Western herbal medicine in Britain is often framed within the context of being local, traditional, hedgerow, and folk. I’m not here to dispute this claim entirely, but I would like to untangle it a little. Within our framing of British herbalism, we often forget to include the influence of plants that have been imported because of colonialism, knowledge that has been extracted because of empire, the global trade in herbs and spices, the influence of Arabic, Persian and African medicine, the movement of plants with migration or the importation of plants with medieval monastic gardens. We also fail to look at how plants are grown, the conditions of the growers, where they are stored, and how they are imported. Although herbalism is framed as a bioregional healing system, it is supported by a global economy and so can not be separated from the other wider issues in the global economy.
During the nineteenth century, plants became a huge source of economic wealth for the empire. Many collectors imported plants into their vast gardens or dried pressed plants into their herbariums or into the collections in the Botanical gardens. Gardens such as the Botanical Gardens in Glasgow were set up to grow plants for the medical college in Glasgow, where physicians learnt how to make their own remedies so that they didn’t need to depend on apothecaries. Botanical gardens like Kew in London were set up to determine the economic potential of plants, the viability of growing them in Britain, and their trade potential. They facilitated plant transfers and aimed at developing imperial self-sufficiency. What this meant was that plants were taken from their original habitats and moved into new empire-owned lands where they could grow mono crops of certain species like tea and ginger.
By the nineteenth century, ginger, for example, had become a stapple in the British pharmacopoeia used for its heating and digestive properties. It was a plant that had been found in south-east Asia used in Chinese and Ayurvedic systems. It was a spice that had long travelled along the trade routes into Britain and was used in medieval and Roman medicine. It had become a highly prized and valued spice. The European empires, however, transformed ginger from a regional growing plant into a plantation commodity. Britain, for example, imported it into Jamaica and grew it on their plantations there. It, therefore, became a crop tied to imperial markets , including slave labour, colonial land seizure, and imperial shipping networks.
After Britain abolished slavery many agricultural economies in places like India, where ginger was also grown, moved to indentured labour forces. This included debt-bound labour, exploitative contracts, and racial hierarchies.
Although it is now not the same as in the nineteenth century, it can still be argued that global agriculture continues to be based upon expoitative systems that resemble this indebted nature. For example, Peruvian ginger growth and exportation grew exponentially due to the high demand from the wellness industry. This created opportunities but also concerns over monocrops, deforestation, and export dependence on European and American market forces, which have unequal trade relationships with Peruvian farmers.
This isn’t about saying that ginger shouldn’t be used in our materia medica, but it’s acknowledging the systems surrounding it and recognising the knowledge systems that it came to us from.
Today in the podcast I am speaking with Nicole Rose of Solidarity Apothecary. We speak about herbs to support us in our fight and struggle for justice and liberation, and about all the amazing work she is doing.
For a while, I felt like my work was lots of fairly separate parts until I realised that there were many threads running through it. Threads that I had felt but threads that didn’t feel clearly visible, possibly to other people. One of those key threads is the idea of restoration after rupture.
Let me explain what I mean by rupture.
I think that we can see rupture when we look back at our history when we were (and continue to be in some places) forcibly displaced from the land, when our connection with it was severed. We see rupture when our spiritual practices were replaced by a dominating all pervading religion. We see rupture when our traditional healing was dismissed as old wives’ tales and replaced by the pharmacological industry. We see rupture when we were told that as women (or men) our bodies, our feelings and our thoughts were not important, and we were separated from our embodied knowing. We see rupture when the imperial empires marched across other lands. We see rupture when the influence of these traditions and their knowledge has been discounted and forgotten as part of modern Western herbalism. We see rupture when we are told that having a dysfunctional pelvic floor post baby or as we age is normal and something we have to live with. We see rupture when we silence our well-being and our needs and continue to grind in the capitalist world, not allowing ourselves time to heal. We see rupture when people are displaced, when they are unable to feel safe in their own lands or in the new lands who give them refuge. We see rupture in our disconnection from our roots and our ancestral lineages.
My work aims to sit within all of this to reconnect the fragments of the many ruptures. Through…
Historical herbalism → recovering and giving voice to lost knowledge, ancestral memory, folk practices, and wise women traditions. Reconnecting with our ancestral lineages.
