Making an Herb Garden for Health
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
If you’ve been considering planting a few herbs for their medicinal value, then you’re entering into a very interesting, and long, historical tradition. Knowledge of plants is something that all traditional societies have in common. Herb gardens, then, go back thousands and thousands of years. However, not all traditional societies have the same meanings and uses for every herb, so beginning a garden like this should necessarily begin by making some essential decisions about which traditions are being embraced. Beginning the garden is the first of many positive health decisions, and that’s a very good base for building something that will last.
While some of the more common uses for peppermint are for breath freshener, or for breathing, the herb can also be used for attracting or keeping a lover.
An herb like lavender will be found in many places, but its uses can vary greatly over time and place. It’s a good idea, then, to decide what bodies of knowledge to draw from, and this doesn’t have to be from their mainstream associations, because these will change over time as well. There are many strands of alternative healing traditions that will trace the beginning of herbalism to the apothecary. These merchants had the role of distributing plants and herbs. They generally had this ability because they could purchase or trade in bulk, and also because they gradually developed some knowledge about how the plants worked.
This occupation is traceable to the 12th century in England, but in truth it does go back much further. The apothecary was, however, the beginning of an organized effort to turn the work into a real vocation. Nearly every civilization and culture has a word for the local healers, and the names are very often references to their unusually astute abilities with plants. In centuries past, then, the healers would be in the process of collecting information from oral transmission of knowledge from the other locals, and from observing nature. Today, we can acquire knowledge in a myriad of forms, and health videos can certainly take a similar role to that of oral tradition. But observation of nature is still key to everything that’s related to herbs and plants with healing properties. Research, then, is essential, but the heart of the work will come when your hands are in the soil, and you start watching how things grow. That’s a method that is very old, and will never go out of style.
