Last Sunday, I spent the day with some amazing plants. It was my first session of the From the Roots Up Bioregional Herbalism fall class series taught by Jade Alicandro Mace.
Class was held at a farm, but we weren’t working with cultivated herbs. We made medicine with three powerful plants that are typically considered weeds and were growing prolifically along the farm paths and oft-mown field meadows: self-heal, plantain, and goldenrod.
I was familiar with plantain (see photo further down), which grows everywhere in my yard and I have successfully used to treat splinters and bee stings. (We’re talking plantago major here, a leafy plant with tall skinny flower stalks, not the tropical starchy fruit related to bananas.)
I’ll admit I raised an eyebrow at the mention of ever-abundant goldenrod. Goldenrod? Seriously? Doesn’t it make everybody sneeze? Could it really be medicine?
But heal-all, the first herb we worked with, was completely new to me.
Prunella vulgaris is a non-aromatic herb in the mint family, and just listening to Jade list its various names gave me a little thrill of inspiration: heal-all, self- heal, heart-of-the-earth. Heal all? This was some powerful language that had been held for generations. I was excited to meet this plant.
There were two sections to the farm, and to reach the heal-all in the far fields we followed a winding path through a ferny wood, which made our botanical treasure hunt all the more magical.
As we moved into the meadow field and sat together in the grass, I got my first good look at this unassuming little plant which was sending up its intricately beautiful tiny purple flowers in vigorous clumps across the green field.
After an introduction from Jade on the plant’s structure and identifying factors, we broke up to wander through the fields and find our own personal patch of heal-all to sit with. After a bit of meandering, I found mine, through no special technique, and it felt good to realize I knew intuitively just where to settle down.
We were allotted about twenty minutes to sit with the plant, spend time getting to know it, ask its permission to harvest from it, and then collect a few flowers for the essence we were making.
I love sitting with flowers in my garden as I do with old friends, and I’ve often blissed out staring at unknown wild blooms while on a hike. I’ve always loved spending time with plants, and this moment felt comfortingly familiar, yet also new and incredibly sacred.
Sitting in my patch, I spoke softly to the flowers and introduced myself. I sat with them a while in silence. I asked if they wanted to tell me anything, listened, and recorded a few words in my journal.
I sat some more, gently stroking the plant and examining its incredibly intricate flower structure. Each tiny flower within the larger cluster looked like a perfect miniature bearded iris. I felt a spontaneous call to give the plant song, so I started to hum.
No particular song, just the low, natural vibrations of my voice, sharing in the vibration of the plants. I could feel my body downshifting, time slowing down. My nervous system relaxed into the earth.
After a time, when I felt I had the plant’s full permission, I harvested four flowers by hand. This felt like the right number to me, and I placed them gently to float on top of the thin layer of water Jade had poured into my half pint mason jar. I placed the jar at the based of the plant, left the lid off and thanked the plant again for sharing its essence with me.
It started to rain at this point, which had not been forecasted, but was sorely needed. Jade called us back to home base by ringing a large melodious bell. I loved it that not a single person hurried through the rain.
In the afternoon when things had dried off, we harvested plantain leaves to infuse in oil for topical use and goldenrod flowers to make a honey.
(So here’s the scoop: turns out it’s NOT goldenrod that makes everyone sneeze. Goldenrod isn’t even a wind dispersing plant. It’s actually the lower profile and less flashy ragweed that comes on at the same time as goldenrod that irritates allergies. But since goldenrod is tall and bright and highly noticeable during sneezy season, it somehow earned this erroneously bad wrap. It’s actually quite valuable medicine against the symptoms of seasonal allergies).
For each of these simple herbal preparations, we learned about the plant’s qualities and healing benefits (while sitting among it), took some time to build our own personal relationship with the plant, and then leisurely collected what we needed for our medicine, taking a bit from here and a bit from there, just as a native pollinator or grazer would.
At the end of the day, we collected our heal-all flower essence jars to take home and preserve, and I carried mine with a special reverence through the woods. I’ll admit, I allowed myself a moment of pretending I was an elf in The Lord of the Rings, walking slowly and peacefully through the forest with my kin, clutching my tiny jar of sacred flower water in front of me.
By some standards our flower essences were “ruined” and tainted by the rain. Fortunately, Jade’s folk medicine sensibilities allow for such deviations, and we all agreed the power of drought rain would infuse our medicine with a special feminine creative force.
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I didn’t look at my phone all day. I moved slowly and quietly, and didn’t keep track of what time it was. It felt good and grounding to be part of this calm and merry little band of actual serious humans who also wanted to spend their whole day making friends with plants.
The time we spent together felt special and important. Because it was different.
I felt more present and still than I had in ages. I didn’t think about any of the things I usually obsess about. Moving at the speed of plants for those few hours was deep medicine in itself.
I’m an avid gardener, cook, and plant enthusiast. Ask the people in my circle and they’ll all probably tell you I’m the plantiest person they know.
And yet as I explore the world of traditional medicinal herbs, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of the power nature has to offer. I’m at the edge of a whole new world, a sacred and ancient world, that has been right in front of me the whole time.
At the end of the day, I was tired, a really good kind of tired. My nervous system had downshifted several notches without me actively trying to do anything. It brought home deeply to me that the natural world is the ultimate regulator, and all of our human relaxation techniques, however valuable, cannot replace the basic, primal comfort that comes from being close to the earth.
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More to come on the specifics of my herbal remedies and how I’m using them in support of my nervous system and overall health! Thanks for reading!
Sounds like a very special day for you! What a blessing to have this joyful quiet time! I knew that goldenrod was not the culprit sneeze maker! Good to tell others. You have very Helpful and interesting information written in a melody of beautiful words! TY for sharing your day! 💐🌾🌻