In 1893, if you walked into a high street chemist with a sluggish liver, dull skin, or “habitual melancholia,” you wouldn’t be handed a prescription.

In late September, driving almost anywhere in rural England, you will see them. Little red-orange globes, strung along the hedgerows like something a child might

Somewhere in a monastic physic garden, one of those austere, purposeful plots that the Benedictines tended across medieval Britain, there was almost certainly a stand

There is a moment, standing in a kitchen with seven jars of dried herbs lined up like a small congregation, when a tea blend stops

Walk into any health food shop in Britain today and you will find it. Usually on a shelf at eye level. Sometimes in a sleek

There is a plant growing on hedgebanks and field margins throughout Britain right now that the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton called an “all-heal.” It rises

Pick a leaf of lemon balm and crush it gently between your fingers. The scent that rises is immediate and disarming: clean, bright, unmistakably citrus,

There is a moment, early on a damp British morning, when you almost can’t believe what you are seeing. In the border of almost every

There is a bottle of something sharp and green sitting at the back of an apothecary shelf in a house somewhere in rural England. It

Somewhere in almost every British lawn there is a plant that most people mow without noticing. It is small and creeping and does not present

Somewhere in the late seventeenth century, an Indigenous elder in what is now New England looked at the ground near a recently settled European homestead

Here is the puzzle. Yarrow stops bleeding. Press a poultice of fresh leaf onto a wound and the bleeding slows, sometimes within minutes, a fact