I love this time of the year! I love the lighter days and the joy of emerging life everwhere. New green shoots, lambs in the fields, a rising vitality of filling baskets with wild spring greens and soon a brand new baby nephew due this weekend. Filming for weeds and wild medicine last week, Danielle and I giggled with excitement as we ran off into the woods, listening to the birdsong as we tapped birch, nibbled the fresh new shoots of ground elder and grabbed handfuls of wild garlic and sorrel. I imagine this is how it would have felt for our ancestors too. The joy of gathering wild spring greens for food is nothing new, and the taste of them is something most modern people have never experienced, to them these foods would have been familiar and welcoming. Did they feel crave for the taste of fresh nettle infusion as we were doing now as mother earth gives us just when we need? Our ancestors were emerging from a hard winter of shortage and being cold; we were emerging from a long hard winter of lockdown and social isolation.

Living in our digital, centrally heated homes with 24-hour supermarkets offering fresh strawberries in winter, that can be delivered to our home without ever having to even step outside in the cold to buy, it’s hard to imagine how our ancestors would have managed during the winter months, a hundred years ago, never mind thousands of years ago. My grandfather told me once of hungry, bitter winters, living in overcrowded cockroach-infested homes and of all the kids having to wear brown paper sewn together under their clothes to keep warm through winter. He came from the slums of Salford, but wind the clock back a thousand year or more and our ancestors would have found winter just as challenging, relying on the food you could either store, forage or hunt. Winters of survival, slowing down to save energy, huddled together around open smoky heaths with your very large family and animals. Even for a hunter-gatherer family, there would still be problems with finding food and staying warm and healthy where ever you spent the winter, with or without stored food. Disease would have been a problem, as well as, malnutrition, starvation, parasites and even death of those elderly, chronically sick and the very young. How would your body feel after a long nutritionally deficient cold, damp winter in a smoky home?

Imagine stepping out in spring into longer days filled with warm sunshine and surveying the wild newly grown plants. What would you need to survive and to heal yourself? We have a long relationship with the earth and the plants. They were here when we came into existence, and our bodies have adapted to extracting their nutrition and being healed by them. How else would we be here after all this time? Whilst in the western world our lifestyle has changed beyond recognition from that of a hundred years ago, our bodies have not. We still feel the need to slow down in winter, eat heavier richer foods and to sit around something which flickers; either fire or the television. We have the need for celebration, stories and good company. We get colds, flu and viruses in winter, feel sluggish and have aching joints, and stiff muscles. Whilst in the modern world we have lots more food and a greater variety of it too, our diets are even less nutritious, with the addition of chemicals, toxins, pollutants and preservatives. Three thousand BC or the 21st century and we still emerge from winter needing to feel revitalised, detoxified, craving good nutrition and with medicines to help our body recover from whatever virus or illness we have had to deal with that winter. 2020- 2021 is no different as we try to recover from the stress, isolation, and illnesses of the pandemic and lockdown.

*Wild Garlic picking on weeds and wild medicine - Towneley park woods*

Wild Garlic - It seems our native wild plans provide what we need at this time, as they always have done. There is nothing like the smell of spring as you step onto a lush green woodland carpet, take a deep sweet breath of the wild garlic and fill your basket with natures treasure. Wild garlic is the ultimate spring clean, it’s antibacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral anti-parasitic, gut and cardiovascular system supporting medicine that is delicious in foods of all kinds. It cleanses the gut, helps restore healthy gut flora, rids the body of lingering viruses, infection and parasites. Many people think our native wild garlic is less potent than the shop-bought bulbs that we crush into our food. I think not! We can eat this delicious food in copious amounts raw in pesto, chopped into mash or casseroles. It seems to lose its potency when cooked, so even better to eat this delicious pungent taste of spring raw in everything until your car, your kitchen and your breath is filled with its aroma. The fact you excrete the raw garlic taste and smell from your lungs means its deep at work there cleansing and ridding the respiratory tract of any lingering infection.

Dandelion - Get out into your garden on a nice day for some early spring gardening and you may be keen to dig up the newly emerging Dandelion rosettes and roots, lest they grow to form bright yellow dandelion flowers so detested by many gardeners. To a herb lover however, this is another of our amazing spring medicines. Dig up the long roots by all means, but rather than throw them in the compost bin, clean and chop them to make Dandelion coffee, Dandelion and Burdock and as food in casseroles and curries. Dandelion is another spring cleanser. Its slightly bitter taste stimulates the digestive tract and liver as well as being one of the best detoxifiers after a winter inside living on processed food, alcohol and breathing in household chemicals. Combined with burdock for the classic drink and you have two herbs in the dark deliciousness of a healthy soft drink that can help remove toxins from deep inside the cells of the body, take them to be broken down by the liver and out through the digestive tract and kidneys. Dandelion root can help to alkalise our body, reduce inflammation, remove toxins and combined with the leaf and much other spring greens can help provide the nutrition our body needs to get back to health. The root is also a great balancer of blood sugar as well as helping to rebalance hormones.

