The Magic of Herbs

INTRODUCTION

Iwas four years old when I discovered the medicinal use of herbs. Suspected of having caught worms from the family cat, I was made to drink a brew composed of broom, bilberry leaves and wormwood. (The cat was spared the medicine and left to harbour worms in peace.) From then on throughout my childhood I was dosed with other herbs whenever illness threatened. Their taste was rarely pleasant, but at least they worked. So well, in fact, that at an early age I resolved to learn all I could about them.

Here I was fortunate, because we then lived in a rural part of Wales where people trusted herbs more than they did the modern drugs prescribed by doctors. And among the herbal experts people went to see was a good friend of my father's, a widower named Mr. James Tan'rallt.

Mr. James kept a farm on Plynlimon, a desolate range of hills just east of Aberystwyth. To my young eyes he seemed a larger-than-life character: tall, enormously stout and clad always in brown tweed, he had what my mother claimed was the foulest tongue in Wales. When he spoke in her presence, she invariably put her hands across her mouth, as if willing him to close his own. Once I asked her why she never put her hands over her ears, which seemed more appropriate in the circumstances. That would be rude, she replied, and besides, I'd miss what he was saying.

And this was the point, for among the oaths and imprecations there was wisdom to be found. Here was a man who knew the countryside and all its secrets. People from neighbouring farms consulted him whenever they or their animals were ill, for he knew which plants to prescribe for everything from colic to the evil eye. Indeed, his knowledge of plants was extraordinary, although he probably knew the names of not more than half a dozen. But whereas any botanist might tell you that the lesser celandine was a member of the Ranunculaceae family and the possessor of three sepals and numerous stamens, my father's friend knew that this plant was ruled by Mars and provided in its root a sovereign remedy for piles and other rectal disorders. (Not that the foulest tongue in Wales would have put it quite as delicately as that.)

From Mr. James I learned most of what I now know about the use of herbs. He himself inherited this knowledge from his father, who in turn acquired it from his own father before him. Three or four generations previously the James family had lived in Carmarthenshire, and Mr. James's proudest boast was that he was a direct descendent of the great Welsh herbal doctors known as Meddygon Myddfai.

An explanation is required here, for these Myddfai doctors are not known widely outside Wales, and, ultimately, it is their herbal learning that permeates this book.

Their story starts nearly eight hundred years ago on a farm near the village of Llanddeusant, where there lived a widow and her only son, Gwyn. Every morning the young man drove his mother's cattle up the Black Mountain, where ample pasture could be found. One day, as the cows were grazing by a lake called Llyn-y-Fan Fach, Gwyn saw at the water's edge a maiden so beautiful that he fell in love with her at once. For want of something better to say he offered her a little bread and cheese, but, laughing, she declined his food and dived into the lake. Only then did it dawn on Gwyn that this woman was a nymph.

Back home the boy's mother listened to his story and suggested that on the next encounter he should offer unbaked bread to his fairy sweetheart. This he did, and at the same time begged her to marry him. But she refused, saying, Your bread is unbaked. For that reason I shall not have you.

After this Gwyn and his mother hit upon a compromise, and when the nymph appeared next the bread he had to offer was half-baked. With it went the same proposal of marriage which, to his delight, the girl accepted, subject to one condition. This was that she would leave him if he struck her three times. Gwyn readily agreed to this condition, whereupon the nymph, whose name was Nelferch, dived into the water, reappearing seconds later with another nymph, her double, and a dignified old man.

The old man, father of both girls, said he would approve the match provided Gwyn could distinguish Nelferch from her sister. This our young hero succeeded in doing, having noticed that Nelferch's sandals were fastened differently from those of her twin. The wedding thus took place and, as her dowry, Nelferch brought with her from the lake all the cows she could count in one breath. Soon afterwards she and her new husband made their home in Esgair Llaethwy, a farm not far from the hamlet of Myddfai, six miles north of Llyn-y-Fan. Here three sons were born to them.

One morning years later, when Gwyn and his wife were on their way to visit friends, Nelferch complained of tiredness. Her husband thereupon suggested that she should catch a horse from the next field while he ran home to fetch some reins. When he returned Nelferch was still standing where he had left her and Gwyn gave her a gentle tap on the shoulder. Thus was struck the first blow. The second followed some years later, when Nelferch began crying at a wedding. Again it was no more than a tap, but the damage was done. The third and last blow occurred at a funeral, when Nelferch burst into hysterical laughter, and her husband, to bring her to her senses, slapped her on the cheek. Sadly she said farewell to him, kissed her three sons, now grown to manhood, and returned with her dowry to the depths of Llyn-y-Fan.

Only once did Nelferch reappear from beneath the lake, and that was to her eldest son, Rhiwallon. To him she disclosed that he and all his male descendants would become physicians, and to launch him on his new career, she gave him a sack of herbs and advice on how to use them.

This story of the lady from the lake may or may not be true. What cannot be denied is that there exists a thirteenth-century manual written in Welsh which contains up to nine hundred herbal recipes, many of which are described in the pages that follow. All nine hundred are alleged to be the work of Rhiwallon and his three sons, Cadwgan, Gruffydd and Einion. These, then, were the original physicians of Myddfai, and it is their successors who have practised herbalism for centuries in Wales. One of the last of them was a certain Rhys ap Williams of Aberystwyth, who died in 1842 and who, the story goes, was a relation of my father's friend Mathonwy James, Tan'rallt.

