than it is here, and many of the reference books I’m using come from the US. I content myself with what the experts rather dismissively call ‘the folk method’.

However, buying the ingredients is a whole lot more complicated than clicking on websites. I’ve discovered that very few companies who sell herbal preparations actually have  sustainable re-planting schemes, and it’s difficult to find out who does. The THR certification scheme does no more that tell us that the herb in question has a history of use in the EU. Plantlife have some interesting/scary stuff on their website about the international trade in plant material and its impact on whole species.  Inappropriate harvesting of the whole plant instead of just the leaves or berries, and overharvesting in general have brought some species to endangered status. Arnica montana, American ginseng bearberry and liquorice are all threatened.  Meanwhile, a dispiriting search around the shelves of Holland and Barrett and Boots suggests that the 25% of the UK population which is said to use herbal medicine regularly may be an underestimate. As David Hoffmann rather acidly suggests, the market is nothing more than a means of delivery of green sounding benefits, far from the holistic approach he teaches. Big business is endlessly adaptable to the latest fashion, and it’s always sensible to read the label carefully.  I’ve counted any number of versions that seem cheaper until you notice you need to take four a day instead of the one a day quoted by more expensive products. The principle of extraction here is from your pocket rather than the generosity of the earth.

As for me, my interest in the whole subject is inspired by my interest in wildlife and plants and not at all by any repressed desire to live forever. I read recently about foragers being caught with 45Kg of fungi in one haul, and it would be unsurprising if the same extractive economy didn’t apply to wild flowers and plants here. My single exception perhaps would be couch grass – Elymus repens –  for which our allotment site could sign up an agreement any day! In the summer I harvested some Mugwort, some Ribwort Plantain and a little bit of Pellitory of the Wall, which are all dried and sitting in a cupboard. But I didn’t touch the drift of Betony or the large clump of Dodder and it didn’t even occur to me to harvest any of the Eyebrights.  We make 5 litres of Elderflower cordial for our own use every year and I hardly think that will damage the species.

So what happens when I want to buy some herbs because I’m not prepared to deplete the local wild plants?  Isn’t it possible that I’m simply evading my responsibilities by passing them on to some less scrupulous forager? The answer is we don’t really know and so we’re left in the gulf between scientific medicine which is not nearly as safe as it would like to pretend, dangerous misidentifications (have you tried this lovely soup I made from some white mushrooms I found in a wood?) and potentially damaging thoughtless harvesting. Right outside the window as, I write this, is a clump of Burdock from which I could easily harvest roots, but I don’t because it’s not just about rarity; many plants are specific food plants for insects, moths and butterflies.  pellitory of the wall is much liked by the Red Admiral, and the rarity might not inhere in the plant, but the species it feeds, and if I overharvested the burdock it would deprive the local children of their endless fun throwing the burrs at their friends. We’re all a part of the great scheme of things.

In the seventies one of my prized possessions was a dog-eared copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue on the cover of which (against one of the first pictures of the earth taken from space), were the words

“we can’t put it together, it is together”.

No, we can’t put it together but we can certainly rip it apart – and we’re doing it every minute of every day. I realized while I was reading that I’ve never positively identified vervain, another valuable medicinal herb.  That doesn’t mean to say it’s rare, it’s far more likely that I haven’t noticed it because (thankfully) it doesn’t shout out like a dahlia on steroids.  Now I know that I don’t know it I’ll keep an eye open  – it’s an interesting variant of the tree falling in a deserted forest koan. Without an observer does any plant exist meaningfully within our culture? But when I find it – it’s fairly common according to the local floras – I’ll bow and say hello, take a photo and then ponder whether I have the moral right to gather any.  I think that if I could add a day’s symptomatic ease to my life at the expense of a threatened plant, I’d put up with the symptom and never tell a soul where I found it.

The answer, or at least a part of it, would seem to be on the allotment after all. Some, but by no means all of these plants could be grown on a small plot.  Many more could be grown by farmers taking advantage of a niche market which could follow from our re-evaluation of the place of meat and dairy in our national diet. Some candidates – like liquorice –  are just waiting to be taken up because the cannabis bubble is bound to burst sooner or later. But sustainability needs deep and careful thought, and and a good deal of expertise, alongside the willingness not to exploit a resource – and that’s something that market economics finds it almost impossible to do.

