Medicinal Herbs

Disclaimer The purpose of this website is to provide information about herbs and simple herbal medicine. It details my personal belief on how these herbs work for me and is in no way intended as a recommendation for their use. Use this information at your own risk. Health concerns should always be discussed with your doctor.

Herbal Medicine, sometimes referred to as Herbalism, is the use of herbs for their therapeutic or medicinal value. A herb is a plant or part of a plant used in healing for its medicinal qualities. Medicinal herb plants contain a variety of chemical substances that act upon the body.

Herbalists use the leaves, flowers, stems, berries, and roots of plants in the prevention and treatment of illness. Herbal medicine has a long and respected history. Many of our modern medications were developed from ancient healing traditions that treated health problems with specific plants. Today, scientists continue to look at plants to help develop new drugs to treat illness.

A short history of herbal medicine

Herbal medicine is the oldest form of healthcare known to man.
Written records date back about 5000 years in India and about 3000 years in China and Egypt, but Herbal Medicine was certainly in use for many thousands of years before that. If it was not effective it would not still be in daily use by 80% of the world's population today.

Throughout the last 5000 years or so, herbal medicine has continued to develop until now, when in the light of growing concern about the effectiveness and side effects of many synthetic drugs, herbal medicines are once more providing a safe and natural alternative treatment for many everyday complaints.

Herbs have been used by all cultures throughout history. Primitive man observed and appreciated the huge variety of plants available to him. These plants provided food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. A large part of the medicinal use of plants looks to have occurred through observation of wild animals, and by trial and error. Over the passage of time, each tribe added the medicinal wisdom of herbs in their territory to its knowledgebase. Information on herbs was collected in this manner and developed into well-defined herbal databases passed from one generation to the next.

Throughout the Middle Ages, home-grown herbs were the only medicines readily available, and few households would be without a well tended and widely used herb garden. Herbal healing knowledge was passed from generation to generation by word of mouth and by the seventeenth century, the knowledge of herbal medicine was widespread in Europe.
In the mid –seventeenth century, Nicholas Culpeper wrote ‘The English Physician’, a book still referred to today.

The first settlers to America discovered that the local plants were different from those at home, and so soon started to use Native American remedies made from North American plants.


Under sub-menus from this page you will find medicinal herbs listed alphabetically, with their qualities and uses. I use many of these to made simple herbal remedies and preparations such as teas, tinctures, soaps, lotions and salves. Recipes for these will eventually appear on another page. I will be adding to these pages often to build up what I hope will be a fairly comprehensive list.