According to Katrina Blair in the Wild Wisdom of Weeds, the root combined with the leaf, stem, flower and seed can provide all 8 amino acids and is a fantastic nutrition source for the body.

The leaf is delicious as a nourishing but slightly bitter leaf green, Ideal in salads. As kids, we knew this as wet the bed, and old folk memory of its use as a diuretic. I remember as a ward sister many years ago when I did a drug round of always making sure that if a patient was on the diuretic drug frusemide that the doctor always prescribed potassium. Frusemide depleted the body of potassium by its action on the kidney. Mother nature knows this and so she puts potassium in dandelion leave to balance the medicine.

Wait patiently for the flowers and, sharing them with the bees when you pull of the heads you can make Dandelion Bhajis (see our video), and a salve that is great for aching joints and muscles as well as being healing for psoriasis.

Nettles - Its still very early in spring here in the north of England and I’m waiting keenly for enough Nettle and cleavers to harvest. They tend to grow side by side and I am delighted to have them in my garden. They have just about broken through the cold soil and are too tiny to pick so I’m waiting patiently for them to grow and take into my body as teas. Nettle is a super nutrient and like the rest of our weeds, we have been told to pull them up and buy vitamin pills and superfoods instead from halfway around the globe. We have growing around us one of the most nutritionally dense foods in the world and we can have it for free. It’s full of vitamins, A, C, some Bs, thiamine and K. Iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chromium, copper, protein, phosphorous, selenium, riboflavin, silicone, Whilst we live in a society of food abundance, our modern-day diets lack sufficient nutrition for health and many medical conditions can be caused by insufficient vitamins and minerals. Nettles provides the body with the nutrition it needs to heal and function correctly. Can you imagine how it would have been for ancestors to put nettle in food and feel its vitality? It’s a heating food and like many of the spring wild foods like mustards and wild garlic, they are great forwarming a sluggish winter body and awakening it to spring. Nettles are another great cleanser, anti-inflammatory and good for supporting an adrenal gland tired after the ravages of winter survival. I find it so amazing that as nettles grow and the pollen rises, nettles can be mother natures answer to hay fever especially it combined with Elderflower and Plantain. For spring babies it’s also a great herb for supporting new mums healing a pregnancy tired body and increasing breast milk.

A good way to take nettles into your body is to make a deep infusion. Take a handful of fresh nettles. Don’t worry about the sting. You can wear gloves and the sting will be neutralised in hot water. Put them in a pan. Cover with hot water and leave covered overnight. The resulting liquid will be deep dark green and you may smell the iron in it. Strain, reheat and drink throughout the day. Your body will love you and crave this powerful nutritious drink.

Cleavers - I have been cultivating a small patch if cleavers in my garden for tea, but have also secret supplies of big, sticky clumps known only to me that I harvest in profusion for creams and lotions to use all year with my patients. I have a beauty therapist sister who closely keeps a jealous guard of my stock of cleavers oil as she likes it to use her own skin. When I go walking I love to squeeze the refreshing green juice from it an lick it from my hands.

Cleavers is often known as sticky willies or goosegrass and grows alongside nettles. Cleavers is another of the deep spring cleansers. I see Nettle as cleansing the blood, wild garlic the gut, the lungs and lingering infections, Dandelion and Burdock the cells and the liver; and Cleavers is a herb for cleansing the lymphatic system. Its not as cut and dried as that as every herbalist knows, but its a way of making it simple and seeing how amazing these herbs are in spring. Cleavers seems to sweep through a clogged up winter infection weary lymphatic system, getting rid of battle-worn dead white cells and debris from infections whilst giving it all a good MOT. Its like the ultimate spring clean for lingering seasonal infections that just haven’t quite gone. Cleavers seems to brighten up the skin too, helping to cool eczema and any skin irritiations as well as being a diuretic to remove toxins from the body. Traditionally its used to help reduce winter weight gain and is allegedly an aid to dieting and reducing cellulite. I don’t know about that but it does make a great cleansing drink if you put fresh cleavers in a container, add cold water and leave over night. drink the next day with a twist of lime or lemon.

Rewilding with Wild Medicine - Spring

Northern Root Medicine; Angelica