Melanie’s Herb Diaries

This afternoon, during a rare spell of sunshine, I decided to take a walk around the park. It struck me that to rebuild or rediscover our traditional knowledge base with regard to plants and their uses, the first step should be to get out there and start looking at them. Getting hold of a little guide book on wild flowers and plants from the library, and familiarising yourself with what’s growing in your area can be enlightening! Coming from a corporate background, my identification skills are not yet what they should be, but on a short stroll around part of the park, I found over a dozen plants with traditional medicinal uses, which I’ve listed below. In the age of the internet, many historical reference works with regard to Western Herbal Medicine can be found on line, and one of my favourites, A Modern Herbal, by Mrs. Grieves, first published in 1931, is available online, and is fully searchable. Whether you live in lush countryside or in an urban environment, I bet you can find a plant growing somewhere, perhaps even bursting bravely from a crack between the paving stones, that has a traditional use you didn’t know about, but that your grandparents probably did. Of course, much has changed in terms of medicine since Mrs. Grieves’ Herbal, so you may find references to uses of plants that have now (thankfully) been made obsolete my modern, life-saving interventions and drugs. However, I find that once you’ve had a glimpse of how our ancestors made use of the multitude of plants around them, a walk in the park becomes something altogether more than just a ‘breath of fresh air’, it becomes a mini-journey of discovery..

Plants I spotted on my herb walk today:

Horse chestnut

Speedwell

Wild lettuce

Daisy

Dandelion

Ribwort

Yarrow

Chickweed

Dock

Nettle

Cleavers

Hawthorn

Elder

Red clover

Red dead nettle

Mallow