The well rounded herbal practioner

Whether you're drawn to plant medicine for yourself or a desire to help others, there's far more to it than learning to match plant to the person's needs or identifying and preparing plants from the wild.

You have to be able to think.

It's not a matter of memorizing 'facts' and being able to recall them as needed - that's not thinking, it's what one of my teachers used to call mental regurgitation. What we need is the ability to recognize patterns. Sympathies and antipathies, as Culpeper would say.

We have to be able to visualise and imagine. To conjure up images in our minds, let them grow and explore them.

Plantain (the herb, not the banana)

Plantain (plantago spp.) is the one herb everyone needs to know about, especially kids or people who have them. It's one of the first aid plants that grow under right our noses (well, feet) where and when needed for bug bites & stings, splinters, or skinned knees; pretty much anything untoward that our outside surfaces can come up against, plantain can soothe and heal. Infected cut? Blister? Plantain.

It does the same for our insides, too. Abscess in your mouth? (ouch!) Plantain. Raw sore throat? Stomach ulcer? Plantain.

This ever so useful, ever so weedy herb grows no matter where you are in the world, in one form or another, tropical or arctic-al (is that a word? it is now). Don't try to tell me you don't have plantain, because you do.

Flu and philosophical musings

Today's post is over at my other blog. Feel free to click on over.

Unless you're one of those damned annoying Russian bots. I've had about enough of you guys.

A course in every day miracles

(or, how to get the most out of my ramblings)


Judging by the stats for this blog (if you can believe them) and the emails from readers, we seem to have a few newcomers here.

That's led me to look through older posts on the blog with an eye to what has already been covered, and then back to the stats to see if those posts are being read. They're not, they're buried. So from time to time I think I'll link you back to them. For some of you this will be review, but if there is one thing I have learned it is that review is essential. I still do it, especially in winter, and even though as I read my old text books I can practically recite certain passages by heart, something I have forgotten or perhaps never quite absorbed will pop out at me.

One thing my readers know about my writing is that I tend to go off on tangents. They're useful things, those tangents, so I want you to pay attention to them. But sometimes they lead me astray and there are blanks in the posts that shouldn't be there.

Apples in the snow

There's a post by this title over on my other blog. It's sort of a wildcrafting post, but it's a little woo, too.

If you don't like woo, don't go there.

St John'swort, topically.

Poor St John'swort. Pigeon-holed by the popular press as an 'herbal anti-depressant' (which it's not, really, except when it it is, sorta, although not how you'd think), it has so much more to offer!

Among other things, it's antiviral, it's a liver herb, it's a nerve healer and it's cheering. For so many issues we humans come up against, some small and irritating, some large and life-altering, St J is often the answer.

Here is a case study from the 'large and life altering' category, from someone near and dear to me. Well, not all that near, as she is now living thousands of miles away .. but certainly dear, as she's my sister!

Here's Catherine's story, in her own words ..




"More than three years ago, I was injured in a rather spectacular traffic accident.

I suffered a compound fracture to my right wrist, which in layman’s terms means the bones were sticking through the skin. I had emergency surgery that night and a second one a couple of weeks later.

Part of my radius bone was replaced by what I think looks like a fork.

Foraging for Black Walnuts

Here's a little foraging and garbling tale from Paul, on the finicky business of handling black walnuts.

A few years back a friend from Kentucky gave me some black walnuts from his folks’ farm. I was immediately addicted. I helped him gather some in Ottawa last year, but wanted my own supply. Our little village should have some walnut trees, I reasoned, but had no success locating them, because I was looking for a HUGE tree, like the massive one in an old part of Ottawa we saw last year.