The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook: A Home Manual

Book Preface

Let’s begin our immersion into the mosaic of ideas and techniques that describe herbal medicine-making by first harvesting a wild plant and making an herbal extract: a Dandelion tincture. We’ll begin this green medicine journey outside your dwelling place—where the wild plants are. Herbal medicine lives outdoors, where nature spirits arouse our enchantment, and our vitality is where nature spirits arouse our enchantment, and our vitality is naturally quickened. With your involvement and, I hope, a freshly awakened passion, you’ll initiate your apprenticeship by experiencing the elation of harvesting a wild plant and, with it, creating a simple herbal medicine of excellent quality. So, if you
are not already outdoors reading these words, please, weather permitting, step outside with me and we’ll and Taraxacum officinale, a most notorious wild plant.… This is the plant that herbalists, children, and poets call Dandelion. Many other people call it a weed and treat it rather rudely. Let us refer to it as a wild medicinal plant and perceive the extract we’re about to make with it as an herbal tonic. Our intention is to connect with a plant spirit and with its alliance create a nutritional preparation that is easy to assimilate and can be depended upon to help our digestion, our liver, and our kidneys to feel good. Then, while this first-born extract is macerating (soaking) in its menstruum (solvent), we’ll proceed through the following chapters of this handbook and peruse the rest of the medicinemaking
ideas that await our attention.