On Not Calling It Medicine

When I started making things from plants, it was because I wanted gentler things for my family. A salve for scraped knees. A warm drink for a cold night. A syrup in the fridge for winter. I wanted to understand what my great-grandmothers' generation had known — the kind of knowledge that used to live in every kitchen and has quietly disappeared from most of them.

What I found, very quickly, was a world full of confident claims. Plants that "cure" this and "detox" that. Ancient wisdom, secret remedies, miracles. It made me uncomfortable, and it still does.

Four kinds of knowing

So in this notebook I try to keep four kinds of knowledge apart.

Traditional use is what people have long done with a plant: linden tea for a feverish cold, calendula salve for chapped hands. It is real knowledge — it tells us what generations found worth repeating — but it is not proof.

History and folklore is what old books and customs record. It is fascinating, sometimes beautiful, sometimes plainly wrong, and I share it as a story, not an instruction.

Personal experience is what I have made and noticed myself. It is one person, one family, one garden.

Modern evidence is what research does and does not support. Often the honest answer is: not much has been studied, or the results are mixed.

A remedy can be traditional, beloved and worth making — and still not be medicine.

What this means here

It means you won't find the word cure on this site. It means every plant page has a section on caution, and that I will tell you when to see a doctor instead of making a syrup. It means I'd rather be careful and a little less exciting than confident and wrong.

None of this makes the work less magical to me. If anything, it makes it more so. A spoonful of elderberry syrup on a dark January morning is a small act of care, made from a summer's walk to the creek. That is enough. It doesn't need to be a miracle.