 

“Where’s the evidence – David?”

IMG_20191129_105716I should dedicate this posting to Sid Harris, my sociology tutor at tech college, a thousand years ago, who would challenge my sociological flights of fancy with the words – “- that’s all very exciting David, but where’s the evidence?” If there is any way of sending a profound thank-you to the past it would be to Sid for providing me with the alethiometer (great TV adaptation isn’t it?) that all thoroughgoing sceptics need to get through the mire of speculation, quackery and sheer roguery that infests our culture.

But the question has its price – particularly that going after the evidence demands a lot of commitment, blind alleys and reading which, added up, mean you have to live until you’re at least 110 to understand a simple question like ‘why does peeling onions make your eyes water?’ My latest read – yes I get through 3 or 4 books a week – is “Garlic and other Alliums” by Eric Block, and which is a magnificent book that makes me want to cheer and applaud every other paragraph. But understanding the central chapters depends on a familiarity with organic chemistry which I don’t have.  Every opening door leads to another whole corridor.

But today I’ll start with a Guardian article that perfectly demonstrates the thought I’m working on. If you haven’t clicked on the link, the article concerns biochar – a form of charcoal made by burning wood in an atmosphere starved of oxygen – so far so ordinary charcoal – but by doing it in a retort that captures all, or most of the nasties that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. The hypothesis is that by making huge quantities of this compound and digging it into the earth we would be sequestering carbon in a way similar to, let’s suppose peat bogs or coal reserves. The article goes on to suggest that the biochar might also improve soil fertility and even the health of grazing animals at the same time. It’s a no-brainer, we should all go out and buy it right now save the world in a day. Except for a paragraph towards the end-

While academics and researchers are optimistic about the benefits of biochar, they are not blind to the risks either. “If we’re wrong, and we spread hundreds of thousands of tonnes of charcoal over the UK, we can’t get it back out of the ground. We’ve got to be right. The stakes are really high,” says Udall.

The evidence isn’t there yet.  It might be there in a year or two, if we do the research, but like most breathlessly announced breakthroughs, we need to slow down a bit. I imagine that the article itself will be mentioned many times, used as a sales pitch and generally enter the consciousness of allotmenteers and gardeners all over the world without the small-print warning following it.

When I started to read about the deep ecology movement I was puzzled by the phrase ‘aquarian conspiracy’ which often cropped up.  For me the ‘age of aquarius’ was a song in a musical where some people got their kit off on stage, I couldn’t associate it with the idea of a conspiracy. But what the phrase seems to allude to is the concept of a ‘new age’ in which all of the great challenges facing us are ‘solved’ by the application of new technology.  Apparently this became something of a Silicon Valley mantra. While you might think that making charcoal in a fancy retort is hardly ‘technology” it’s clear that the ideological use that it might be put to  could be a dangerous diversion from the pressing issue of our anthropocentric environmental greed. Soaking up excess carbon is a must, but you need to stop producing it at the same time.  The pressing danger of the ‘aquarian conspiracy’ is that it allows us to carry on polluting in the false belief that there’s always a technology around the corner.  And there’s no evidence for that either!

Evidence based science often clashes with the sales pitch – it’s hardly surprising – and the danger is that we rely so much on the carefully crafted ‘evidence’ produced for us like pre-digested seagull food, because we lack the skills to find out for ourselves. Here’s an interesting quotation from David Hoffmann’s book “Medical Herbalism”

I was asked to present a paper on the topic of “Herbal Alternatives to Prozac”.  This quest to identify a herbal alternative to Prozac is a perfect example of how the real gifts of herbalism can be deflected by underlying assumptions. It would, in fact, be more appropriate to consider the holistic alternatives to the current vogue for psychopharmaceutical solutions.

