Wednesday 10 January 2018
Cannabis sativa my personal story with this Herb
Wednesday 13 March 2013
Spring Herb Walks and teaching days 2013
21March: on the spring equinox, start the first day of spring learning about herbs.
to start the day,We will sow seeds of medicinal plants, drink tea made from the same plants and discuss their actions, properties. We can often experience the qualities of plants through tasting them, and spending time with them. Getting familiar with plants through growing them from seed, through to maturity, flowering and harvest is a great way to learn about medicinal plants. You will come away with a seed tray of a selection of plants.
In the European tradition of 4 element herbal medicine, spring is the season of childhood and youth, the personality type of Sanguine. So we will focus on herbs to help the sanguine; roman chamomile, valerian, nettle and hawthorn.
We will also make a simple home remedy to take home, using one or more of the herbs we have sown and tasted.
Venue is my home in rodmell where i have my herbal dispensary and where we are building an innovative permaculture garden and forest garden with stunning views of the Ouse valley, lewes and the sea.
Bring a note book and a packed lunch.
11-3pm £35 booking essential
*24 March- Herb Walk
Meet at the Linklater pavilion to explore the medicinal plants growing on the railway Land nature reserve.
The railway land is a fascinating nature reserve as it contains a number of different habitats, right on the edge of town. As you enter there is the post industrial ex railway sidings. The river Winterbourne ends here too pouring its clear light blue waters into the muddy ouse. There are pristine water meadows, and swampy woodland, and we can see it all in the two hours.
Come find garlic mustard, cleavers, nettle, and many other herbs bursting forth with the spring energy.
3-5pm £15
1May Planting and harvesting medicinal plants, making remedies.
Use this day to follow on from the first experiential day in March, equally suitable for beginners too.
Explore the Rodmell food and herb forest, one of the most stunning locations you will find for a garden in Sussex. We will taste, explore and make remedies from a small number of plants, sowing seeds and harvesting.
Spring will be in full flow and the first of May (Beltaine) is a magical time in the calender, and i thought a great day for connecting to the land and learning about herbs.
11-3pm £35 Booking essential
5 May - Herb Walk
Downland medicinal plants, on some of my favourite foraging sites.
The area leading up from the prison up to the old route of the race course, and on towards black cap, is a wonderful area with massive diversity of plants. Partly because it is grazed, and because it is ungrazed and wild. We'll see hypericum, mayflower, vervain, deadly nightshade, and burdock and many others.
Bring a small bag for collecting samples, and a notebook if you want to take notes.
meet at spital Rd by the prison
3-5pm £15
Friday 24 August 2012
Herbal Medicine
Herbal Medicine is integral to the cultural, evolutionary, spiritual and developmental nature of humanity. As well as being the oldest form of medicine in the world it is still today the most widely used form of medicine in the world. Herbal medicine is both a science and an art. It is understood by many means modern and ancient, all have their advantages and limitations. Modern scientific means such as controlled trials, and laboratory research clearly prove the powerful healing effects of plants on the body. For example the link below:
NHS research shows Hypericum as effective as pharmaceuticals for treatment of depression. (see page 12)
Many of todays pharmaceutical drugs are synthesized from plant medicines.
Empirical understanding of herbal medicine such as the traditional use of plants is passed down the generations of practitioners and lay users.
How plants heal is often culturally defined. In the modern western university training of Herbal medicine we use bio-medical science to explain the actions of plants on the body, yet traditional medical systems such as the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic medicine from India have become extremely popular in the West as they help us see an individuals illness in relation to the wider world. We call this holistic medicine and in England we also had such a system until the 18th century. The Greek humoral system explained the actions of herbs based on their energetic actions, and of their balancing the four humours of the body. In clinical practise i find energetic medicine an essential adjunct to understanding modern medical science. Understanding an individual patients pattern of illness is not always explained by a simple medical diagnosis. Each individual will experience illness according to their own constitution and life experiences. Understanding the individual patient is as crucial to healing as understanding the plants and the pathology.
It is the complexity of Herbal remedies that gives them their safe use. I do not use standardised extracts of herbal medicines as they create a a product out of balance with nature, and it is the connecting with nature which i believe gives Herbal medicine its power to heal.
