Blog Resources
Our resources promote public and educational awareness in using our heritage of medicinal plants to enhance health, prevent disease, and provide safe medicine.
Plant-based medicine to complement pharmaceutical medicine in modern healthcare is not a return to outdated traditions, but is the vanguard of evidence based advancements, grounded in historical use, and backed by science and clinical research.
Scientific research increasing validates the essential role medicinal plants play in human health and the planet’s health, and across four main areas. Medicinal plants:
- Act as powerful disease preventative agents, supporting cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, immunological and mental health throughout life.
- Treat many common conditions such as skin and digestive disorders, and insomnia, anxiety, depression and memory loss with few, if any, side-effects.
- Provide a key source of new and essential medical drug discovery today.
- Are part of a long historical relationship with humans, a partnership that improves both the health of humans and improves the biodiversity of the planet’s flora and fauna.
Explore how reclaiming a lost heritage and bringing medicinal plants back into your life, diet and medicine cabinet, can enhance your health on many levels.
Our growing collection of blog resources offers expert information, practical tools and guidance to help you discover the benefits of medicinal plants for you and the planet, responsibly and effectively. Before reading the blogs, learn more about our overall approach rooted in scientific research.
Check back often for new posts and updates!
Hawthorn’s Secrets: From Ancient Remedy to Modern Science
Hawthorn is definitely more than a pretty tree with awesome spring blossoms – it is a remarkable plant with a rich history, powerful use as a medicine, and an important role in the natural world…
Plant Power: The Original Pharmacologists
Some of our most important discoveries about how the brain works were made thanks to plants. Long before high-tech labs and brain scans, nature had already packed the answers into leaves, roots, resins and flowers. Many of today’s medicines, and even entire systems of pharmacology, owe their existence to humble, but sometimes highly potent, medicinal plants.
First Harvest Cultivating Memory, Connection and Care
We’re excited to share some moments from our first big harvest of the season, where we gathered key plants used in our medicinal tea blends and tinctures. This week’s harvest
Don’t Forget This: How to Keep Your Brain and Memory Strong with Age
Dementia Action Week is a national awareness campaign led by the Alzheimer’s Society, bringing individuals and organisations together to take action on dementia. Here we look at the known risk factors that influence brain health as we age and increase our risk of developing Alzheimer’s. We look at the preventative plant medicine, and the plant pharmaceuticals, that can work powerfully to decrease these risk factors, and treat the memory loss and associated symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
Overall Approach and Responsible Use
Our Blogs Provide
Easy-to-Follow Guides and Recipes: Learn how to incorporate medicinal plants into your daily routine.
Support for Key Areas of Health: Explore ways to improve immune, digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, brain, and skin health.
Solutions for Modern Challenges: Find plant-based approaches to managing anxiety, depression, insomnia, and cognitive decline.
Sustainable Practices: Learn to grow, source, and prepare plant medicine in ways that respect both your health and the environment. Increasing wild green spaces (which naturally contain native medicinal plants) provides a place for wellbeing in the community, and is essential to restoring biodiversity, especially in the UK, one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
Health, Prevention, and Safer Treatments
Incorporating a diverse range of medicinal plants into our diets and lives can:
Improve Physical and Mental Health: Medicinal plants not only support health and help address causes of many chronic conditions, they also enhance our life and overall wellness.
Help Prevent Chronic Disease: Edible medicinal plants – including herbs, spices and a range of fruit and vegetables, contain vital phytochemicals that help reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes and cognitive decline, and that are immune supporting, anticancer, antibiotic, antiviral and antifungal.
Provide Safer Treatments: When used correctly – the correct plant medicine and at the correct therapeutic level for the condtion, plant medicine can effectively treat a range of common conditions, often with fewer adverse effects (such as addiction risk) compared to single agent pharmaceuticals for the same condition.
Responsible Use is Essential
While medicinal plants are powerful allies for health, proper use is crucial:
Consult Experts: Speak with a NIMH medical herbalist or healthcare professional before using medicinal plants for children, during pregnancy, or if you have a medical condition, allergy or take medications.
Never Stop prescribed medications without professional advice.
Choose Reputable Sources: Always source plant products and supplements from trusted suppliers -from companies that list their full ingredients, prepare products correctly to standards.
Do not buy or harvest endangered species.
Transforming Health with Medicinal Plants
Our evidence is grounded in scientific research, combined with an understanding of the unique benefits of each plant. By reconnecting with the natural world, and our forgotten knowledge of using the medicinal plants around us, using science as the bridge, we rediscover how plants enable people to thrive.
Only Way Forward: If we start teaching medicinal plant use, nutrition, and health and wellbeing awareness alongside core subjects like maths and English now, we could transform our nation’s health within a generation—removing the strain on the NHS by addressing its challenges, like an ageing population and a rise of long-term illnesses.
Is it possible to imagine a time when humans can be more self-sustaining, and our healthcare systems primarily address unavoidable illnesses supported by adequate medical resources?