When judging outcomes in phytotherapy, the quality of an outcome depends on your values. If an RHS judge with a passion for formal gardens was asked to comment on our allotment they might say it’s a mess because it doesn’t meet their criteria (tidiness, straight lines, complete absence of pests and diseases), for “a good allotment”. A good outcome in holistic therapy (or gardening) might be an enhanced sense of wellbeing whereas a medical assessment might depend on a series of abstract measurements. Neither method is more correct than the other, they both try to be rigorous and they each have strengths that we depend upon – and in any case I have to say that being loved cared for and listened to is the best healer and that defies almost all science.

I remember well a ward sister at the General Hospital in Bristol where I was a part time chaplain. When she died in a riding accident, they put a plaque on the wall to commemorate her.  It’s gone now and they’ve turned the hospital into expensive flats – and I’ll  make no further comment on that subject! However Sister Valerie Helps – this is my little personal commemoration – had a gift beyond any scientific exploration.  Post operative patients in severe pain would feel better when she came on to the ward.  She would say -“could you hold on for just another half hour?” when they were calling for morphine, and they discovered that they could. She would challenge the doctors when they were attempting to do something stupid and inspire complete confidence in patients and relatives alike.

Lets do the science – masses of it – and be prepared to learn from it, even if it means changing some of our assumptions.  But for science and healing to work together they each need to broaden their underlying assumptions.  For science there’s the need to try to describe and quantify a broader range of outcomes which will have to include wellbeing and other ‘subjective’ states.  For herbalism, gardening and the whackier reaches of human culture we need to accept that not every hand-me-down remedy is necessarily, a priori, better.  I remember my mother talking about the lives saved when sulfonamides were first used during the 2nd world war.  They’ve been superseded now, for the most part, but in their day they were lifesavers. To go back to biochar, it may be a part of the answer to the climate catastrophe but in ethics they always say “you can’t make an ought into an is” and that’s not just a lesson for ethicists but for all of us.

Got anything for cold feet?

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Plantago major

IMG_20191126_141144All this rain! On the other hand, my incarceration in the flat has given me time to catch up with some reading, and I’ve immersed myself in David Hoffmann’s “Herbal Medicine”.  Slowly, slowly the pieces of the jigsaw are falling into place and the inter-relatedness of all things is showing itself wherever I look. In some ways I’m a million miles behind, especially when it comes to the complex decisions that phytotherapists need to make. But in other ways I feel pretty confident – the field botany, the Latin names and even the knowledge of where to look for plants have all been easy to adapt. In fact the extension into a related field of study has served to make plants even more interesting. The knowledge that a plant can function as so much more than a tick in a flora, but be a visual delight, a sign of the underlying soil conditions, a signal of ecological health or sickness, of ancient human habitation or recent of soil disturbance, not to mention its history, the literary references to it, its use as a food, flavouring and medicine.  It’s lovely that we can grow some of these herbs on the allotment, and it’s especially lovely that some of the plants with the most potent applications to human health are the least showy; often regarded as weeds. The capacity of plants to synthesise complex molecules from very simple ones is a miracle, and I’ve discovered the oral and worldwide cultural history that sustains herbal medicine goes back thousands of years, and which must make it one of the longest ever citizen science experiments.

I’ve also decided that rather than try to engulf the whole subject like a basking shark, it makes more sense to investigate plants as I find them, and possible uses as I need them myself. That way I don’t have to develop a fizzing brain and the certainty of my inadequacies through limited experience.

I’ve done a few of my own experiments, by gathering, drying and storing a few very easy ones and I’m pleased that the specimens I dried have kept their colour and survived for just under five months in a dark cupboard without any apparent loss of quality.  I’ve even tried a few completely safe things on myself – all this is beginning to look like a CV but really it’s not  – I’m just sharing how exhilarating it is to be so immersed. One highlight yesterday was to order up three herbs from a supplier to test on myself.

The Potwell Inn allotment is turning out to be a laboratory in which the plants do all the work and, at best, we’re the cleaners and porters who help out. Not only are we not the experts in all this, but it transpires that the plants don’t much need an expert.  As allotmenteers we provide room service for the plants, a bit of weeding and feeding here and there and perhaps a bit of pillow plumping while they get on with doing remarkable things.

