CHAPTER TWO

The Modern Renaissance

of Herbal Medicine

The seed is the whole potential of the plant

contracted to a single point.

—Rudolf Steiner

A history of what philosopher Paul Lee coined the “herbal

renaissance” in the United States has yet to be written, but
a book titled Herbal Pathfinders captures the diversity and creativity of
that period of time.1 The book is a collection of interviews with men
and women active in the herbal revival of the 1970s as well as brief
introductory essays by the book’s authors, Robert Conrow and Arlene
Hecksel. Each essay traces the lineage of learning—from Shakers to
Rudolf Steiner to Native Americans to Ayurvedic texts to elders to
curanderos to books. The diversity of the contributors captures the cre-
ativity of the herbal movement at that time. The voices were eclectic.
There were essays on vision quests, responsible harvesting practices,
medicinal uses of herbs, the spiritual dimensions of herbalism, and
more.2 No one claimed to have the only valid perspective. Each was one
thread in reintroducing practices that had been lost—or simply weren’t
visible—in mainstream culture.
The common theme across all the interviews in the book is the power
of learning directly from the plants: from the spirit of the plants or by
experimenting with using plants as medicine. The relationship is at the
heart of the healing.

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

There are many ways to tell the story of the herbal renaissance.
Unlike countries where the traditional systems of medicine that relied
on plants never died out, in the United States herbal medicine had
fallen from mainstream use by the early mid-1900s. Even so, in rural
communities without access to formal health care, in African Amer-
ican communities in urban areas, in Native American communities,
in pockets of Appalachia and more, these methods were kept alive
and passed through the generations. Just because no one was talking
about plant medicine in mainstream circles didn’t mean no one was
using plants as medicine. These communities became the sources of
inspiration for the women and men who “rediscovered” these practices
in the 1970s.
Because there was no strong cultural framework for learning about
the practice of plant medicine, the individuals rediscovering it played
a large role in shaping how traditional Western herbalism reemerged.
Those eager to learn gathered knowledge wherever they could and in
turn shared that knowledge with whoever would listen. In this chapter
I describe what I learned of this revitalization by tracing the stories of
the teachers with whom I studied, particularly those who went on to
create the companies that many other herbalists in turn now advise their
students to support.
This account is based on my experience, and as such, it is not a complete
history of herbalism or of the herbal renaissance in the United States. I
present it in this way because the herbal medicine that was widespread
in the late 1990s and early 2000s primarily catered to white audiences
who, because of their economic class and ethnicity, had the resources to
access this information, either by attending conferences or enrolling in
in-person apprentice programs. Similarly, those with resources, financial
and cultural, were more likely to start businesses than those without.
Other voices and stories are now entering the conversation, revealing
the ways that people of color have been excluded and their practices
ignored or taken without acknowledgment. An entirely different book
can, and I hope will, be written about these practices, historically and in
the present, and the movement to bring this diversity to herbalism in the
United States.

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

Rosemary Gladstar
For me the story begins with Rosemary Gladstar. “As a child, I was
infused with the plants,” Rosemary once told me. As she said this, I
imagined an infusion of nettles, steeping overnight in a mason jar. By
morning the clear water has turned a dark green. I think of Rosemary
infused in the same way, filled with the colors and vibrations of plants.
We were sitting in the cozy, comfortable living room of her home at
Sage Mountain on a rainy autumn day. Herb books were stacked on the
coffee table and on bookshelves. Potted plants sat on a bench by the row
of windows. Candles, small statues, rocks, an incense burner, a vase of
dried flowers, photos of her grandson filled the mantel.
Rosemary spent uncounted hours as a child with her grandmother,
Mary Egithanoff, in the garden, weeding and gathering herbs for cook-
ing. Rosemary’s grandmother had escaped from Armenia in the early
1900s, fleeing starvation and persecution. Her grandmother showed
her amaranth, chickweed, purslane, the native plants they had eaten
in Armenia when they were starving. “She loved purslane,” Rosemary
said. She paused. “I grew up being nurtured on this cellular level by this
ancient information. That was important. It kind of encoded me.”
Rosemary told me about the earliest childhood dream she could
remember, when she was four or five years old. “I’m in this kind of foggy
place, and I’m running through the mist and then into a beautiful meadow
of violets. The feeling I had—I can still feel it as if it were yesterday—was
like, I’ve come home.”
Another time, in an experience that wasn’t a dream, she and her
brothers and sisters were in the field with the cows from their dairy farm
in California. Suddenly the cows started running toward the children.
“We thought they would trample us to death, so we ran across the field
and climbed an enormous willow tree. It was dark and the cattle were
coming, and what I remember, again, it’s just like yesterday, was sitting
completely protected and held by this giant willow and feeling this
incredible oneness with that tree.”
Rosemary graduated from high school in the late 1960s, just as the
back-to-the-land movement was beginning. “It was incredible, you just