Reimagining and recaiming the wise women → reclaiming, now marginalised forms of knowledge, that we were severed from, reclaiming healing authority, reconnecting us to the land, our plant kin, spirit; to the more than human world.
Research and writing → making meaning from all of it and giving it language.
Community remedies for refugees, homeless people, and other marganalised communities → reconnect from displacement through practical care for people experiencing displacement, instability, trauma, and loss of belonging.
Restore your core → To be able to root well energetically and spiritually, we need to heal our root and our core by healing these physical areas. But this is also about reconnecting with ourselves physically, emotionally, culturally, and spiritually. Reconnecting to our body, nervous system, grounding, breath, inner orientation. Enabling us to feel whole again.
Herbalism → Working with plants to reconnect to the land and sense of place. To heal fractured nervous systems. To reclaim lost knowledge.
Foraging waks → to reconnect with ancestral knowledge, our plant kin, and the land beneath our feet. Learning to see again so that the wild weeds become our teachers—inviting care, connection, and a deeper sense of belonging.
Women’s circles → Meeting in community to celebrate the changing seasons. Creating oral tradition, shared healing, witnessing, enabling women-centred knowledge exchange, and sacred crafting.
Clinics → individual restoration work. One-to-one support for: stress, depletion, disconnection, transitions, grief, nervous system overwhelm, and identity loss.
This, I have realised, is my work. This is what this patreon and my website are all about. But there are many ways to restore after rupture.
How are you restoring your wholeness after the systemic rupture we have all been through?
I have been thinking about this question a lot lately, as more and more people become displaced and will become displaced. I feel that plants have a huge role to play in reconnecting people not only to their old land and helping to heal their trauma and sence of loss, but also to connect and settle into their new land and life. Plants can sometimes be the one constant that weaves your two lives back together. For example, if a plant species grows in your own land and you find it growing in your new land. Sometimes, however, our landscapes can be so incredibly different from the places that we were brought up. These days, you can usually find dried herbs as teas, oils, or sprays. The smell of the plant can be enough to awaken a memory, to reconnect you to your loved ones, and to help you connect to the world around you.
The simple ritual of making and sitting down with a cup of herbal tea can help to calm your nervous system, soothe the soul, not only through the quiet moment spent with the mug, but also with the connection you have with the plant inside that cup.
Growing and tending your own plants, whether that is in a pot or garden, can equally help the reconnection as the process helps to ground you, rooting you when everything else in your life might be spiralling. They can be a way to gently and slowly open you to the new world around you, giving you support whilst you heal.
Plants as food is another powerful way to reconnect to place, as you spend time sourcing and preparing the ingredients, possibly introducing you to your community. Cooking the food, possibly with the help of others – family, friends, colleges – talking and discussing memories of the culture and land. Nourishing your body with the food to literally build your being with the plants from your land.
And finally, for now, working with the plants as your medicine both spiritually and physically to heal your being and soothe your soul.
However you look at it, plants are a doorway back into reconnection.
How do you think plants help people reconnect after displacement?
In today’s podcast I am speaking with Sara from Habobas house about her charity work setting up Habobas House, which supports the rebuilding of homes in Sudan, and about Sudanese culture. It is really nice warming episode, so please enjoy, and support her work if you can.
We speak about foraging, The Wild Biome Project, Natasha’s new book and the National Institute of Medical Herbalists UK. Natasha’s book Foraged Condiments is available through Aeon. They have given podcast listeners a discount using the code NL20 available until 22/11/25.
If you enjoyed the podcast please like, share and subscribe.
