podcast

Our herbs this week are pine and plantain! A mighty tall tree and a humble herb of the packed earth. Pine trees come in many varieties. Around Boston we mainly find white pine (Pinus strobus) and red pine (Pinus resinosa), but many others are similar. Pine can help sustain energy and mood, so we consider…

A seaweed and a vine-flower, how are they alike? We started out this episode feeling like these two herbs were completely different from one another. By the time we got to the end, though, we found a unifying quality or two. Dulse, whose Latin name is Palmaria palmata, is our favorite choice for those who…

Today’s herbs are two excellent friends to the human nervous & emotional systems. Tulsi and evening primrose are both nervines, and although they are rather different from one another, they fit together nicely. Tulsi or ‘holy basil’, Ocimum sanctum aka O. tenuiflorum, has featured on our podcast many times previously: as a supportive herb for…

Happy new year everyone! May 2023 be an herb-filled year for all of us! Monarda species plants are sometimes known as bee balm, wild bergamot, horsemint, or a variety of other names, but we usually just call them monarda. These lovely mint-family members produce an abundance of hot, “sharp” aromatics which are extraordinarily helpful in…

Today we’re profiling a few of our favorite “minty” mints! We discuss spearmint, peppermint, & pennyroyal. Spearmint (Mentha spicata) has a light flavor and impression, with moderate menthol content. It’s gotten a lot of attention in herbal circles for potential impacts on elevated androgen levels in certain circumstances, but is this generalizable? We’re not convinced.…

Tonight we’re talking about two of our favorite herbs, and two of the tastier herbs in our materia medica. Goji berry, Lycium barbarum / L. chinense, is an excellent post-workout adaptogen. It’s a very good herb to consume as food, whether a simple handful of dried berries, included in a trail mix, cooked into rice,…

This week we highlight lavender & motherwort! Lavandula angustifolia (and many other Lavandula species), a well-known scent to everyone, recognizable and soothing. Lavender relaxes and releases tension. It has a warmth to it, which is more noticeable the more you take or the longer you take it. The flowers are the part that are most…

We’re back to our apothecary shelf herb profile tour! This week we have a pair of herbs who both support respiratory function. They demonstrate two types of heat: pungency and the hot aromatics. The root of elecampane, Inula helenium, taste in a way we fondly refer to as “peppery mud”. This herb is fantastic for…

We’re almost moved! This week our episode is about the herbs we’ve kept on the shelves so that we have them available every day. These are plants that are helping us get through the physical exertion, dust!, and stress of packing & moving. We talk all about why we love them in this episode, and…

One of our habits as herbalists and teachers is to avoid the word “use” with reference to plants. We don’t say “I use meadowsweet for headaches” or “I use Japanese knotweed for Lyme disease”. We don’t say “I use chamomile for stomach cramps” or even “I use ginger as a stimulating diaphoretic”. And when students…

Yellow leaves, undeveloped fruit, long “leggy” stems between the leaf nodes – these are some of the key signs of a plant under stress. But if you’ve never met this species before, you might not know something’s off! Other signs are not so visible, and require you to know the plant stand for a season…

We’re back! We had a bit of an interruption in our podcasting schedule, and we’re sorry! We’re moving to our “forever home” very soon, and the podcast took a back burner to online course production work. But we’ve got a plan! This episode and the next two constitute a mini-series on herbalism and climate change.…