Grow Your Own Medicine: 10 herbs to add to your garden this year
Hey dream weavers and plant lovers. How’s your year going? I've been joyfully busy with doing the projects that I've been instructed to do this year from the Earth. I've been doing my Dreamweaver Circle teacher training course, my first cohort, which is going so beautifully. I am deeply loving getting to share what I've gathered with these beautiful souls on how to hold, create and sustain safe, loving, kind, soulful space for dream weaving. We’re learning how to help folks to grow soul for their own lives, their communities, and for the world at large. I've also been working hard on a project with my beautiful friend, colleague, and sister Kimberly Gallagher, who owns the incredible company Learning Herbs, on a course called Rhythms and Relationships, a Feminine Way into Herbalism. That's going to be available in September of 2026, which I'm really excited about because I don't yet have an online offering available for entry into the way that I live, walk, breathe, and practice herbalism. So, keep an eye and an ear out for that, and in the meantime check out my Dreamweaver’s Foundations Course and Herbal Dreamers Courses, both available in my new monthly membership. We’re growing really fast in that space, and there are a lot of exciting things coming up there.
I hope you have exciting things coming up in your life as well. I know, deep in my bones, that if you are listening to the heartbeat of Mother Earth, then you are hearing her call, her summons, her request from all of us to jump up, rise up, get our hands, our hearts and our voices involved doing our part in creating and weaving the future in this pivotal, powerful time. So, from my heart to yours, thank you for all that you are doing. Whether that is raising children or caring for the elderly, working a high-level corporate job, growing food, making medicine, working as a healer, creator, builder, plumber or any other number of things…Thank you for doing your part. Thank you for your walk, for your work. We need you! I am grateful that you are here, that you are turning your gaze in the direction of the dreams of the healing plants and of Mother Earth herself.
When your gaze turns in these directions, it is my experience and belief, the healing that flows through your walk, your work, and your given life stream is magnified. So thank you!
Grow Potent Medicine: Embrace the Wild Gardening Approach
I want to dive right into talking about growing your own herbal medicine at home. Why? Right now, it is spring and it is the time to start planning for and planting your medicinal herb garden. Growing medicinal herbs is really not that hard, and there's an important reason why, and here is that reason: Plants manufacture certain chemicals that we might call terpenes, alkaloids, or essential oils, for the purpose of helping them face stressors that they are experiencing in their life. For example, if a plant is being invaded by other plants, has low amounts of water or nutrients, it is under stress. When the plant is experiencing those stressors, it causes them to manufacture more of these biochemical constituents because they help to increase the plant's survivability and adaptability. It just so happens that those same constituents that the plant manufacturers, in order to help itself face the stressors that it is facing, are also the constituents that are medicinally acting in our human bodies. So, the excellent news for those of us that want to grow medicinal herbs, especially those of us that might not consider ourselves to have the greenest green thumb, is that you don't want to pamper your medicinal plants.
The tactic taken in growing medicinal herbs is often called wild gardening, where we're really trying to mimic the wild the way that these plants grow in nature. We’re not planting them in straight rows, weeding them, fertilizing them, or providing them with ample water. If we do provide them with that constant care, they might actually not produce the medicinal qualities we are looking for as well. When I first started studying 20 years ago, there was a belief system that was wild harvested plants are stronger. Wild-harvested plants are stronger, wild harvested plants are stronger; they contain that spirit of the wild.
Unfortunately, in these times, we have asked far too much of the plant Kingdom, and it is far more ethical and reciprocal to grow our medicine instead of taking from the wild. So, we can mimic this wild spirit by adopting a wild approach to our gardening. Meaning, you don't need to overly pamper your medicinal herbs. You don't need to provide them with significant amounts of water or soil amendments. You want to let them interplant, open, pollinate, and even allow some weeds to be there.
Let me tell you what my garden looks like. It's called the Garden of Herbs and Dreams and in it I have about 60 to 70 different medicinal plants. It’s my fifth season and I have a short growing season because I live up at almost 2000 feet elevation. Most things don't even start sprouting until May. I do not water my garden, but I do wood chip mulching, which I highly recommend you research and look into if this is not familiar to you. Wood chip mulching is an incredible way of wild organic gardening that mimics nature and reduces the time that you need to spend tending to your garden. Once or twice a year, i provide a thick layer of 6 to 12 inches of wood chips, just as a tree would drop leaves and twigs down to the earth, providing a starting point for humus building up on the forest floor. It also provides weed suppression and water retention. I allow everything to go to seed so that the wisdom of nature can find the place where she wants the motherwort to grow, the saint john's wort to grow, the calendula to grow, etc. She knows best, I’m not exaggerating. It’s these wild-seeded plants that are much more robust and suited than anything I have planted myself. By allowing all of the plants to go to seed, I am also ensuring a steady supply of new seedlings that will be potted up come next year that I can then give away to friends, family and students, and help to spread the medicine.