You can connect with Natasha on Instagram @
You can connect with me and my work on my website and support the podcast HERE
My work as a community herbalist with Movement in Thyme CIC sees me working with disadvantaged communities and people seeking sanctuary. We run workshops empowering people to help themselves with herbal remedies at a time when the medical system seems overburdened and adverts on the radio advise patients to treat themselves at home before attending the hospital. This is all well and good, but the NHS has become a victim of its own success. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big proponent of the NHS, I think it is a testament to the social support of our country, and hate to think of Britain’s health service being carved off and privatised following along the lines of America, where only money talks. Being an herbalist does not mean that I am opposed to medicine and its advancement, on the contrary, the advancements we have made have been amazing and saved many lives. However, the rise of the medical establishment has also corresponded with the demise of our own capabilities and beliefs to heal ourselves. As medicines have taken over, we have been told that the remedies, once passed on mother to daughter, are more or less useless, and so many have been forgotten. Life has a cyclical way, though, and our present doctors are beginning to tell people to use things like honey for a cough. We are slowly beginning to realise that home remedies had some merit, that they had their place and their use, and that in this day and age with overstretched doctors and disrupted supplies of medicine that they may even be essential once again.
If we look at the history of medicine, particularly the role of folk medicine – medicine used in the house mostly by women – herbs were the main ingredients. Herbs were also the mainstay of much of what became authorised medicine, with plants being an ingredient within much of the chemical medicines the apothecaries made. Even to this day, much of our medicine started off its life as a component part of a plant, which was then isolated and recreated in a chemical format.
It is comforting to imagine that herbs were the only ingredients of folk remedies, but when we look back through time, they weren’t the only ingredients used. Dung, snails, frogs, fried mice, spider webs, wood lice, dirty socks, unicorn, powdered mummy, red thread, and breast milk were just some of the other ingredients used in home and practitioner remedies. Now we have a slight disgust for these ingredients in medicine, having moved so far away from them and from nature in general, but its also not wise to completely dismiss them all. There have, in recent years, been scientific research done on the efficacy of some old remedies, and some of these have been shown to be effective, that is not to say that you should go around collecting dried sheeps dung and start making your own remedies with them. However, if you travel to other countries, which we have in our “glory of empire” days termed “backwards” or “savage” you may find that some of these ingredients are still being used.
An ancient remedy, for example, in Traditional Persian Medicine, is dung from a female donkey, called “Anbarnesa,”which is smoked like incense for conditions like bronchitis, ulcers and ear infections. Scientific studies are now being done, which show the surprising benefits of it.
Then there were also the charms, which were an important part of remedies. These days, people often look at them in disbelief. “How could they believe in magic?” But if we look at charms and spells using modern terminology as ‘positive intentions’ or ‘positive mindset’, we see them in a different light.
Research shows that mindset or expectations to heal, similar to placebos, can trigger specific neurobiological correlates including the immune, cardiovascular, and neuroendocrine systems. In fact, placebos are driven in large part by the mindset that the pill is effective.
The research also shows that medicines are more effective when the physician tells the patient the benefits of it before or while administering it. We are just finding this out now, although if we look, healers knew this through history.
The greatest sanction which the Romans used against dissidents was to brand them as magicians and sorcerers, for which the penalty was death. Women healers often met this fate. Caligula’s insanity was attributed to drugs and magic used against him by his wife, and she was executed. The early Christians were similarly branded as magicians and executed, and it is no coincidence that some of the early Christian martyrs, like Theodosia, Nicerata and Thekla were principally sagae or midwives….The conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity crystallised attitudes towards women and women healers….Thus men were confirmed in their role as official healer and Galenic medicine – the most prominent Roman medical ‘school’ – was confirmed as Christian medicine…..For the poor had little choice but to continue with home remedies and unorthodox practitioners. This duality of medical practice remained a feature of European medicine until the twentieth century.
This duality existed despite the fact that the church and male physicians sort to discredit women healers. Part of the reason women healers and domestic medicine continued was the fact that they helped the poor, their neighbours, their family, and the community. Doctors, on the other hand, charged large amounts of money for their services and so were out of reach for the majority of people. There were also not enough doctors to doctor everyone, and the majority of doctors did not want to work with the poor anyway. Normal people, on the whole, thus continued as they always had looking after themselves using domestic medicine, things they could find in their houses, in the hedgerow, or could be grown in the garden. There are numerous recipt books from upper-class women who were able to read and write, which shows the role of women as healers of their households. They also show how women shared this knowledge and passed it on between them.
