Introduction to Materia Medica

It’s hard to express the joy that I experience in working with plants. I imagine this is the case for many cultures who did not allow their relationship to the nonhuman world to be severed by progress, civilization, capitalism, and so on. I have no doubt that this joy arises from the relationships I work to deepen with every plant I encounter, and the space to wonder about all that plants offer which we have yet to discover.

One of my favorite ways to honor these deepening relationships is by working on my personal materia medica. It gives me the opportunity to connect with individual herbs through in-depth study and to organize the multitudinous insights, experiences, and epiphanies related to the herbs I encounter into plant monographs that I may refer to over the course of my life and practice as an herbalist.

Of course, plants are magical, complex, and mysterious. Their virtues cannot be reduced or simplified to the squiggly lines of text that, these days, only tend to exist as 0s and 1s rearranged back into their original forms on a screen. But we are not aiming for reduction or complete knowledge here, we are aiming to support our relationship to plants and the interconnectedness among them.

In this way, I think of my materia medica as more of a journal or book of poems than an encyclopedia. That is, it speaks to shared symbols and ideas in both the realm of culture (including latin names, ecological terms, botanical terms, horticultural terms, energetic systems) and the realm of spirit and soul (related to the poesis of our own experience of the plants we encounter).

From this perspective, the space we devote to writing and putting together our materia medica can be playful and joyous, and doesn’t have to be entirely stuffy and academic. This is where the sweet spot is, and I hope you discover it in writing your own materia medica.