It hasn’t all been a trip down the primrose path, though. While I was confined to the flat I got on with a few more computer moving jobs and while I was setting up a redirect on one of my old email accounts, I inadvertently created a logical argument that repeatedly copied copies of copies of emails back to their original senders, and one poor friend received 135 of his own emails before I noticed something wrong and pulled the plug. So If you happen to be one of the afflicted ones, please accept my apologies. As one of the victims said – ‘what is it about old people and technology?’ – I hope we’re still friends!

IMG_6262Then yesterday evening we went off to the AGM of the allotment society. The business part of the meeting was chaired with great efficiency so it was over in 3/4 hour and then after the inevitable tea and cake we had a talk given by Rob Solari from the Isle of Wight Garlic Farm. Talks can be anything from lethally sleep inducing to full-on loin girders.  Rob’s talk fell into the second category and in about an hour we realized how much we still have to learn about growing garlic. So much so that we were planning to change our whole approach by the time we got back home and by this morning we’d got a much clearer idea of what we would try to do this coming season.

What was also fascinating was some of the biochemistry of the health benefits of garlic.  Raw is better than cooked, for instance, although that’s intuitively true.  But I hadn’t known how much better it is to crush rather than chop the garlic.  I didn’t know that an infusion of elephant garlic leaves can deter slugs, or how to grow truly giant bulbs over two seasons, or that garlic shouldn’t be grown with peas, beans, asparagus, sage or parsley – hmmm – a bit of plant moving called for there; or that  hardneck scapes taste lovely. Isn’t it terrific to listen to someone who really knows their subject.  I was so inspired  I googled up a scientific monograph on garlic and bought it online. Luckily Rob has a stall at the Christmas Market here and we can buy the bulbs we now know we need to plant.

All this leaves me with a bridge to cross, because I have a visceral dislike of raw garlic – and I’m not the only one; one of our allotmenteering neighbours spent the whole talk with a giant handkerchief pressed to her nose. But the health benefits are so well established it would be marvellous if I could develop a taste for it.  RS Thomas used to eat bulbs of the stuff, but then not many people wanted to talk to him, with or without garlic breath. I used to work with twin brothers, welders, who would eat raw onions with a penknife as if they were apples, but I’m not sure I could stop myself from gagging.  However, the experiment must be done! I’ll say the missionary’s prayer ‘ “Lord, if I get it down will you keep it down?” and my new life will begin – or not as the case may be. But I had a quick look at one scientific paper earlier on, and I read a section from James Wong’s book “How to eat better” and all is not lost because there are workarounds that I can experiment with.

And just to finish, we were given some black garlic to try and it’s beyond delicious.  It’s ‘fermented’ at 60C for a month at high relative humidity and it emerges as a sweet black mildly garlic flavoured paste.  You could eat it with a teaspoon it’s so good.

 

 

 

 

First proper frost of the season

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I love to wake up like we did today and see white frost on the green outside, but this morning it was especially good to see the excited loop drawn on the grass by a dog released from its lead. Who says a line can’t express joy! It’s no less pleasurable to be prepared for frost, and I say so having not been up to the allotment to look for myself. “Possibly” says my inner pessimist – ” all your seedlings are dead”. “Oh do go away”, I think, “and bother someone else”.

We’ve fleeced and cloched all the vulnerable plants, and garlic especially is supposed to positively relish a few days of hard frost – so bring it on, I think.  On the other hand it’s worth wondering what the balance of good practice might be in relation to sheeting, IMG_20191109_151823fleecing and mulching. Creating a warm dry environment under black plastic sheets is a great help to slugs as well as more friendly pests – (just peel the sheet back and look for yourself), so maybe we should be encouraging foxes (on our plot they don’t need much encouragement), badgers who love a fat slug, and hedgehogs as well as toads who equally don’t mind if they do. Oh and don’t forget the birds. I know that those who sell garden supplies would have us think that only an architect designed and artisan produced bee hotel will be suitable, but insects prefer to choose their own overwintering spots.  Every year at this time we have an invasion of ladybirds who creep into the flat and take up their winter quarters in the corners of our ceilings.  I took this photograph in the hall, ten minutes ago.  I suppose we could  spray them with insecticide, but in the spring we’ll be hoping for them to arrive as the aphids get going.  I prefer to see our guests as free biological control breeding colonies.  I’m not so keen on the frass, but that comes off with a wipe anyway.

