Grow Your Own Drugs – S02E06
BBC2 – 27 April 2010
6/6 – Wild Plants
It’s the end of James Wong’s ethnobotanical journey, and he rounds his series off with a look at the plants that have provided a free living pharmacy for thousands of years: wild plants. Taking care to point out the perils of picking in the wild, James travels to Northern Ireland, where he harvests seaweed for a luxurious seaweed body scrub, forages for elderberries and turns them into an anti-viral jam to help ward off colds and flu, and tries to offer hayfever sufferers some relief with his nettle tea.
He also seeks out a tiny wild flower called eyebright, and uses it to make a compress to soothe tired and itchy eyes. For the green-fingered, James demonstrates how you can make your own mini wild flower meadow in a tiny back garden, and offers some historical and scientific background to the plants he uses.
Ah James if I knew you were needing a load of nettles you could have had all the evil beasts that I dug up from my garden last year. Now, I have none, and despite their health giving benefits, I’m glad I don’t have a garden full of six foot high stinging nettles with miles of spaghetti roots as thick as electrical cables in my garden any more. Nettle tea, nettle soup, nettle dye (ah The Good Life and the loom) it’s all good but not for me. I can get plenty in the wild if I want some (which I don’t) Actually I have tried nettle soup and tea before and it really must be “an acquired taste” and one I just don’t have. Now elderflower and elderberries on the other hand, I would love to get my hands on some of those! I have a desperate urge to try my hand at making wine and elderflower/berry is top of my list, and of course jam as well, but wine aah.
Seaweed again is something that I know has great properties and I wish I could make some beauty products out of that but I think the local stuff is a bit polluted.