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

got pulled into it,” she said. But she didn’t need to go back to the land,
because she already lived in rural America. Instead she went to the
wilderness. Rosemary spent three years in the Sierra Nevada, living out
of a backpack in the woods and learning from the plants, her books, and
the people she met. Herbal medicine was still alive and well as a system
of folk healing in this area. “These teachers were just people living,”
Rosemary said. “They weren’t teaching from a book. They were just like,
here you go, let me show you what is around here and here is how you
make this.”
Each summer she came down from the high country to town to earn
some money. She cared for the children of the Roma people who worked
in the circus. She cleaned toilets at the Guerneville natural food store.
Once she’d made some money, she headed back to the mountains. She
recalls it as a time of grace, a time when she was able to drink deeply of
the world, to fill herself with adventure. It wasn’t a way of life she could
continue, though. And so when she came back to town to stay, she was
ready to “give back.”

z
Baiseti thuma (which translates as “grandmother”) was a tiny woman
whose hands were gnarled from years of working the soil in the remote
Himalayan village of Hedangna. Rosemary has the same direct, clear
presence that Baiseti thuma had, like a forest-spirit. She would have
been a shamani, Baiseti thuma once told me, had she been a man. Being
a woman didn’t stop Rosemary.
Rosemary’s joy and apparent lightheartedness belie an incredible
depth of knowledge and an equally incredible capacity for hard work, for
doing what it takes to get things done. She can make it seem like every-
thing is easy. At one of the countless conferences she has organized, in a
moment when I could see Rosemary’s weariness showing through, she
told me that she chooses joy. She sees the good in people, not necessarily
because that good is always easily available, but because she intentionally
chooses to focus on it.
In 1972 Rosemary began working in the herb section at the
Guerneville natural food store, mixing herbal medicines. People began

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

buying her custom formulas. Seeing how well the formulas worked, their
friends came to buy them as well. Soon she made arrangements to rent a
small wing in the store. “It was like a closet, really,” Rosemary said. That
was her first business, Rosemary’s Garden. Like many of Rosemary’s
creations, it still operates today (under different ownership).
Rosemary continued mixing formulas in her small shop. Customers
who came in would describe the symptoms of their ailment, and as they
spoke Rosemary’s hands would begin gathering a pinch of this herb
and a pinch of that, her body intuiting what each individual needed. “It
wasn’t like I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “It was that I was moving into
a part of myself that knew more than my brain alone knew. My brain
could help understand what I was doing, but the process was happening
on some deeper level.
“Some people have a knack for aspects of herbalism, maybe a knack for
making things or listening to people. I found I had an incredible knack for
formulation.” More and more people began to request her formulas. Rose-
mary was also giving public lectures and being invited to teach. Filling
bags of the same formula for customers was becoming repetitive, so her
partner, Drake Sadler, suggested that she pre-package the blends in brown
paper bags, the type used to hold bulk coffee, and label the bags “throat
formula” or “nursing formula,” as appropriate. A mutual friend told Drake
and Rosemary they should create a brand with names for the formulas
that people would remember. One evening Rosemary, Drake, and two
of their friends (one also named Rosemary and her partner, Warren), sat
around a woodstove drinking tea, brainstorming names for the formulas:
Smooth Move, Mother’s Milk, Throat Coat, Gypsy Cold Care. Warren
drew images—for Smooth Move, a sketch of a person in an outhouse.
I didn’t meet Drake until well after I first got to know Rosemary.
Terry and I interviewed him for Numen, and then I also talked with
him again by phone while researching this book. I asked Drake how
the business evolved after that first meeting around the woodstove. He
told me that he was an astrologer at that time, and he traveled along the
California coast each fall to sell his silk-screened astrology calendars. He
suggested taking along some bags of the bulk tea on his next trip to see
whether they would sell.

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

According to Drake, Rosemary was not interested in creating prod-

ucts to sell beyond her store, fearing that selling their teas would be the
“further dissolution of herbalism and commercialization.” He convinced
her by suggesting that he would try to sell ten thousand bags at $1 a
bag, and then they could use that $10,000 to travel to Mexico. “It was
a hippie dream,” Drake said, “to make $10,000. But Rosemary loved to
travel almost as much as she loved the plants, and so she agreed.”
It was an era when the established institutions of political and eco-
nomic power were showing their vulnerability. Close to half a million
people had attended the three-day music festival at Woodstock, New
York, in the concert that has come to epitomize the counterculture of
the time. In 1970 four unarmed students were shot by members of
the Ohio National Guard during a mass protest against the Vietnam
War at Kent State University. The Pentagon Papers were published.
In 1972 five White House operatives were arrested for burglarizing
the Democratic National Committee offices, marking what became
the Watergate scandal. Antiwar demonstrations drew an estimated
hundred thousand people in US cities. Three hundred thalidomide
victims were offered nearly $12 million in compensation after a
twenty-year fight in court. Richard Nixon made an unprecedented
visit to China and met with Mao Zedong, after years of impasse. The
last US ground troops withdrew from Vietnam. In 1973 the American
Indian Movement (AIM) occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in
a seventy-one-day standoff with federal authorities. In August 1974
President Nixon resigned from office.
Amid so much unrest, change on many fronts suddenly seemed
possible. For California hippies like Rosemary and Drake, the right
response was to seek a way to live simply, off the land, using one’s hands
and reconnecting with all that had been cast aside in the pursuit of profit
and power.
There was a lot of mixing and mingling of traditions—Tibetan
Buddhism or Zen, tantric yoga or hatha yoga or Transcendental
Meditation—and a lot of drugs. Young men and women pursued what
worked for their own spiritual transformation and discarded the rest.3
Herbal medicine was no different. For better and for worse, the men