Since i started making my own herbal medicines myself i am more drawn to using local plants. I find that my understanding of a plants uses grows exponentially as i plant seeds, watch the development, harvest and process the plant myself. However i do use plants from around the world when i cannot find a local which gives me the same effect. My training in Chinese medicine has given me a high regard for Chinese tonic herbs. British Medical herbalists also use many North American herbs such as Echinacea, and Black Cohosh, because in the Nineteenth century American herbalists who had learned their skills from Native Americans and Pioneers brought a resurgence of Herbal Medicine back to the UK.
Herbal medicine has always been a world wide trade, as can be shown by exotic herbs found in neolithic burial grounds.
Because of intensive agricultural production and todays commercial pressures it is essential that we can trace our food and herbal medicines to safe sources. I only buy herbs from organic growers or small producers i know personally. I believe my hand made herbal remedies to be as good and usually better than most on the market.
Saturday 9 April 2011
Tuesday 1 March 2011
New course for April - A practical introduction to herbal medicine
Violet harvest 2010,and now they are flowering again
Saturday April 2, 2-4pm and Tuesday evenings 5-26 April 7-9pm, in Lewes, Sussex
The aim of this course is to enable you to feel confident to harvest, make and use herbal medicines for your self, your family and friends. Led by Haskel Adamson a practicing medical herbalist based in Lewes.
"Traditional herbal medicine connects us to with the healing power of the divine through plants that grow around us."
In five sessions we will explore many local plants, each session will combine practical skills in medicine preparation with the theoretical background of herbal medicine.
A booklet will be provided at the first session with information about the topics of all of the sessions
The five sessions will include
1 Herbal identification and harvesting
In this first session we will be out in the field, learning the botanical basics to ensure safe collection of medicinal plants.
We will learn the appropriate time to harvest different parts of plants
Where to harvest plants
How to identify plants with the use of a plant finder
2 Herbal infusions and decoctions April 5, 7-9pm
We taste test a range of herbs
Water extracts of herbs, when to use
Why and to use teas, decoctions or deep decoctions
3 tinctures/ liqueurs April 12, 7-9pm
Tinctures are the preferred form of dispensing herbal medicines for
Western herbalists. Find out why!
We will go through all the stages of producing a tincture from freshly harvested plants. We will learn about concentrations, alcohol strengths, and doses.
4 Infused oils, and topical preparations
Moving onto topical herbal medicine, we will make a few infused oils from freshly harvested plants. These can be used directly on the skin, or in the bath, and will be the basis for our next session on making ointments and creams.
5 Ointments and cream making
Using local beeswax and our infused oils we will make an ointment, the simplest solid skin preparation we can make. Then we will learn a much more complicated procedure of getting oil to mix with water to create light and nourishing creams.
Price £75 (concessions £50) and includes samples of products made, and info sheets on all the sessions
Friday 1 October 2010
Making rosehip syrup with eight year olds from Wallands School
This is the season of berries, bright and alluring to children, but often children are nowadays taught that all wild berries are poisonous. It was good to teach their benefits. I brought some Thyme from my garden, Some Liquorice from my dispensary and after putting the Liquorice on to simmer we went of to collect Rose hips together. This was a fun part of the morning and gave the children real ownership of the finished product. Rose hips were collected in WWII in their tonnes to provide English children with Vitamin C when supplies of oranges couldn't get here. They contain the highest concentration of Vit. C of any (certainly indigenous) fruit.
I think that its really important that children are taught sometimes by non teachers as i don't have to conform to any "standard practices " or education agendas. We took the hips back to the camp kitchen and i smashed the hips up in a tea towel between rocks before putting them into the Liquorice brew. They had 15 minutes simmering gently and the Thyme went in for the last five minutes of this. The whole brew was poured into a muslin bag and pressed through the press you can see. Though not strictly necessary, i thought the children would like to use some machinery, and the press added to the theatre of the event. Everyone had a spin of the press, and the resulting decoction was returned to the clean pan and sugar added. Three kilos of sugar added to 2 Litres of decoction. Yes its a lot of sugar, some people use a ratio of 1:1, some 2:1 sugar:liquid, mine was in between. I didn't want their syrups to go mouldy. When the sugar had melted the syrup was poured into sterilised bottles , labelled by the children, so they could take it home. A certificate of excellence in potion making was awarded to each child.