A bit of botanical history

In a quick update on my Tutsan research, I checked back on the transcribed edition of Culpeper’s Herbal and found that in the 1649 edition the plant was indeed described as ‘Tustan’, but Culpeper wrote that it was no longer much used. It doesn’t seem to appear at all in Gerard a century earlier.  There’s a clue in the indispensible “Englishman’s Flora” when Grigson states that Tutsan had been mistaken in a medieval herbal for another herb altogether, mentioned by Pliny. He goes on to say that by Gerard’s time the misidentification had been corrected and this must have led to its decline, although Culpeper still lists a number of uses. But the 1649 edition is also full of typos – there are dozens if not hundreds listed at the end of the Project Gutenberg edition so perhaps it was a Friday afternoon in November when a short sighted printer with no botanical knowledge at all dropped two pieces of moveable type into the wrong place in a frame and no-one noticed. Why am I so interested in this? Well I spent half my life grappling with understanding and interpreting ancient texts, and old habits die hard.

Some tougher stuff on herbal medicine

And while I’m on the subject of honest errors, I notice in the newspapers another routine round of attacks by conventional medicine on the dangers of herbal medicines.  Let’s be clear, I’m not a gimlet eyed anti vaxxer and I have more reasons than most to be grateful for modern drugs – I take four different drugs every day and without them there’s a signficant chance I’d be in much poorer health than I am.  I have my annual flu jab and so it goes on.  So thank you to the NHS, I’m a fan.  But in his day, Culpeper battled with the Royal College of Surgeons – he wrote this in 1649 as he translated the (Latin) Pharmacoepia Londinensis into the English common tongue, facing the same challenged as did Myles Coverdale and many others in translating the Bible (in 1535) so that any ploughboy might read it.

” The liberty of our Common Wealth   …… is most infringed by three sorts of men, Priests, Physitians, Lawyers”.

Well he would say that wouldn’t he? – he fought with Cromwell in the English Civil War and was a thoroughgoing Puritan radical. He got a serious chest wound which may have been a subsidiary cause of his death from TB at the age of only 39. He could see that many poor people simply couldn’t afford to pay for credentialed physicians and so he gave them what they needed – reliable access to self care. He was always careful to note where a misidentification could be dangerous, and there’s no sense of anything but close observation and attention to detail in his book – but it was a book written in the 17th century translating another put together in the 16th from manuscripts that went back to the first century and using experience gathered from Egyptian, Roman and Greek sources. It can’t be understood without serious study: which is a long way of saying that attacks on herbal medicine that come from a simple 21st century superficial reading of ancient texts suffer from exactly the same flaws as do the attacks by anti-vaxxers on modern scientific medicine – they’re often fuelled and inflamed by a complete failure to understand what the other is really doing.

Undoubtedly herbal medicine can be dangerous and can cause unexpected interactions with conventional medicines. Undoubtedly we could do with better training and more regulation of expensive raw materials, bearing in mind that fake Viagra and illegal steroids are hardly ‘better’ than fake Ginseng or any other herb. Conventional medicine too has its downside.  I found some research by the Universities of Sheffield, York and Manchester published on 23rd February 2018 on the subject of prescription errors: it found that in the UK there were:

  • 237 million medication errors each year
  • An estimated 712 deaths
  • Were a contributory factor to between 17,000 and 22,000 deaths
  • Cost £98.5 million per year to remedy

I tried to find equivalent data for herbal and oriental medicines but it seems that there is very little detailed research and a lot of untested anecdotal evidence floating around. Could this be a clash of ideologies just like the battles of the 16th and 17th centuries? The only way to find out is to do the comparative research on a level playing field. How many times have I heard it said that “there’s no evidence” that a certain treatment works when the reason there is no evidence is because no-one had ever done any research to find any. That’s a politicians trick!

Meanwhile I’ll continue to pick my sceptical way between the opposing sides and use the best informed opinions when it comes to choosing the right therapy. A few weeks ago we had a meal with a GP and a cancer specialist consultant.  I asked in all innocence (ho ho) whether their patients ever asked them about complementary therapies. “All the time” was the response and the conversation was immediately doused with a bucketful of cold silence.