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

and women who were rediscovering plant medicine didn’t worry much
about documenting the genealogy of their inspirations. It was a time of
loosening and breaking rigid traditions; there was an openness and sense
of freedom that made possible a tremendous amount of creativity.

z
Dressed in a long cape, with what he called his Charles Manson beard,
and driving a Volkswagen van filled with herbal tea, Drake headed up
the California coast in 1974 and into that awakening. He sold all ten
thousand bags in eleven days. He called Rosemary from a pay phone by
the side of Highway 1 and told her to order more herbs and brown bags.
Rosemary recalled Drake’s “orders for so many tea bags, and then
another stop and more tea bags! And I remember thinking, Oh, that’s
going to be a lot of mixing and bagging!” She told him to come back home.
They talked things over. Rosemary agreed to try selling the tea for nine
months, since that had been their original plan, but only if they used
the bags to educate consumers about herbalism. And so they started
including leaflets along with the herbs with instructions for making
infusions and salves, information on the history of wild collecting in
America, promotion of good causes like clean water and their local birth
clinic and community center, and poems and quotations. “There was
more information than tea in those bags!” Drake exclaimed.
The images on boxes of Traditional Medicinals tea are no longer
hand-drawn sketches, and the wording on the label speaks about
details of sourcing and certifications that weren’t part of the picture in
the 1970s. And the details of the Traditional Medicinals origin story
have blurred a bit, depending on who is telling it. Yet regardless of
the specifics, what emerges is that Rosemary and Drake had vision,
and they had stamina. There was plenty of room in the 1970s for
that combination—room to start a business, room to set up a school,
room to teach. Listening to the stories of that era, it’s easy to feel
envious. There was so much possibility. Drake saw the potential and
jumped in. Nine months later they were managing a warehouse and
twelve employees and had invested $100,000 into the business. “It
just exploded,” Drake said. The company filled a unique niche in

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

the United States at the time. Celestial Seasonings, another herbal

tea company that came out of the back-to-the-land movement, had
begun to focus exclusively on beverage teas, not medicinal ones. Alvita
Tea, a family brand that dates back to the 1920s, sold single herbs as
medicine, so it was up to the customer to know how to use them as
teas. Rosemary and Drake’s teas were the only pre-blended formulas
available as a consumer product. They created a niche for themselves
that they hadn’t even known existed.
After a few years it became clear to Rosemary that Drake had an
amazing sense of how to develop a business and that he really loved
the work. It was equally clear that she did not. “I remember thinking,
This is not fun,” she told me. “It’s not what I want to be doing.” She
loved sharing information and helping people. “Part of my fascination
is with the healing aspect of the plants, their wildness, their spirit.
And also with the people I met—they were just incredible characters.
People who had missions in life. They were brilliant and wild and pas-
sionate and willing to be different. The plants were clearly directing
them and they were willing to follow. That’s who I wanted to spend
time with.”
Rosemary and Drake separated. In 1978 she set up the California
School of Herbal Studies, the first herbal school in the state. She also
founded Mountain Rose Herbs as a mail-order company to provide bulk
herbs to students who wanted to prepare their own remedies. By 1987
she decided it was time for a change and moved to five hundred acres of
wilderness in Vermont. Once there, she became aware of and concerned
about the impact of the herbal renaissance on wild plant populations
of North America. She turned her new home, Sage Mountain, into
an herbal retreat center and botanical sanctuary where she continued
to teach. In 1994, with a group of concerned herbalists, she founded a
nonprofit organization called United Plant Savers, a nonprofit dedicated
to the conservation and cultivation of native medicinal plants. Though
many men and women were part of and leaders in the herbal renaissance,
Rosemary stands out. Herbalist David Winston said it this way: “The
amazing thing about Rosemary Gladstar is that she has vision and she
manifests that vision.”

