Late one Sunday morning in the fullness of spring, 21 plant enthusiasts and a dog named Star gathered by the garden shed at Sugar Creek in the Oakhurst neighborhood of Decatur, Georgia. We were there for a “plant ramble,” a kind of educational group hike that covered basic plant identification and usage.
Star the dog belonged to Emily Brabeck, Sugar Creek’s site coordinator and our herbal tour guide. We began with comfrey, a tall herb with scaly leaves that stick to your fingers but make an effective poultice for healing bruises and wounds. Then yarrow, skullcap, mullein, boneset, and feverfew. Wild stinging nettle and lance leaf plantain grew in the adjacent field. Brabeck led us through the rows of herbs and passed around cuttings. “We never want to harvest everything,” she said while passing around a leaf from a milkweed plant, a favored habitat for butterflies. “There are insects and critters that will make use of it.”
Sugar Creek, once a useless floodplain between backyards, is now a gardener’s paradise. In 2010, the Wylde Center took over the space and converted it into a wild fruit tree orchard, compost center, beekeeping area and medicinal garden. The garden grows medicine-making materials for Herbalista, a health network that provides pay-what-you-can herbal education and free, mobile clinics to the Atlanta-area community. They also host these plant rambles.
Some of the group dressed in typical hiking or gardening garb, complete with wide-brim hats, while a smaller faction wore tie-dyed hippie scarves and tree of life masks. I felt a little over-dressed in green canvas joggers, a racerback tank, and an army overshirt (I expected more foraging), but I didn’t get sunburned or bug-bit.
After a year spent indoors in an apartment with little natural light, walking through a garden and touching plants felt medicinal in its own right. I pressed a few cuttings between pages of my notebook—a bit of aromatherapy to ease future writer’s block. I used to hide herbs in my favorite novels, so that when I re-read them, a year or more later, I would find a surprise.
Becky Beyer, who has been a practicing hedgewitch since she was 12, told me that, once you get to know them, the plants around you feel like thousands of friends. (Beyer describes her practice as “the art of using the plants that grow on the borders, on the edges, in the hedges—and using the spiritual practices that come up from the between places.”) The plants in my garden have been my friends for as long as I can remember. I played with dolls only when my younger sister guilted me into it. If I had my way, we went outside and became rulers of a realm I called Aria. I had the plants play the villain to my hero; I, fairy queen Rio Samba (after my mother’s favorite rose), vanquished the evil Yarrow and Milkweed. I didn’t hold anything against those plants. The names just sounded witchy enough to hold magic. I enlisted the cats as warriors but, in the face of such power, they often deserted. So, I would make potions to imprison my anthropomorphized criminals. I didn’t realize the weeds at the edges of my mother’s garden had practical, medicinal uses. I didn’t realize when I rubbed aloe on a cut or ate a mint leaf that I was practicing herbalism.
Though my parents both have medical degrees, herbal remedies were not something I knew about growing up, unless you count green tea with lemon and honey for a sore throat. Medicine was made in a lab and distributed by professionals. They, being professionals, had plenty of access to it. My father sent me to college with a pouch full of just-in-case medicine. But now, a prescription requires a trip to urgent care or the doctor’s office and—as a self-employed freelancer with a high-deductible, low-coverage plan—I avoid those at all costs.
Instead, I supplement. I exercise a few times a week, I make my own flexitarian meals, I use a CBD and arnica cream for my chronic shoulder tension and, every now and then, I add a dropperful of a tincture blend called “Immunity Now” to a glass of water. I flirted with essential oils for a year, but my skin is too sensitive for most fragrance. I have a jar of activated charcoal at the back of my spice cabinet to help with hangovers. That might be the closest I’ve come to participating in a major wellness trend.
Wellness, in its modern context, is exhausting. There is no end to what you can spend on a calmer, thinner, more efficient, better version of yourself. This act of navel-gazing, once rooted in the radical feminist idea that making space for the female body mattered, has morphed into a $4.5 billion industry. It has become a holy-grail-like quest that is never finished, which is what makes it so addictive for the ones (mainly women) who, quite literally, buy into it. The industry includes such disparate (and sometimes dubious) therapies as crystals, energy healing, juice cleansing and yoni eggs. A pack of Ayurvedic-based vitamins called “Why Am I So Effing Tired?” from Goop costs $90/month. I think I’ll take the burnout.
Of course, people have been supplementing their health for far longer than the modern wellness industry has existed. Before most people had access to a doctor, communities relied on village herbalists, known in Southeast Appalachia as granny women, for folk medicine. Some herbalists, like Beyer, bring ritualistic aspects to their healing, but it doesn’t have to be a codified or spiritualistic practice. At its most basic, herbalism is nothing more than using plants for their healing properties, whether that’s drinking ginger ale to soothe a queasy stomach or making your own medicinal tinctures.
Phyllis D. Light, a fourth-generation practitioner of southern folk medicine, grew up gathering herbs for her family’s livelihood. Folk healing, Light said, was such a part of everyday life in the rural South that, until about 20 years ago, the rest of the U.S. didn’t know it existed. When Light went to her first herbal conference and introduced herself as a southern folk herbalist, she was told there weren’t any.
Light defined southern folk medicine as “a combination of Native American plant uses, European conventional medicine of the time, European folk medicine of the time, African healing methods—everyone who was there when this area was settled and before it was settled.” Cultural practices converged so the practitioners could survive. Light added, “It was an integration of necessity, you know?”
