Plant Medicine is as old as mankind. Human beings have used the plants around them for medicinal and healing purposes back to the beginnings of tribal shamanism.
Plants are mystical beings with the intelligence of the cosmos in their cells. We have a profound symbiotic relationship with plants. They have the ability to charm, nourish, intoxicate and heal us with their varied and individual properties. Plants in all their myriad forms communicate with us through our senses, and through other, more mysterious means, telling us about their attributes and functions.
They are adaptable, complex and alchemical.
Various herbs, plants, grasses, weeds, roots, flowers and fungi have hermetic healing properties when used to restore balance to our bodies when we are ill.
Modern pharmaceutical medicine has its roots in ethnobotany.
Ethnobotany, a term coined in 1895 by U.S. botanist John Harshberger, is the study of the multifaceted relationship between people and the plants around them. Different people across the globe use plants for a myriad of purposes: as foods, medicines, for ritual practices, in clothing or as tools, for construction of for furniture. But the science of ethnobotany began long before the modern term came into existence.
Plant medicine was being explored a far back as ancient Mayan and Grecian cultures.
The “De Materia Medica” was an illustrated herbal directory of hundreds of plants from around the Mediterranean and their medicinal uses, whether they were toxic, where they could be found and when they could be harvested.
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Through the centuries, the field of ethnobotany has evolved as more and more plants were collected, cataloged, and investigated as to their properties and the way indigenous peoples integrated them into their cultures. The term ethnobotany is somewhat academic and technical sounding, but its meaning is as core and basic as it could be.
Simply put, ethnobotany is the science of plants and people, inextricably linked through the intricate web of life on this extraordinary planet.
