The Practical Herbalist

. . . but do I listen?

For years, my front and back yards have been infested with what I called “prickers.”

I hated them.

For various reasons (and diagnoses), I have trouble staying on top of house and yard tasks, and also anxiety, and I had this obnoxious weed that just WOULD NOT STOP.

Although it looked pretty for a while with these lovely light purple flowers, it spent the whole second half of summer and all fall covered in painful spiky little burrs that hurt my fingers to remove from clothing and dogs and, well, my skin.

So I figured out what it looked like as sprouts in the early spring and started pulling them by the roots everywhere I saw them. I would grit my teeth through my commonly-experienced heart palpitations and keep at it, knowing that moving around just made them worse. But I wanted them GONE.

And yet they multiplied.

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Then I read Braiding Sweetgrass, which I recommend, and somewhere in it Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about how the earth was trying to give us medicine.

And I thought: huh. I wonder what medicine the earth is trying to give me?

I’ve always used the folk remedies I learned at my mamma’s knee and discovered later in various ways, but I haven’t paid much attention to what might be growing as ‘weeds’ right under my nose.

So I used my plant identifying app and it told me that the plant was called motherwort, a native of China but growing all over the damn place.

When I google it, I discovered that people have been using it for at least hundreds of years for heart palpitations, anxiety, and perimenopausal symptoms.*

bwaaaaahahahahahaha.

Anyway that’s part of how I started to really look at my inner-city surroundings not only for wild edibles like sheep sorrel and lambs quarter but also for medicine.

And, thanks to some research and even a bit of formal education, I’m learning more and more about the herbal and folk remedies I’ve always used and adding on to that knowledge.

Especially since literal nazis will soon be running all three branches of our government, we need to share our knowledge and skills with each other as much as possible to survive (and maybe even thrive?) in community.

This is what I’ve got to offer.

So here we are. Let’s go.

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_{* As for many, many herbal folk remedies, there is some but very limited clinical research to support this; more on that in another post.}