Bioregional Herbalism
One of the things I love about being a herbalist is the variety of my work. My day may be spent with clients, taking histories and assessing issues. It may be spent in a deep dive into academic literature, as there is always more to learn and new research to keep up with. And it is often, especially in the growing season, spent outside, planting and tending to my herb gardens, or foraging for wild herbs in woods and meadows. Then there is the slow process of drying herbs for teas, making tinctures, salves, and other plant-based medicines.
I have made a point in both my clinical practice and my teaching to focus on what is called bioregional herbalism, or in other words, using the plants that grow in the area I live in. There are several reasons for this, but before I get into them, let’s confront a bias many of us hold. There is a tendency for human beings the world over to value the rare and the exotic. Consider how the Goji berry is lauded and the humble blueberry is overlooked.
Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa
It is just the same with herbs. The virtues of exotic plants from far away places are extolled while their cousins that grow at our feet are often ignored. But those familiar and ordinary plants can – and do – provide as much medicinal benefit as their famous counterparts. For me, there are some benefits that bioregional plants provide that exotics can not.
The first of these is freshness. Consider the time it takes to harvest and process a plant, package it, deliver it to a warehouse to await export, then ship it to another warehouse in another country to await distribution to stores. This process can take months, and all the while the medicinal qualities of herbs are slowly deteriorating. Most tender plant material such as leaves and flowers have a useful medicinal life span of about a year. Those herbs from far away may have spent almost that amount of time just getting to a store.
The plants I grow or gather from the wild are turned into tinctures and salves within hours of harvesting and are full to bursting with nutrients and medicinal phytochemicals. Plants that I dry to use for teas are ready to fill our clinic shelves within a few days and retain far more of their medicinal qualities than their exotic cousins. All of this translates to better quality products for my clients.
Secondly is the cost benefit. If you grow herbs yourself, the cost is as little as a package of seeds – less if you remembered to save seeds from last year’s plants. If you pick wild plants, whether from your lawn or a meadow, the cost is only your time and energy. As a herbalist, growing or foraging for the majority of the plants I use means that I can keep remedies affordable for my clients. One of the things I adore being able to do is to point out the medicinal plants growing in my clients gardens – the weedy patch of nettles by the barn, the plantain in the lawn, the chickweed in the veggie patch – all of these are wonderful medicinal herbs and completely free!
Stinging Nettle, Urtica dioica
And thirdly, is the ecological footprint. Herbs from far away places are often transported to multiple places before they arrive at their final destination. Farm machinery, trucks, ships and planes might be involved, all of which use energy and fuel, creating a far larger ecological footprint than locally sourced herbs. The fresh herbs you buy at a farmer’s market have most likely been gathered by hand and driven directly from the grower to the market, creating a smaller footprint than exotic herbs. The only energy required to pick herbs from your garden is your own, and the only footprints created are the ones you leave in the grass.
There are of course some plants that simply do not grow in our climate – how I would love a grove of orange or lemon trees – but so many useful herbs do, and by choosing to use them we not only benefit ourselves but the planet as well.
