A Cure for All Ills ; Find the Remedies to Turn Your Garden Into a Medicine Cabinet, Says Pattie Barron

Summary

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PLANTS are potent, whether they grow halfway up the Himalayas or in a Wandsworth window box. What you can buy from the chemist -- throat lozenge, headache pill, tummy soother -- you may well be able to make at home, in a different form but using the same active ingredients. "Think of your back garden as a free pharmacy," says Kew-trained ethnobotanist James Wong, who, in his BBC2 TV series and book of the same name, Grow Your Own Drugs, offers simple plant remedies to cure low-grade ailments such as flatulence (Four Winds tea made with mint, chamomile, fennel and caraway), sore gums (tooth powder with sage leaves and sea salt) and hangovers (whizz together kiwi fruit and feverfew).

In Malaysia and Singapore, where Wong grew up, using plants as remedies is nothing new; these days, though, we have lost touch with this kind of hands-on approach. "People are conditioned to think you have to trek to the Amazon to find a rare plant and then you have to hand it into a Swiss pharmaceutical institute so it can be turned into a drug," says Wong, "but this is a healthcare system that has evolved from cultures that didn't have access to any medical healthcare."

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A Cure for All Ills ; Find the Remedies to Turn Your Garden Into a Medicine Cabinet, Says Pattie Barron

To cynics, Wong points out that more than 50 per cent of the top 50 drugs used today, including digitalis, morphine and penicillin, are derived from plants, and of the leading drugs for cancer...

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