Don't be shy, don't be nervous and don't be too hard on yourself with your herbal garden…Just start!
All the plants that I'm going to share with you here are very easy to grow: they will grow in many climates and many soil types. They are robust and prolific in their medicinal properties.
#1 Calendula
I'm sure you've seen or heard of calendula, it’s related to marigold. The seeds are seeds are shaped like little crescent moons. It's an annual plant, which means it fulfills its whole life cycle on in one year; however, it is so robust at self-seeding that it really grows like a perennial. Scatter those seeds in your garden, wait until they flower, and then pluck those flowers to be used in your medicine. The more you pick them, the more they will grow. Calendula is one of our strongest vulnerary, or skin healing, soothing and cooling skin care herbs that is often used in oil and turned into salves for all kinds of skin inflictions.
#2 Chamomile
Another self-seeding annual that when established can grow like a perennial is chamomile. Most people know chamomile from sleepy time tea. Chamomile is also a wonderful anti-inflammatory, diaphoretic and digestive and really serves a lot of functions in the home medicine chest.Chamomile’s flower heads that are harvested and dried for teas, oil, tinctures, glycerites, and more.
#3 Mints
Next are a few of the mint family plants, and I'm specifically choosing ones that are not common culinary mints. All of the culinary plants in the mint family, including oregano, marjoram, rosemary, lavender, sage, thyme… all of those are incredible medicinal plants, loaded with essential oils. They are excellent to know about when it comes to things like respiratory stuff, digestive stuff, sore muscles, etc. They are powerful and potent medicines and you probably already have a lot of those at home.
#4 Skullcap
Also in the mint family, skullcap grows and spreads really easily, and it's an amazing nervine plant. It's one of those plants that helps to balance mood and help with emotional stability and all kinds of other things as well.
#5 Motherwort
Another mint family plant is motherwort. She grows very easily, and is very unique looking. Motherwort adds her own layer to the garden, and is a wonderful digestive bitter, nervine, and women's hormonal balancing tonic.
#6 Mugwort
A great one to have and to know about also on my list is mugwort, also a mint. Artemisia vulgaris, the common mugwort, grows really easily, is easy to establish and has so many benefits. My favorite quality is that she is the Dream Weaver, but she is also an amazing smudge, blessing herb and anointing oil. Mugwort is also a great digestive bitter and circulatory stimulant, and is good to have in your medicine cabinet.
#7 Valerian
Valerian roots are used medicinally after the second year of growth. They're so aromatic and provide wonderful nervine, sedative, sleep, pain support that is really great to have in your home medicine chest.
#8 Marshmallow
Another medicinal root is marshmallow. Like valerian, you can harvest those roots at year 2. They're very prolific and have this yummy carbohydrate constituent called mucilage that makes a slime-like substance that is so soothing and healing.
#9 Oregon Grape
You can get at most nursery stores now, and it naturalizes really easily into the landscape. The roots of Oregon grape have a constituent called berberine that has been well researched and has a lot of good immune supporting antimicrobial effects in the body.
#10 St. John’s Wort
Another that grows really well, and might even be growing wild in your area. However, it can be hard to find wild St John’s wort that is not growing next to a busy road. Since it grows so easily in the garden that’s a great place to tend to it and harvest flowers for your tinctures and oils.
Unlock the Healing Power of Plants: Simple Medicine Making
If you just added those 10 plants into your garden-scape, not only will it bring visual diversity, energetic diversity and biodiversity, but you'll add medicine into your home for your family. Check out my blog post on the basics of herbal medicine making to learn all sorts of things you can do with the bodies of these beautiful beings. Herbal medicine making is so much easier than most people think. For whatever reason, lots of folks think that growing and making medicine for your family is hard and that you have to know a lot in order to do it. I'm here to tell you that that's not true. Likely just a few generations back, your ancestors all had basic knowledge of how to grow, harvest and prepare a handful of plants into medicine for their families. That capacity is available in you too.
So, give those plants a place in your garden. Don’t pamper them. They’ll grow into beautiful plants that you can use to help your families and, ultimately, help the world. In fact, that’s one of their jobs. It's my belief in this creation that all species have their own role to play. The plant kingdom are healers. They heal the land, animals, and us. They heal our bodies, spirits, and souls. The more that we can bring them into our gardens, our kitchens, and our lives, the more healing that we can access.
I hope that you add one of these plants to your garden this year. Even one is HUGE. If you just add calendula and you learn how to make an infused oil, then you have you have your family's first aid, skin soothing itchies, bug bites and scrapes covered….and that's big. Not to mention the deeper reweaving power that calendula will be doing on your mind and spirit. So get out there, get your hands dirty and play and co create with the plants.
Blessed be your gardening. You're tending and you're weaving this year, dear ones.
