Making Your Home Herbal Apothecary

 I’ve written at length about my childhood aspirations to be an herbalist. These early fantasies dreamed up from the embrace of a favorite apple tree were no doubt romantic and in some ways impractical. But they also held a seed of long-lasting truth that continues to inform how I shape my path as an herbalist and lifelong lover of plants.Mugwort smoking 

Since earliest memory, I pictured myself in a tumbledown cottage or rustic cabin at the edge of the woods, with a weedy patch of garden interwoven with the surrounding forest, the inside of the cottage strung with bundles of drying plants, and the shelves packed with jars of remedies, mushrooms, and peculiar flowers. Happily, I’ve managed to manifest my childhood dream apothecary in the wild mountains of New Mexico.Mugwort smoking 

The pantry and cabinets in my tiny cottage are packed tight with all manner of wonders—paper bags of carefully dried herbs, antique jars of oil infusing with aromatic plants, blue-tinted bottles of bioregional bitters, stoppered decanters of herbed wines, glass vials of powdered styptics, and sealed canisters of weedy tea blends. There’s a spice chest in the closet, sealed buckets of red root and reishi in the pantry by a bag of rice, decoction pots stacked by the Dutch oven, and every size of funnel hanging next to the spatulas. Mugwort smoking  The liquor shelf is populated not only with my favorite peaty libations of bourbon and scotch but also with the local spirits and southern specialties I prefer to use in my remedies—smoky mezcal crafted in New Mexico and the apple-scented moonshine of my youth. My kitchen and my apothecaries are one and the same. They so clearly reflect the earthy, commonsense approach to herbalism I most enjoy. 

The Dressing of the Apothecary

Not everyone’s vision of the ideal apothecary will be the same. There’s a variety of aesthetics, contents, and structure available. Mine is clearly marked by my southern upbringing, my love of the mountains I call home, and my practice’s peculiar blend of the weedy and the otherworldly. But there are as many ways to envision and create an apothecary as there are herbalists. Mugwort smoking  What tends to remain consistent is the high quality of plants and their clearly prized status.

The organization is also a priority. Every herbalist is likely to know the frustration of searching for the one perfect formula that happens to be in an unmarked mason jar, shoved into some dusty corner for safekeeping. Such events are likely to teach us the value of storage by alphabetical order of botanical names and other such commonsense practices that seem tedious in the beginning but soon become an all-too-obvious necessity. Mugwort smoking 

Whether home, clinical, or retail in nature, our herbal apothecaries exist for the storage, preservation, and distribution of botanically-based remedies. After all, the very word “apothecary” refers to a storehouse, and most any herbalist who has been about this business for any length of time will know just how important (and how challenging) it can be to make room for their ever-expanding herbal abundance. Mugwort smoking  I’m fairly sure I could personally fill a good-sized pantry with just my favorite oils and fats, and that doesn’t take into account the plants themselves!

The real question here is exactly how to structure and organize one’s apothecary.

I’ve seen shiny, perfectly hygienic, clinical pharmacies that bore a great resemblance to mainstream medical facilities—every ingredient sealed and recorded. I’ve witnessed mobile storehouses with all sorts of special accommodations made for traveling with temperature-sensitive plant matter. Mugwort smoking  And I’ve spent time in local trailers and small adobes where the elderly inhabitants keep their myriad remedies wrapped in brown paper and stored in dresser drawers, bedside tables, or occasionally a roomy TV cabinet. In practical terms, it only matters that the apothecary serves to protect the plants and pleases the owner, not that it fit some standardized mold.