My grandmother knew plants. Her grandmother knew more. Somewhere in the generations between them and me, much of that knowledge got interrupted — by displacement, by the slow erosion of practices that did not translate into dominant culture, by the particular violence of a history that discouraged Black women from taking up space as healers.
Herbalism, for me, is not a hobby or a profession. It is a retrieval.
What It Means to Learn Ancestral Plant Medicine
There is a difference between learning herbalism from a textbook and learning it in relationship with a lineage. I have done both, and they feel different in my body. The textbook gives me Latin names and contraindications and evidence-based dosing protocols. The lineage gives me something harder to articulate — a sense of plants as beings with their own histories, their own relationships to the people who have worked with them over centuries.
Curanderismo, one of the traditions I have studied, holds that the healer does not choose the plants. The plants choose the healer. I thought that was metaphorical until I spent enough time in the garden to notice that I kept coming back to the same plants, the same textures, the same relationships, regardless of what I thought I was looking for that day.
"The garden is not a pharmacy. It is a conversation that takes years to learn how to have."
Duafe House and the Teaching Garden
The learning garden at Duafe House grows plants from multiple traditions: African Diasporic medicine plants, Völva Stav-adjacent northern European herbs, plants with deep roots in Curanderismo. Some of them overlap across traditions. Calendula, for instance, appears in healing systems across continents — which is itself a kind of teaching about the universality of the body's needs.
What I grow, I use. What I use, I teach. Community workshops at Duafe House include hands-on time in the garden — learning to identify, to harvest with care, to preserve in a way that honors the plant's intelligence.
For the Beginners
If you have ever felt drawn to plants — to gardens, to herbal teas, to the particular quiet of something growing — I want to encourage you to follow that. You do not need to have lineage knowledge to begin. You do not need to know the Latin names or the biochemistry. You need curiosity and a willingness to slow down enough to pay attention.
Start with one plant. Learn it over a full year. Watch how it changes across seasons. Notice what it asks of you and what it offers in return. That single relationship will teach you more about healing than many textbooks combined.
I offer herbalism workshops at Duafe House throughout the year. If you are interested, reach out. There is almost always room for one more person who wants to learn how to grow what was lost.