Product Details

Synopsis

Popular author and healing practitioner Nancy Arrowsmith takes readers on a fascinating in-depth exploration of the herbal arts. Arrowsmith's friendly voice and vast knowledge of herbal applications, history, and folklore shine through in this herbalism reference work.

As entertaining as it is practical, this comprehensive illustrated herb guide covers everything from herb gathering prayers and charms to signatures for fifty powerful herbs. Each herb is described in detail, with tips on growing, gathering, drying, and storing these marvelous plants, as well as their culinary virtues, cosmetic properties, medicinal merits, veterinary values, and household applications.

Along with thought-provoking bits of folk history and literary and spiritual references to herbs and nature, this directory includes step-by-step instructions on cooking with herbs and preparing herbal remedies, as well as gardening hints and seed-saving tips.

Publishers Weekly

Arrowsmith's modern herbarium, first published in a German edition, draws on decades of personal experience. Working deeply rather than broadly, she focuses on 50 potent, multitasking herbs commonly found in Europe and North America, divided into sacred, solar and lunar categories. Some cultures, Arrowsmith (A Field Guide to the Little People) says, identified herbs as the "little people" of the plant world, and she encourages a similar respect for their medicinal, cosmetic, culinary, household and ritual virtues. She aims, she says, for a unified and balanced understanding against the modern tendency to isolate particular plant compounds for pharmaceutical purposes. She relates hundreds of ways to use herbs in daily life, with tips on planting, gathering, drying and storing; preparing tinctures, teas, salves, beauty treatments and special cures; treating humans and animals; cooking and baking; and creating nurturing environments. She includes recipes (sorrel fritters, marigold cordials, etc.); poems; quotes from the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton; legends; and describes the magical powers attributed to various herbs. While color photos, rather than the basic line drawings that are here, might better serve aspiring herbalists, this trove of herbal wisdom is a splendid homage to herbariums of the past. (Feb.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Biography

Nancy Arrowsmith (Arizona) is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Kraut & Rüben, Germany’s first organic gardening magazine. She also founded the international seed organization Arche Noah, with the mission to preserve endangered plants. Arrowsmith has a master’s degree in acupuncture and runs her own healing practice in Arizona. She is also the author of the classic A Field Guide to the Little People (Farrar Straus & Giroux).