The Road to Hectors Farm

“The birds are singing and the wind is blowing in your hair as you push aside the clinging bramble shoots and step carefully over the nettles. Bending under the low branches of a sloe tree, you are into the woods. The young leaves of the silver birch are unfolding and under your hand its pale bark is cool and smooth, peeling in places to show its pink lining. there are ferns clumped around its base, and a single primrose plant, its downy buds just showing lemon cream”

Gabrielle Hatfield, Hatfields Herbal – The curious stories of Britain’s wild plants

This is the first paragraph from the book I started to read today and it instantly felt so familiar from any time I’ve gone off the beaten track and stepped into some woodland in the UK. I have always felt that plants hold the key to good health, that a cure for everything we know of on earth is available somewhere around us. The introduction of the book talks about how Gabrielle spoke to many people who described how generations of people before them simply knew that a particular plant was good for treating a particular ailment. Passing their knowledge down between generations. This still lives on today, like knowing that a dock leave will stop a nettle sting from itching. If you grew up in Britain, and I’m sure so many other countries in the world too, you just knew about this ability most likely because your parents or grand-parents would have told you about it. Did you know though that chewing one of the bramble leaves mentioned in the passage above can relieve the pain from toothache? Or that as well as the extract from a Primrose being good for cosmetic skin creams that it is also useful for making an ointment for burns? Think how many other useful remedies have been discovered and lost over the thousands of years simply because they haven’t been passed on over time.

In some ways too, modern medicine has distracted away from the potential for plants to heal us of our ills. Many medicines of course are based on plant science, but are synthesised for mass production or modification to speed up their effects, and who knows what that may do to their overall composition or long term effect. But they are subject to medical trials that ensure their safety I hear you cry? Well what better series of medical trials could you have than the ones which have gone on for centuries before modern medicine existed and all people had to help themselves was the flora and fauna around them? Think how, over the existence of mankind, the trial and error process that has been exercised to come to the finding that a particular plant was good for certain conditions.

There is an effort going on via the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to capture any knowledge that exists about plants and their abilities before any more is lost. If you know about anything that plants have the power to do, visit their site and register your knowledge in their database so your understanding of natures power gets captured for others to use and benefit from.