Tan'rallt Farm—the name means Below the Hill—was situated in a mountain valley, too high and too bleak for anything other than sheep-farming. Along one side the Forestry Commission had seen fit to plant some fir trees, but few had managed to survive. Otherwise nothing grew there except grasss and a protective clump of alders near the house. This whitewashed building, together with some ramshackle outhouses, can still be seen from the road that crosses Eisteddfa Gurig on its way to Ponterwyd and thence to Aberystwyth. By now, however, the house lies empty and its roof, I am told, has fallen in.

Despite his wonder-working reputation, Mr. James was not a prosperous man. Or, if he was, he never showed it. On entering his house one passed into a murky darkness which two little windows strove in vain to lighten. Gradually, as one's eyes grew accustomed to the shade, one observed the squalor all around. Downstairs—I never saw the loft—a large room served as a living-room and kitchen, but only a tiny space around the range was habitable, the rest being filled with rubbish. Here, old harness, rusting shotguns and a spade or two could usually be discerned among the stacks of peat and piles of Farmers Weekly. And, of course, above one's head there hung the herbs, great bunches of broom, loosestrife, sage and comfrey, all drying in their own sweet time.

In this room, seated on the settle, I watched old Mr. James prepare and mix his herbs. For Mrs. Price, the Post, who suffered from the dropsy, a pinch of larkspur, two of nettle and a good handful of tansy, the lot to be infused in water and taken three times daily. For old Moses Jones's cough, a mixture of colt's foot, liquorice and honey. And as a pick-me-up for Lizzie Hughes, some yarrow and a little rue, to be swallowed in a glass of milk at 11 o'clock each morning. And all the time Mr. James would tell me what he was preparing, and why he chose one herb in preference to another. There was much for a young lad like myself to learn, but my teacher was a good one.

In this book you can join me on that settle and together we can learn the ancient lore of herbs. For none of what now follows is my own invention; it is simply what I learned from a remarkable old man. Nor was it his invention either since, as we have just seen, it belongs to a rich tradition stretching back to the legendary Myddfai doctors, and, perhaps through them, to Nelferch, nymph of Llyn-y-Fan. Such ancestry is appropriate, for herbs have something truly magical about them. And, of course, they work!

Chapter One

BOTANICAL MEDICINE

Herbalism is perhaps the earliest form of medicine. In human beings the knowledge that plants can cure disease is probably instinctive, for even animals seek out the appropriate herb when unwell. For thousands of years medicine depended almost exclusively on flowers, barks or leaves and only recently have synthetic drugs replaced them, some of these carbon copies of chemicals identified in plants. Well into the last century pharmaceutical companies sponsored expeditions to remote corners of the world in search of medicinal plants, just as Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (1479–1458 BCE) dispatched court botanists on similar missions. Today, clinical experience repeatedly vindicates the confidence our forebears placed in many of the plants they traditionally favoured.

The study and therapeutic use of plants is by definition the concern of herbalism. It is, as I said, no less the concern of orthodox medicine, which puts similar faith in the curative value of certain plants. And yet, although the continued use of plant remedies in standard medical practice demonstrates the worth of herbal therapy, herbalism itself is often regarded nowadays as a quaint aberration, fit only for quacks, fools and hypochondriacs. From the outset, therefore, we had better ask ourselves in what way herbalism differs from respectable pharmacology.

The answer herbalists would give is that their method is more natural than that followed by their rivals. They imply, like advocates of healthy eating, that natural somehow equals good—a dubious implication, if only because of the difficulty in deciding what is natural and what is not. After all, a herbalist who grubs about in hedges is really no more natural than a chemist at work in his laboratory. Nor are the botanical infusions of the one necessarily any better than the medicines of the other: both are natural and both may do good.

In my view, herbal medicines are more natural only in the sense that their preparation is less complicated than that of most modern drugs. In traditional herbalism a plant is simply eaten raw or else infused in alcohol or water. In orthodox medicine, on the other hand, the same plant may be subjected to umpteen chemical processes before its active ingredient is extracted, refined and made ready for consumption. Instead of more natural, therefore, we should perhaps say that herbal-ism is the simpler, even cruder, method of the two.

The advantage of the orthodox method is that it identifies and then employs only the beneficial part of each plant. (This substance may then be copied in order to produce a synthetic alternative that is cheaper and more readily available.) Another advantage is that the active ingredient can be administered in concentrated form, thus ensuring that it acts quickly and with maximum effect. But this has its drawbacks for by their swift and certain action many such drugs cure illness without requiring more of the patient than an immediate physiological response. As a result, the patient's collaboration in his or her treatment, whether conscious or not, is kept to a minimum.

Herbs, on the other hand, may achieve results more slowly, and in that time the body has a chance to help them in their fight to cure its ills. Thanks to its involvement, the body does not lose—from want of practice—its natural ability to heal itself. In this way, too, it builds up a resistance to disease¹ and learns how to cope with sickness on those occasions when herbs or other medicines are unavailable.

Apart from these differences in method, the development of medicine may help us better understand why herbalism is relegated to its outer fringes. The earliest physicians were herbalists and one of