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

Ed Smith
Around the time that Rosemary was starting Rosemary’s Garden, Ed
Smith started reading a borrowed copy of Jethro Kloss’s book Back to
Eden while riding on a bus in Colombia. First published in 1935, Back
to Eden was the bible for the natural living movement in the late 1960s.
It introduced Kloss’s method of natural self-healing based on herbs and
a diet that eschewed meat, fat, and eggs. (By the 1980s almost three
million copies had been sold.)
Ed read the book cover-to-cover. It was his first exposure to the use
of plants as medicine, and he was hooked. He began visiting the village
markets to speak to the curanderos who sold fresh herbs, and he tried
preparing the remedies they described for himself. For several years Ed
traveled between his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and South
America to continue studying herbal medicine. Although he wouldn’t
have predicted it at the time, this initial exposure to plant medicine in
Colombia would eventually lead him to start an herb business, Herb
Pharm, that has thrived for decades.
Ed and his then-partner, Sara Katz, founded Herb Pharm in 1979.
I met Ed and Sara when Terry and I visited Herb Pharm to film the
farm and production facility in Williams, Oregon, for Numen. Ed was
a regular teacher at herb conferences at the time, and like Traditional
Medicinals their company was among those most often recommended
by herbalists. I also spoke with Ed and Sara separately about their
memories of the company.
Ed told me that on his first time back in Cambridge after being in
Colombia, he visited a local health food store to buy some herbs. He
was disappointed with what he found. Colombian healers used vibrant,
vital, fresh herbs. In the stores in Cambridge, though, the herbs were
overdried and stale. The arnica had gone to seed. Mints didn’t smell like
mint. “The herbs were just good enough to keep people interested,” Ed
said. “But that was all.”
Ed got a Peterson field guide and began gathering wild plants from
the woods around Boston, continuing to learn about their medicinal
uses from whatever sources he could find. A few years later he and Sara

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

moved to Oregon, where they helped Dr. John Christopher, who was
starting a naturopathic school of medicine. Often called the father of the
modern herbal tradition, Dr. Christopher was a naturopathic physician
from Utah known for his teachings on herbs and natural healing espe-
cially among the Mormons in Utah, during a time when few people were
teaching about the use of plants.
In Oregon, Ed continued harvesting wild plants, and he also explored
secondhand bookstores. On one visit he stumbled across the entire
collection of a retired pharmacist, which included books about liquid
extracts written by the Eclectic physicians. Ed couldn’t believe his good
fortune and told me he spent his last $300 on the books.
The Eclectic physicians were a group of nineteenth-century sectarian
medical practitioners marginal to the history of allopathic medicine
but central to that of herbalism. Their practice emerged in response to
the growing dissatisfaction in communities in America with the harsh,
heroic healing therapies—especially use of leeches and heavy metals like
mercury and arsenic—common among medical providers in the mid- to
late 1800s.
In the late 1880s and early 1900s, Ed said, you could walk into
any pharmacy, apothecary, or doctor’s office and find liquid extracts,
bitter-tasting liquids in brown bottles. These extracts were made by the
leading drug companies of the time, such as Eli Lilly and Parke, Davis
and Company.4 John King and John Milton Scudder, the two leading
Eclectic physicians in the late 1800s, developed a theory of medicine
making based on analyzing the specific medicinal qualities of individual
plants.5 They then hired a gifted young pharmacist, John Uri Lloyd, to
manufacture liquid extracts based on these formulas. Lloyd, along with
his two brothers, developed Lloyd Brothers, which was best known
for making extracts for use by Eclectic physicians. King and Scudder’s
formulas were produced from raw materials supplied by a robust trade of
what were called raw drugs or crude drugs.6 These plants were cultivated
by the Shakers (the largest growers of herbs in the United States in
the nineteenth century) or wild-harvested from Appalachia.7 Most of
these plants harvested from Appalachia passed through supply houses in
North Carolina. In the late 1800s the largest wholesale botanical drug

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

dealer in the region, Wallace Brothers, in Statesville, North Carolina,

stored more than two thousand varieties of leaves, roots, barks, and
berries in its forty-four-thousand-square-foot botanic depot. Historian
Gary Freeze describes “rows upon rows of ginseng, sassafras, and cherry
bark, stacked in baskets or wrapped in bales awaiting shipment.”8 An
1883 North Carolina Agricultural Department report noted that “the
bales [of medicinal herbs] seen in the country stores of the mountains
were similar to the bales of cotton seen elsewhere.” According to Freeze,
Statesville became known “as the place where more medicinal plants are
collected and prepared for the trade than in any other [place] in the
world.”9 By 1875 the root trade, which had been “looked upon almost
contemptuously” generated more than $50,000 (equivalent to over
$1 million today), and provided a living to many people.10
These plants were shipped to the Lloyd Brothers in Cincinnati, a
center for the botanical trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s, to be
manufactured into the liquid extracts that King and Scudder used in
their practice.11 The two doctors treated tens of thousands of patients
over the course of almost fifty years. Their success was in large part due
to the quality of these formulations.
This information faded from public view, only to reemerge when aspir-
ing herbal practitioners discovered books written by King and Scudder,
which documented their clinical practice and formulas in great detail,
while rummaging through secondhand bookstores. Herbalists often
return to the Eclectics as the source of information about high-quality
material and herbal medicine. This is both because of the quality of their
clinical work and the botanical medicines they produced and because,
unlike many others from whom they acquired their knowledge—early
American settlers who drew on European traditions, Native Americans,
African American slaves, midwives, homeopaths, physiomedicalists, and
others—the Eclectics were some of the only ones at the time who wrote
books about their practice.12
Though not part of mainstream medicine, as educated white men,
the Eclectics had the access to resources that allowed them to codify
their knowledge, the freedom to practice, and the available time to
document their learning. They were educated in institutions that

