I spent part of my childhood surrounded by beautiful nature but I felt completely disconnected from it. In the last two years, that’s changed and I have planted my own mini-garden – complete with a vine and a cherry tree, wildflowers, herbs and spring bulbs. Growing vegetables will come later (the drought last summer cancelled my first attempt at a crop!) – it’s next on the list.
I now know that not knowing about plants and trees has been a contributing factor in my sense of disconnection with myself. For instance, I was always kept away from dirt as a child, but scientific studies have shown the benefits for children of learning through mud play.
Natural High
The poet e.e. cummings wrote in his poem [In-Just], about the world being ‘mud-luscious/’ and ‘puddle-wonderful’. As adults we can also experience the benefits of getting a natural high by getting our hands dirty – literally – partly due to the slightly awe-inspiring influence of the live organism found in all earth: mycobacterium vaccae. This bug gives us a natural high.
So, this week I have planted daffodils, fritillaries, crocuses and wildflowers for next spring. I covered them with earth and bark and laid some chicken wire, given to me by a friend, over the top of the beds (this is London, so we get a lot of squirrels!). It felt good to be planting some seeds I’ll see come up next year, and it’s also made me notice how some plants even have an early flowering before the big freeze – so Viburnum and Salvia are doing well at the moment. Learning about plants has also made me grateful to live in London rather than another big city with less outdoor space.
In this month’s newsletter – only for subscribers – I share the insights of the wonderful urban herbalist Roisin Reilly who recommends the mindset and health benefits of interacting with plants. Roisin works full-time as a herbal medicine practitioner and is based in London. Watch the video which is for email subscribers only for the full interview, or see below for an extract of the interview.
Top tips
Roisin Reilly’s top tips for the benefits of being in nature more (even if you live in a city!):
1. Become aware – of the plants around you
2. Be grateful for the natural habitats you see every day
3. Get to know plants as a wellness technique
4. Nourish yourself with plants – exchange energies with a tree
5. Wild plants in their edible form are ‘organic food on steroids’
Happy seed-planting!
Warmly X Elizabeth Rose
Narrative Life Coaching interviews Roisin Reilly
Interview transcript with Roisin Reilly [edited].
NLC: How did you become a herbalist in the first place?
RR: Thank you very much Elizabeth for having me. If you ask herbalists, they’re generally going to say a lot of the same things about how they became herbalists; they have an innate love for nature and for people, so I like to combine those two things, so I came up with the solution of being a herbalist. There’re so many plants that we pass by on a daily basis that now that I’m a herbalist, I know that ‘this helps this and this condition.’
I really want everybody else to know that as well. I suppose part of the story is from my family. I’ve lived in London now for about 11 years but before that, I lived in another part of England but before that, I lived in Ireland and I was born in Scotland and lived there for a while: so my mum’s from Scotland and my dad’s from Ireland. We’ve always just had a really easy relationship with the earth really and I think when you grow up you don’t have a lot of money and you go out as a family you go out to places which are free – that’s always outside so we just always spent a lot of time outside as a family. I had this amazing Irish granddad called Joe. He knew plants; he would know the history of how they were used. He would grow plants and was enamoured with them and he really imbued this passion in me about understanding the plants around us. That was definitely part of the path to get there.
I took my degree at the University of Lincoln: l three years full time can do a part-time course which I think takes five years. I believe that now the university of Lincoln is now the only university that has a clinical or herbal medicine as part of a degree course. When I started 6-7 years ago there were at least four other universities that were doing it but now I believe it’s now only the University of Lincoln. Back then it was really heavily science-based obviously as it should be and I think I would probably say about 70% of it was theoretical and 30% of it was practical. We had to have a clinic within the building where we would see patients within and that was really the only practical side of it. So we also did biochemistry, botany and the history and philosophy of medicine, pharmacology and everything really that you would expect from a health practitioner’s degree except we were doing it from the perspective of how the pharmacy of plants would help people rather than the pharmacy of manufactured medicines.
The right environment
NLC: So how do you source your plants in an urban environment? {sign up for my newsletter below to read the full transcript and get the latest videos and information about what NLC can offer by clicking this link.)
