Gardening is my hobby. I love to see veggies from my own garden arranged on my dinner plate. But, I think I came to Earth to be an herbalist. An humble herbalist of course!
Here I am gathering berries from the nearby hawthorn tree. This is something I do every year in fall and in spring collect the flowers. If I didn't have access to a hawthorn tree I am sure I would have found some other heart-healing herb in the local ecosystem. Because - in my opinion - it is the use of local herbs that makes herbalism sustainable.
It is so nice to see herbalism gaining popularity in the industrialized world where it was for a few decades replaced by pharmaceuticals. But, with the inclusion of herbs in social media also grows an unhealthy aspect of our instinct to gather:
instead of just being happy with a few herbs with many uses, a lot of new herbalist want to master all the herbs.
And that is just not the way of herbalism. At least, not to me. Herbalism is meant to be popular in the sense the herbs are the people's medicine. Extreme illnesses may be remedied by exotic herbs ... maybe. But, most ailments can and should be aided by the use of common herbs that grow nearby.
That is why I find incorporating the garden in with the wild plants of the forest to be my specific path of herbalism. I love to bring herbs that I find in the creek & forest home to grow outside my kitchen window. And also there is some specific wild medicine that is only found in the trees that grow in the forest, and have always grown in the forest without human intervention.
At the moment I am happy to say that my computer is fixed and I am currently working on a video all about the Hawthorn tree and these bright red berries that grow on their branches. Stay tuned for that!!