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valued written culture over oral traditions and had access to circles
and audiences who could further and perpetuate their beliefs. When
I spoke with Richard Mandelbaum, the director of the ArborVitae
School of Traditional Herbalism, about the legacy of the Eclectics, he
told me that they rarely attributed the foundational sources of their
knowledge, or at least not more than in passing, instead presenting it
as if they had discovered this knowledge themselves. Even if they didn’t
intend to exclude the sources of their knowledge, by translating that
knowledge into their own words and books, often without citations, in
fact they did.13

z
Ed gathered herbs by day. At night he pored through the books of King,
Scudder, and others, taking notes longhand on yellow legal pads, noting
which plants and formulas were used and how. He gathered herbs and
ground them in a coffee grinder, mixed them with alcohol and water in
mason jars, and left them to stand until he had time to strain and bottle
the finished tincture. As every budding herbalist discovers, extracting
herbs produces a lot of tincture. Ed ended up with ten ounces of arnica
tincture, nine ounces of yarrow. He shared the extra with friends, who
saw the tinctures were effective. As with Rosemary’s tea blends, they told
their friends, who came to purchase some for themselves. And without
intending to, Ed realized he had started a company.
The key to the success of his remedies, Ed believes, was the attention
paid to the quality of the raw material; he wanted to match the kind of
vitality he had seen in the herbs displayed at the Colombian markets.
He made a pegboard to use during classes he taught at Dr. Christopher’s
school. He divided the board in two, and on one side he attached yarrow
from a local health food store. On the other, he displayed yarrow he had
picked himself. He pointed out the silvery green leaves and vibrant white
flowers of the yarrow he had harvested and dried, and the faded, brown
and gray leaves and flowers of the yarrow from the store. “You didn’t have
to be a master herbalist to tell the difference,” he told me.
Ed is quite well known for making this point at every opportunity
when he has an audience. Sienna Craig, an anthropologist, described

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meeting Ed at a conference on traditional systems of medicine in Bhu-

tan in 2009. Ed pounded a fist on the table as he told the audience of
academics, “You don’t have to have a PhD to tell good-quality plants!”
Rosemary recalled sitting in on one of Ed’s classes back in the 1970s,
a time when no one was really thinking or teaching about the importance
of herb quality. She invited him to teach at Orr Hot Springs Resort
in the California redwoods. After his class Ed displayed bottles of his
tinctures on a Guatemalan blanket. Students bought every bottle. He
left with $300 in cash. Rosemary invited him to teach again, at another
hot springs site in Northern California. He brought along a bigger
blanket—and left with $600 in hand. As he was packing up, a student
who ran an herb store asked whether Ed had a wholesale catalog. “No,”
he said. “But we will next week!” He and Sara immediately registered the
name Herb Pharm and made a logo. Sara typed up two pages describing
twelve to fifteen herbs. That was their first catalog.
More orders came in. Herb Pharm, which made its mark by knowing
the “pedigree” of its herbs and selling only “organic, custom, wild-crafted
plants,” began to take off. Ed and Sara made enough money to pay the
rent and put food on the table. They took a weeklong vacation to Mexico.
Sara said they were never goal-driven. They had the good fortune to be
doing something that wasn’t widespread but had widespread popularity,
which meant they never had to be clever about marketing or sales. “The
whole industry was so fledgling and naive. We were always just ahead
of the curve. We showed up all day, every day, and did the work. People
loved the medicine we made. It was thrilling—we would say to each
other, ‘Let’s go home and make some more!’
“You couldn’t do that today,” she continued after a pause. “We were
able to get where we did because of hard work and passion and because
of the times.”
“When we first started Herb Pharm, we never dreamed it would turn
into a multimillion-dollar business,” Ed explained. “We were basically
two hippies trying to avoid getting a job. Not that we didn’t want to
work—we just didn’t want to work for The Man. We were trying to earn
a right livelihood, to do work we believed in, work that was good for our
fellow citizens and good for the planet.”

