The Herbal Medicine Encyclopedia

A Word Before We Begin

There is a particular kind of knowledge that does not live in universities or laboratories, but rather in the cracked spines of old recipe books, in the memory of a grandmother's hands moving surely over a bundle of dried lavender, in the faint sweet smell of a simmering pot on a winter afternoon — and it is precisely this knowledge that I have spent the better part of my long life gathering, honouring, and now, with tremendous gratitude and a full heart, setting down for you in these pages. I grew up in a Cotswold cottage where the garden was as much a medicine chest as it was a place of beauty, where yarrow was pressed to a child's grazed knee before supper, where a cup of elderflower cordial was considered quite as restorative as any chemist's remedy, and where my mother and her mother before her moved through the seasons with an intimate, unhurried understanding of what the earth freely offers to those who pay attention. This encyclopedia is the result of decades of study, of quiet experiment, of conversations with herbalists and healers whose names deserve to be remembered, and above all, of a deep and abiding faith in the gentle, persistent power of plants — not as a replacement for modern medicine, where it is needed and necessary, but as a companion wisdom, a softer, older way of tending to ourselves and those we love, one that I believe we should take very great care never to lose.

— Agnes