This then brings us back to my original point, that we have lost this knowledge and yet have come full circle where it is needed once again. We need to look back at our history to find what we have lost and bring this teaching to people so that we can look after ourselves for basic needs and don’t “clog up the hospitals unnecessarily.” And it is the everyday person yet again who needs this knowledge as the upper classes are as usual less affected.
As a historical herbalist, my role is to uncover the traditions of our past, preserve our knowledge, and ensure that our wise women, our grandmothers, and their struggles, are not forgotten. When we see what seems to be happening in the States with what appears to be the reversal of democracy, womens liberation, and the rise of Christian nationalism we can see the circle of history repeated, even as they try to delete it. In these times of uncertainty, the knowledge that kept us alive for millennia seems ever more important.
But why dress in historical clothes? As historical herbalists, our aim is to practice living history. Recreating the clothes and techniques of the era to help us to better understand how people might have thought or felt, what the challenges were, and how they practised healing. And it’s fun!
To take a few obvious examples: communities speak languages that are inherited from the past. They live in societies with complex cultures, traditions and religions that have not been created on the spur of the moment. People use technologies that they have not themselves invented. And each individual is born with a personal variant of an inherited genetic template, known as the genome, which has evolved during the entire life-span of the human species.
So understanding the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human. That, in a nutshell, is why History matters. It is not just ‘useful’, it is essential.
The study of the past is essential for ‘rooting’ people in time. And why should that matter? The answer is that people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process.
I guess in essence this blog post is me trying to connect my two roles as community herbalist and historical herbalists, which can on the face of it be two very different roles, but are in fact two sides of the same coin. Rooting myself in the knowledge of the past helps me to see the cycles that are being repeated, and equally helps me to help marginalised communities just as our grandmothers (and some grandfathers) before us always have.
Movement in Thyme is a non-profit you can find more about our work and support us here: https://movementinthyme.com/
In todays podcast I am speaking with Agnieszka Drabek-Prime from Prime Therapy
She is a medicine women and sacred womb weaver. We speak about how and why to connect with the womb, the cycles in life and the archetypes.
You can connect with her at her website (above) or on instagram @ Yoni.Wise
You can buy her new book Dancing with Goddesses at Aeon, with this discount code DWG20 until 8/11/25
I am looking forward to weaving in some of Agnieszkas womb meditations into Weaving the Feminine, you can find that and support the podcast at Wise Herbal Ways
In the last patreon post on the Wise Herbal Ways weaving the feminine path, we looked at the archaeological remains of an Anglo-Saxon woman who has been described as a wise or cunning woman. Wise women would have had great power and healing skills to help the community and animals. They would have mediated between the people and the spirits, been midwives and therapists. As Christianity and the state became more powerful, their role in society was inverted, and they became painted as witches, spreading illness, making animals infertile, spoiling milk, stealing, killing, and encouraging unnatural sexual acts.
This subversion of their role has had many consequences, one of which is that we question and query any finds that even suggest that a wise women may have been a healer and physician and may have been found within Anglo-Saxon and Viking Britain doing good work. The victorian archaeologists also had a huge role to play in this as they viewed all their finds through a patriarchal lense, and so only men were considered to have been capable of being physicians. In this way, history and our view of society in the past can be changed. Despite this narrative, many women have an inate knowing that there were medicine women in tribes and families, and they often find that they identify with the witch.
We often look back at the past and wonder how any of this could happen, and yet we see what is slowly happening in America. Christian nationalists, technocrats, and the oligarchy appear to be trying to take us back to this past. The rise in the tradwife who glorifies, on social media, being the perfect stay at home wife and mother pushing this agenda, the increasingly alarming laws that seem to be taking women’s freedoms, body autonomy, and rolling back centuries. From the UK, we watch, amazed, that all this is happening to a supposedly democratic, free country, and yet we worry that that is what is also heading our way. We look back at the history of the witches, and we have been left with the scar of their persecution, every halloween we are reminded that they were ugly women, with warts on their faces and an evil cackle; a warning that women were persecuted for their speech, their views, their disobedience of male society. And we find ourselves wondering if this fate awaits us yet again.
Image: A witch casting spells over a steaming cauldron. Engraving by H.S. Thomassin after Demaretz.