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Phyllis Light
Realizing that we needed to diversify the voices we were recording
for Numen, we headed to Arab, Alabama, to interview Phyllis Light, a
fourth-generation practitioner of what she calls Southern Folk Medicine.
Our conversations with Phyllis brought in the perspective of the practice
of herbalism passed through family in a tradition that was never broken.
Phyllis is more rooted in the physical and cultural place of her home
than anyone else I have met in the North American herb community. She
still lives in Arab, the town where her ancestors lived and where what she
calls the mishmash of cultures that make up her heritage came together.
Phyllis’s entire family—on both sides—was involved in folk healing,
a mix of Native American knowledge about plants and the spiritual
knowledge of African slaves who had been brought to North America by
the Spanish. Europeans added their system based on the ancient Greek
humoral methods made popular by Galen. The Scots-Irish, who came to
the area in the 1700s and 1800s, brought in a superstitious or magical
framework that they combined with what they found in the Bible and
Christianity.14 “So we have about a four-hundred-year history of folk
medicine in the South. Other parts of the country can’t say that,” Phyllis
told me with pride.
The Civil War helped solidify herbal use in the South, she continued.
“I’m not going to get into the politics of it. We all know slavery was not
a good thing.” But the South was blockaded by land and by sea and so
certain foods and medicine weren’t available. Southerners had to go back
to using herbs as medicine, she explained, adding that some of the best
herbal books were written during the Civil War.
After the Civil War, the land was ruined: “The barns and houses had
been burned. The fields and crops and soil had been burned. The land
was in waste and devastation. The slaves were free, but they had nowhere
to go. Reconstruction was a really horrible time. Then, too, herbs were
the only thing people had as medicine. Every woman had to know to
care for her children and her family using herbs, because that was all
there was. No one could afford to go to the doctor, and there weren’t
many doctors even if they could.”

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Just as the South’s economy was beginning to stabilize, the Depres-

sion hit. Phyllis recalled that her grandfather used to say, “I read in the
paper that there is a Depression, but we couldn’t tell any difference in
our family.”
When Phyllis was ten years old, she began gathering herbs with her
grandmother, who was part Creek and part Cherokee and had been
taught by her own mother and grandmother. Phyllis’s father took over
after her grandmother died. “On my dad’s side, I’m part Native Amer-
ican, German, and Jewish German. I’m a little Oriental and definitely
Scots-Irish,” Phyllis explained.
Phyllis has thin, straight blond hair, cut just below her ears, that
ripples as she shakes her head to emphasize her points. In a photo taken
when she was seventeen, Phyllis’s set jaw shows her determination—like
the shake of her head, her expression seems to say, Don’t even think of
crossing me. Sitting at the linoleum table in her kitchen that she uses for
teaching, Phyllis described growing up in Arab at a time when everyone
lived off the land because that’s all they had. “We all had gardens. We all
raised our own animals for food. We all farmed and hunted and went to
the woods to gather wild food and herbs. That’s just the way life was in
that part of the South. Drop me in the woods with a knife and I’ll make
it. I know how to eat, how to make a shelter, I know what foods to eat. I
know what herbs I’m gonna need for medicine.
“When I heard people talking about the herbal renaissance, I was like,
What in the world are they talking about? We didn’t need any renaissance
because we already had it. We didn’t know we were holistic,” she added.
“We were just poor.”
I asked Phyllis about her relationship with plants. She answered by
telling me a story.
One morning when she was seventeen, her father told her they were
going to the forest to find ginseng. It wasn’t the season for digging gin-
seng, she said, they were simply venturing out to locate some plants. By
that time Phyllis had spent plenty of seasons with her family “sanging,”
as hunting ginseng is called, but she had never tried to find a ginseng
plant without the red berries that are its signature. She and her father
walked and walked. Finally, after what seemed a long time, he stopped and

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

told her that “between that creek, them rocks, and that tree, there’s some
ginseng plants, and I want you to find them.” And then he pulled out his
paperback western from his back pocket, sat down, and began to read.
“There I was standing in the middle of all these plants that all hit
around my knees, and they all looked exactly the same. They were all
green, and they all had leaves,” Phyllis said.
She looked and looked. She couldn’t see any ginseng. She asked
her father for some help, but he ignored her and continued reading his
western.
She kept looking. Eventually her father told her, “You better hurry
up, we have to get home for supper.”
“And I am so frustrated that I’m starting to cry,” Phyllis told me,
her voice inflected with the accent of her home. “I’m getting mad at
myself, and I just stopped and took a breath. Right in the middle of all
this green stuff, I just paused. And suddenly I didn’t care anymore if I
found those ginseng plants or not. I was done. I closed my eyes. I could
hear the birds, and I could hear my daddy turning the page in the book,
and I could hear the creek bubbling over the rocks, and I could hear the
wind flowing through the trees, and in that instant I really couldn’t tell
the difference between myself and the wind, and myself and the creek,
and myself and the pages of that book. And when I opened my eyes I
saw seven ginseng plants, outlined in light. It was the most amazing
experience of my plant life.
“And I looked at my daddy and I said, ‘Here’s one, here’s one, here’s
one!’ I was so excited! And he stood up, and he said, ‘Yep. Let’s go eat.’
He put his book in his back pocket and started walking toward home.
“And that was my teaching. That’s how my dad always taught me.
That’s how my grandmother taught me. They taught me by making me
learn. They didn’t teach me with a lot of words. Those were the teachings
I had all through my early years of herbalism: How do you connect? How
do you see what isn’t there?”
The herbal medicine Phyllis learned came from her relationship to
a particular place, to the plants that grew there, and to the people who
knew those plants and how to use them, steeped in knowledge that had
been passed down to them from their mother or father or grandmother.

