The Heart and Its Healing Plants
The Heart and Its Healing Plants is inviting title and topic that promises to authorize folklore, a rich source of knowledge about a deeply fascinating organ, our heart.
The Heart and Its Healing Plants: Traditional Herbal Remedies and Modern Heart Conditions by Wolf D. Storl, 2024. Published by Healing Arts Press, a division of Inner Traditions International, Rutland, Vermont. c2009 by AT Verlag. Color and black and white illustrations.
A relevant, yet rather irreverent look at our notions and beliefs about the emotional human heart is offered by Wolf D. Storl, an ethnobotanist and cultural anthropologist.
The author’s point of view includes what is known medically about our hearts, not only today but through the lens of history, as humans have sought to care for this organ and its complex relationship with the mind and the body.
A Spiritual vs a Mechanistic View
The first half of the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read. Topics range from early European traditions and monastic gardens to the more modern perception of the heart as an organ of the body with one purpose. Yet with “the heart as the source of love, and abode of the gods”, there is a rhyme and reason to the heritage of valuing the heart in the ways that we do, even if they are not scientific. Storl asks us to review the past but seeks consideration of the heart’s value as an organ of purpose, with soulfulness or appreciation of the human connection to love.
The author characterizes the illnesses of the physical and emotional heart, which have increasing meaning for us as we look at aging or any form of heart disease. In modern times, we have left most of the pertinent information about our physiology to medical scientists. I think Storl wants readers to take some responsibility for what we accept as truth. For who’s to say that scientists have to remind us of our souls as well as mend what breaks under stress?
Storl deftly communicates a between-the-lines a kind of ironic struggle between science and the delicate matter of the heart as keeper of the soul. He says these days we are the recipients of cultural ill-will against the soul-fulness of the heart, and asks finally if heart patients need a psychiatrist?
A Materia Medica
The book’s second half is devoted to heart-healing plants from folklore aw well as those with the components of chemistry we’ve learned to associate with heart medicine, like cardiac glycosides and alkaloids, etc. In this materia medica, color photographs of the plants in flower allow us to see the kinds of plants and perhaps awaken familiarity with those Storl has chosen to highlight. Maybe you’ve seen foxglove, black hellebore, Queen of the Night (Selenicereus spp.), Yellow Oleander, and others growing in gardens or by the wayside, or on semi-rural land. Of the more traditional heart medicine plants, Storl points to Borage, Violet, Lemon Balm, Rosemary, St. John’s Wort, and Vervain, etc.
Whether the plants are seen as traditional substances for the heart or the ones from which isolated drugs are extracted as medicine, all are described with medicinal and historical uses.
A reader, being very well-versed in plant knowledge, may pick up much about the cultural understanding around these revered plants. Or if not much at all is known about the particular plants described, the reader might value the culturally rich European background in which myth and truth explain how humans care for their most important organ.
I think The Heart and Its Healing Plants is a must-read for herbalists and those intrigued with cultural influence in the age of digital information and influence.