A granny woman’s remedies were not about achieving perfect human health or some elusive state of “wellness.” They were essential to collective survival. She took care of her community and it, in turn, took care of her. Medicine was free or in exchange for room and board. Wellness was the by-product.
This type of accessible community healthcare, based on mutual aid, is a model herbalist and medicine maker Lorna Mauney-Brodek wants to bring back. She founded Herbalista in response to how elite and privileged much of the industry had become.
Herbalista HQ, also known as Mauney-Brodek’s home, is east of the city in the forested hills of Skyhaven. A small herb garden, made up of two rectangular box planters and a hand-built herb-drying hut, sits down the hill from the house next to a stream and a culvert. The motherwort is taller than an average person.
The day I visited, Mauney-Brodeck was out of town, traveling to Herbalista’s sister operation in Dublin, Ireland. Mary-Lies Van Asten and Sam Cramer, manager and project coordinator, respectively, of Herbalista’s Atlanta operations, sat on the floor restocking plastic totes with remedies made in-house. The space was more apothecary than home. Herbs were everywhere: dried for making tea, infused into salves and oils, distilled into tinctures.
After I removed my shoes, Cramer invited me into the kitchen for a cup of tea. (“I wouldn’t be a good herbalist if I didn’t offer you tea,” she said.) I selected a peppermint blend from what looked like an old cigar box wrapped in bright green velvet. While the water came to boil, I inspected the pantry shelves. Elderberry fire cider and sleep tonics nestled next to more ordinary finds like oats and a bottle of angostura bitters. To the Herbalistas, this co-mingling is natural.
“We’ve been consuming herbs regularly as long as we’ve been cooking, and probably even before that,” Cramer said. “Reclaiming that as a part of healing is really important.”
Part of Herbalista’s clinic work is teaching underserved communities with little or no access to conventional medicine how to use food and herbs as remedies. Cramer explained that while products labelled as supplements can’t be bought on EBT, or food stamps, medicinal plants labelled with nutrition facts can.
Herbalista’s free clinic currently operates once a month in partnership with Mercy Community Church. Together with the church, they provide free showers, food, acupuncture and medicine to Atlanta’s unhoused and impoverished. Herbalista also works with the Harriet Tubman Footcare Clinic, which provides free herbal soaks and foot care twice a month to people experiencing homelessness. That kind of intimate attention and care is not something this population receives anywhere else.
The clinics are about more than access to medicine. Van Asten said a large part of their work is “taking the time to sit with [clients] and connect with them and seeing them as human beings.” They focus on building relationships with communities that are often shunned and ignored.
This attention to whole-person health is what differentiates herbal medicine from conventional medicine for Light as well. Her client visits are about empowering people with information, rather than prescribing or diagnosing. “Visits will be one hour minimum, maybe two,” she said, “versus at a doctor’s office, you might get seven minutes.” Often, Light’s patients haven’t tried herbal remedies before. They find her because they have chronic health issues that prescription medication hasn’t helped.
In preventing disease and managing chronic issues, “herbalism really gets to the cause,” said Light. “It’s more supportive of the body, and if the body is supported, it can heal.” Conventional medicine, on the other hand, takes a treatment approach, usually addressing symptoms rather than root causes.
Perhaps, in part, because of our treatment-based healthcare model, the leading causes of death in the U.S. are heart disease and cancer—chronic issues caused by long-term behavior (read: lack of access to healthy habits) and stress. Within this system, preventative healthcare is a luxury. Most of us only go to the doctor when something is wrong. And, despite the abundance of wellness products, most Americans are not well.
The demand for “alternative” and preventative treatment skyrocketed in the spring of 2020, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Most non-emergency medical resources closed. Those with non-life-threatening conditions were told to stay home, to not overcrowd the hospitals. Regular healthcare was largely inaccessible.
Light has seen much more interest in both her healthcare services and her classes at the Appalachian Center for Natural Health in the past year. The pandemic, she said, was the first time in many peoples’ memory that doctors turned patients away— “All people had were home remedies.”
The women at Herbalista told me many people may have turned to herbalism this year in search of agency. “So much about the western medical system is that your health is managed by an expert,” said Cramer. “You aren’t allowed—as a person—to understand your body. In this world where we’re taught we have no control, coming home and making a tea can really feel good, you know?”
While the pandemic limited Herbalista’s clinic opportunities, they focused on growing more of their own herbal supply and expanding educational programming. Herbalista used to reserve their plant walks for summer, when many herbs would be in bloom and, therefore, at their most recognizable. Over the past year, though, the demand was so high that they started organizing the rambles year-round. Van Asten said some may have simply wanted a safe outdoor activity, while others found knowledge of “what’s growing around them and how they can use it” more desirable that it had been.
We’ve all been forced to focus a little more on what’s in our own back yards — or, when it comes to healthcare, what we can do in our own kitchens. For an herbalist, attention to what’s going on around you, both in the garden and in the neighborhood, is essential. It’s a kind of magic to do something for your community’s well-being when health can so often feel out of our control — or even out of reach. No one I spoke with would say that herbalism could replace our current medical system. Instead, the education these women provide is to teach people how to be attentive to their own bodies, even when nothing is hurt or sick. That, after all, is the core of self-care.