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

It wasn’t a product separate from the source. It was knowledge rooted

in connection.

David Winston
To the north, in New Jersey, David Winston was also becoming inter-
ested in herbs. David described the 1930s to the 1960s as the “herbal
dark ages.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he recalled, he would tell
people he was an herbalist and they would ask, “You mean like spices?
Potpourri?” They thought he was wasting his time. “It was like saying I
delivered ice for the icebox or used gas in my lamps,” David said.
“My friends were all interested in one herb, and I was interested in all
the rest,” he told me, laughing. He thought he was the only person on
the East Coast interested in herbs, but gradually he began to meet other
people who used plants as medicine—Tommie Bass of Georgia, Catfish
Gray in West Virginia, Adele Dawson in Vermont. They were members
of the generation who kept herbal medicine alive. He fell in love with
the way these wise herbalists talked about using plants for healing.
While visiting Goddard College in central Vermont in 1975, David
stopped in a general store and noticed an announcement for a book sale
tacked to the bulletin board. Intrigued, he stopped by the sale, where
he discovered a collection of vintage leather-bound books about herbal
medicine—books written by Eclectic physicians including King’s Ameri-
can Dispensatory by John King and American Materia Medica, Therapeutics
and Pharmacognosy by Finley Ellingwood. David told me that he was
blown away to discover that medical doctors in the United States had
used herbs in their practice as recently as the early 1900s. He thought
their use had died out hundreds of years ago. Yet on page after page, he
found accounts of a rich clinical record using herbs not only to treat
conditions like headaches and cramps, but for the most serious diseases
of the day. He thought all of this knowledge had been lost—or that it
had never existed. It was incredible, he said, to discover a whole history of
plants as medicine. All the books were half price. He spent almost every
penny he had buying two shopping bags full of the treasures, reserving
only enough cash to pay for his bus ticket home, with a dime to spare.

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

A Community Forms
Many of the social and cultural movements of the 1960s faded or trans-
formed beyond recognition as the front-line individuals grew up and
realized they needed to find conventional jobs. What made the herbal
movement a true renaissance turned out to be one of the many pivotal
projects Rosemary decided to embark upon—organizing a conference.
She was inspired by a retreat she attended in the mid-1970s organized
by Baba Hari Dass, an Indian guru who, among other accomplishments,
was an early proponent of yoga and Ayurveda in the United States.
Rosemary decided to do something similar for the herb community.
As Rosemary described that first herb conference to me, it struck
me how similar it sounded to conferences I have attended for the past
twenty years. Everyone gathered for an opening circle, holding hands.
We sang together. There were classes on the uses of plants as medicine
and on making remedies with those plants. At these early conferences,
in between sessions, the participants took off their clothes and soaked
in hot tubs.
Rosemary had grown up with Adventists with a strong sense of family
and community. “When I look back on it, I think I brought in some of that
sense of community from church, singing together, holding hands, praying
over meals, washing each other’s feet. I brought the sense of holiness that
I loved in church into what became my spiritual family. Otherwise why
would I start off with singing? We didn’t sing or hold hands at the Baba
Hari Dass conference. I didn’t make a plan, now we’re going to make a
circle and hold hands, even if you are uncomfortable, you’re going to stand
here and hold hands. I just thought that’s what we should do—and people
did it!” She burst into her huge laugh. “They joined hands and sang—and
then we saw that it was good so we kept doing it.”
She paused and then added, “Even if people hadn’t been interested in
standing in a circle and singing, I would have continued doing it because
I knew gathering in a circle was important. I always felt that these con-
ferences were about more than just educating. Plants bring something
deeper than that. They bring the sense that we are connected. We are
part of that mycelium. To me, that’s the biggest teachings they offer.”

