The healing powers of wild flowers

All My Wild Mothers: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss and an Apothecary Garden, by Victoria Bennett (Two Roads / Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 / €19.99)

Mens sana in corpo sans (a healthy mind in a healthy body) is an old saying, but its truth is borne out by this very evocative book.

Most books about wild flowers and herbal gardens are written from a gardening point of view. This narrative however is intensely personal; it is a psychological memoir with additional herbs.

It is more akin to the sort of books that you find on the memoir shelves in your local bookshop.

Recovered

It tells of how a shattered life was recovered and remade, but brutally. As a hoarder I got a shock on reading how the author ruthlessly burned all the relics of her past life on leaving an old home, even down to family snaps and the battered stuffed toy she had hugged as a child. To the dismay of her little boy it went on the top of the bonfire.

However a move with her little boy to rural Cumbria allowed her to so to speak begin again. On the rubble building site that surrounded their new home they began to explore, finding their way to a new relaxed and nourishing inner life involving the wild flowers and then the herbs that could be found around where they lived.

The sections of her book are given the names over 80 flowers and herbs. Slowly through experiences in the fields and through the books she began to read she learnt about the plants and about the traditions around them, and how they are to be used as aids to health and to cooking and to simply adding delight to one’s life.

All this makes for fascinating reading at an emotional level. But she also bought a battered copy of Gerard’s Herbal as the beginning of a small library.

Her suggestions for “an apothecary’s book case” contain of course some familiar tomes including Mrs Maud Grieve’s Modern Herbal (1931), but also many up to date books, some very much in the line of alternative living.

However herbs need care. One has only to recall the difficulties that the enthusiasm for St John’s Wort gave rise to. This being so the publishers have added “A Note on Safety”, declaring the book is for entertainment only.

It is not intended as a guide to self-diagnosis or treatment. The bottom line is always seek medical advice. And be careful what you pick – buy a book with really good colour illustrations, drawings in preference to photographs.

Reminded

Though they are far from the author’s outlook, I was reminded in these pages of the wisdom enshrined in the ‘Brother Cadfael’ series of books on medieval life by the novelist Ellis Peters written around the detective experiences of a monastic herbalist.

There the herbs and plants are directly seen as part of the wonders of God’s creation. But this is a very modern book – and so misses out in a way on some deeper aspects of the lore of past centuries that she admires and cultivates.

This book deserves the praise already heaped upon it. But as Francis Brennan might advise, good health is not an end in itself, but means to benefit you and others.