Wednesday 7 July 2010
Herb walk around central Lewes town
I led my fourth herb walk of the summer today. We met at the castle gate in the middle of Lewes, and ambled around the lanes, and alleyways of the medieval town. It was so good to be in the centre of Town, yet to be away from cars, and taking the slow route around town. We first came across Pellitory of the Wall, growing out of the Castle wall. This herb in the same family as Nettle is used for conditions relating to gravel and stone in the urinary tracts. It action is cooling, diuretic (increasing flow of urine), and demulcent (soothing to the tissues of urinary tract. For such complaints it it used more often than any other herb.
Next we came across a cultivated wonderful scented Damask Rose growing above the wall of the bowling green. The bowling green was the old jousting area of the castle grounds and the archery practise area. The bowling club is still a male bastion, only the sport is now a sedate one, though i believe the mortality rate of the sport is as high as jousting. The rose, fragrant and a symbol of summers joy, lifts the heart and raises our spirits. Rose is considered cooling in fevers, and an action in common with all its relatives in the rose family is that it is astringent, drawing in tissues.Its essential oils lift the spirits and it is used as a nervine, to soothe the furrowed brow. Rose hips are used as a soothing syrup for chest infections , also being high in vitamin C and the flavonoids that make vit. C easily absorbed by the body.
Fifty yards on we came across four Lime trees Tilia cordata shading the view north over the Sussex Weald. One tree was still in blossom, past its full fragrance when its perfume fills the neighbourhood. The flowers are revered in France as a tea 'Tilleul', a relaxing digestive remedy, it is wonderfully relaxing to drink,and was used as a relaxing diaphoretic, to promote sweating in a fever and therefore reduce the body's temperature. This century experiements have found the plant able to reduce blood cholesterol, lower blood pressure through relaxing the blood vessel walls. Its wood is the finest for carving, and the inner bark can be woven into a coarse rope or binding.
Walking down the alleyway down to the Paddock we found Elderflowers Sambucus nigra mixing their scent with that of the mock orange. The children in our party tasted a petal of the mock orange, and they were quite delicious.
Elderflowers as well as all parts of the Elder tree are widely used in Herbal medicine. A classic combination for the common cold or early stages of flu being Yarrow , elderflower and peppermint. Drunk as an infusion regularly and often . Elderflower is astringent to the mucous membranes of the upper respiratory tract, reducing the inflammation that occurs in a cold and drying the overproduction of cattargh. For this same reason i use it in hayfever. They have a history of use in bronchial disease, and in eruptive fevers such as measles and scarlet fever. Externally an ointment was used for wounds, burns and scalds, chill blains and used for horses wounds in WW1. Distilled elderflower water was a common cosmetic for sunburn and freckles and generally toning the skin.
On the summer solstice up on Firle beacon a came was passed around at dawn which had elder flower stalks lining the base of the sponge, really fragrant as the essential oils released by the baking get trapped within the cake.
We saw Greater Celandine, in the poppy family, its bitter alkaloids are strongly acting on the liver, stimulating this organ to break down chemicals , its used only by practising herbalists, and used in many gall bladder and hepatic conditions.
On the left of the Paddocks entrance gate we found Lily of the valley, Convallaria majalis These tiny flowers are heady scenters , and were traditionally carried by brides and set upon the wedding table. To be collected and given to your true love every spring. In Sussex we have the best wild spread in the country. Medicinally they are also restricted to use by Medical herbalists only. They contain cardiac glycosides with a direct action on heart , and a diuretic with an action sililar to Digoxin, the commonly prescribed drug synthesized from Foxglove Digitalis . It slows the heart beat whilst making the beat more effective , thus pumping more blood. It is also easier to prescribe than Digitalis which is liable to accumulate in the body with poisonous effects.
Calendula officinalis pot marigold is used for as a healing herb topically for cuts , scrapes etc, in creams and ointments, and also for spots and swellings when the 90 % alc tincture applied neat is really effective. Its the resins used within the petals that require an oil base or such a high % of alcohol.
We saw the oriental opium poppy still the most effective pain reliever in the world In Victorian England it was used to power the industrial revolution as 'mothers little helper', sold in corner shops to soothe small children whose parents were out working for long hours.
We also and talked about nettle, yellow dock, Plaintain, Artichoke, Borage and bitter chickory,
but i've run out of time to talk about these now. Try making tea out if them and see what happens.