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

Rosemary went on to organize a second conference, this time at Bre-

itenbush Hot Springs, southeast of Portland, Oregon. Photos of these
early conferences periodically show up on the internet. Some of the key
teachers in herbal medicine today are in those photos, too, men with full,
bushy beards and thick heads of hair, women with long, flowing hair and
long, flowing dresses. Thirty years on, when herb conferences take place
regularly all over the world, it is hard to imagine the impact of these early
gatherings. David Winston was the only herbalist east of the Rockies
to attend that second Breitenbush conference. “It was amazing to be in
a room of people, seventy people in a circle, all in love with the idea of
using plants as medicine,” he told me when we spoke.
Herbalist Paul Bergner attended his first Breitenbush conference in
1986. I spoke with him on the phone years later. He was living in New
Mexico at the time, he said, where there was no social or cultural support
for herbalism. Anyone interested in plant medicine was accused of being
a fraud. Paul felt like a sailboat “sailing into the wind, an oddball wher-
ever I went.” Attending Breitenbush was like being struck by lightning:
“It was electrifying to be in a room where everyone talked to the trees
and—where the trees talked back.”

z
David Hoffmann moved to the United States in 1986 from the United
Kingdom, where he had studied clinical herbalism in the mid-1980s.
He met Rosemary while traveling in California in 1985, and she offered
him a job teaching at the California School of Herbal Studies. I first
met David when he taught a weekend course in the advanced program
at Sage Mountain. Terry and I later interviewed him at the campus of
the California school, where he still teaches. He is also chief herbal
formulator for the Traditional Medicinals company.
As herbalism became more popular, a core group of herb teachers
such as David Hoffmann were able to make a living from their work
through teaching, practicing, or selling herbal products. These herbalists
didn’t have to grow out of their love of plants; that love could be the foun-
dation of their work. The US herb community had something he hadn’t
encountered in the U.K., David told me during a phone conversation.

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 FOLLOWING THE HERBAL HARVEST

Rosemary “infused the movement with hippie love and peace without
talking about it in those terms.” There were a lot of different flavors of
herbalism then, David mused, including Wise Women, Mormons with
Dr. Christopher, hippies from the West Coast, and people like him who
leaned more toward clinical herbalism and science. As David said, at
conferences “we were all in a room with nothing in common except our
love of herbs.” That joy of being with the plants is the heart of herbal
medicine. Rosemary’s gift and one of her main legacies was to create
bridges between the differences, a container that helped give birth to
a viable movement that has grown and developed for decades. “We
overcame our differences by not looking at them,” David said, “and that
helped give birth to a viable movement that has grown and developed.”
Of course ignoring differences doesn’t make them go away, and herb-
alism was no exception. David Hoffmann soon found that things weren’t
perhaps as “glowy” as he initially thought. Herbalist David Winston
shared similar reflections on the herbal renaissance. He described it as the
most creative, vital, imaginative blossoming of herbal medicine that has
ever occurred, but, echoing what others told me about this period, David
went on, “It was sloppy. There was a lack of discernment.” There was no
science, he added. In many ways, my own journey with herbalism has fol-
lowed this trajectory, through my deepening exploration of the industry.

z
As herbs became more popular with consumers, a disconnect grew
between the celebratory joy of plants and the reality of sourcing herbs
on a scale needed to meet the growing demand. As demand kept
on increasing, the companies started in hippie kitchens in the early
1970s grew. Production spilled into barns and then warehouses. Their
demand for plants with which to formulate their products also grew.
This entailed finding more sources, processing more plant material,
and storing and shipping more dried herbs. The gardens and forests
near their homes could not supply enough to meet their requirements,
which meant herbalists and those starting companies had to turn to
other sources of materials—wholesale companies that imported herbs
from around the world.

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 T he M o d ern R enaissance of H erbal M e d icine

The pioneers of the herbal renaissance had a vision of changing the

world through using plants as medicine. They brought their imagination
and intuition and activism to the formulas, the packaging, and more.
But as the scale of production ramped up, more and more of the herbs
in those packages—the raw material for the revolution—came to them
from networks that had been supplying herbs and spices for hundreds of
years. A trade that was founded on slavery, theft, and war.
When I began studying herbal medicine, herbalists downplayed their
connections with the industry. Herbalists tend to have a high ecological
consciousness, David Winston told me, but the industry is an entirely
different beast. For a long time, he was embarrassed to be part of it,
he admitted, even though his company produces some of the highest-­
quality products available.
Herbalists criticize people in the industry for compromising on their
values. Those in the industry criticize herbalists for being naive. The
promise, implicit or explicit, was that herbs offered a “natural” and thus
safer and more environmentally responsible alternative to conventional
medicine. And that, it followed, buying from companies making these
products was better for humanity and the earth. When she taught in
the advanced course at Sage Mountain, medical doctor and herbalist Dr.
Tieraona Low Dog admonished us to think more critically about herbal
medicine. Don’t just repeat what nettles were good for, she told us. Find
out where that knowledge originated and whether it was a valid source of
information. I asked her about this when we interviewed her for Numen
at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Arizona
(at that time, she was head of the fellowship program). She elaborated,
“We must bring the same critical edge that we bring to the drug industry
to our own industry of herbal medicine. One is big and one is small. But
even so, we can’t have a separate set of ethics. We can’t suggest in any way
that just because you’re in the field of herbal medicine, just because you
dance with the plants, you have high integrity by default.”
I realized I had set aside my own critical lens in my embrace of herbal
medicine and the criticisms of the industry. I needed to understand poli-
tics and economics, not just culture. And to do so required going further
back in time.

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