Herbs, the IMB and Master Jon Gardener

ANOTHER LIFE: A gusty close to May left the lanes dusted with confetti: petals of hawthorn flung from extravagantly bridal hedges. I thought of the great drifts of these petals - kilo after kilo - heaped and sifted in a herbalist's drying shed in Co Meath: good for all things to do with an ageing heart.

The boreen is in surging, therapeutic growth. Hawthorn holds tannins and saponins, procyanidines, trimethylamine, flavonoid glycosides. In the damp ditch below it, meadowsweet is brewing up its creamy summer froth of salicylates, a natural aspirin for fevers. Cleavers, clambering up the bank on Velcro fronds, is nondescript but reliably diuretic, its complex chemistry taking the piss as gently as couch grass, dandelion, horsetail, yellow-starred agrimony.

Leaving aside kitchen herbs in their row of beachcombed fish-boxes, most of the herbs in my life are of the soothing, cheering sort: home-grown lovage, mint and lemon balm for teas, summer woodruff steeped in wine. From such blessed self-sufficiency, I watch the efforts of the Irish Medicines Board and its Scientific Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products to tease out the unruly tendrils of phytotherapy and pharmacognosy. They must decide where plant medicine begins and ends and how much of it needs regulation and quality control.

Their early action on St John's wort, a herbal anti-depressant and alternative to Prozac, did not augur well. The IMB made it a prescription-only drug, barred from the counters of health-food stores because it can interact badly with some drugs, such as warfarin, and the oral contraceptive pill. Moreover, said the board, depression was too serious for self-diagnosis and self-medication. This was even more depressing to customers who had been gratefully managing their mood for years without bothering their GP. By next year, the global market for herbal medicine will be worth more than €7 billion, so the restriction of St John's wort to sale in chemists' shops had, in some eyes, just a hint of a tincture of conspiracies to come. But the IMB insists it has no bias towards any sector of the medicines industry, and its ad hoc Scientific Committee has included herbalists and even aromatherapists in framing the proposed licensing controls (find them at the IMB's website, http://www.imb.ie).

More than 2,000 products will be vetted for sale over the counter, in regulations that have to mesh with the EU's own Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products, due out this year. But what is a "traditional" product? The EU wants it to mean 30 years of continuous use somewhere in the member-states, or 30 years elsewhere and 15 in the EU. The IMB and its science committee think this could discriminate, for example, against herbal medicines from Chinese and Indian cultures, newly introduced in Europe.

The popular appeal of herbs is still infused somewhat with the mystery and romance of ancient herbals by John Gerard, Nicholas Culpepper and others, with their striking woodcuts and often improbable claims. There has been little to speak for the early Irish experience, but a medieval poem, reproduced in a beautiful book from Dublin's Strawberry Tree Press, offers the earliest gardening manual in the English language, inscribed on 22 leaves of vellum at a monastery in the Pale some 600 years ago.

The Virtues of Herbs of Master Jon Gardener is an elegant collectors' item, (170 hand-bound copies at €280 each) in which the poem is eased into accessible - if not exactly flowing - English, with an extensive plant-by-plant commentary by botanist Charles Nelson and a dozen, delicately tipped-in watercolours by Wendy Walsh, Raymond Piper, Frances Poskitt and others.

Master Jon Gardener was one of three Johns who looked after the kitchen gardens of Windsor Castle in the 14th century and made a fair fist of medieval doggerel which combined hints on growing such food plants as "worts" - not Herb John but colewort cabbage - with cultivation of herbs that "helpeth man to leech". Some had additional virtues: "Of rosemarine she took six pound,/And ground it well in a stound,/And bathed her thrice every day/ . . . So fresh to be she then began,/She coveted coupled be to man." Of several contemporary manuscript versions of the poem, this one, Charles Nelson speculates, was written by or for a physician attached to an Irish monastery. In recent centuries it was sold three times and ended in the Wellcome Historical Library, where its fine scrollings in purple and scarlet still sparkle on the folios.

"All of the herbs of Ireland," it promised, "Here thou shalt know them every one." It actually lists about 80, which still gives plenty of scope for what the foreword calls, discordantly, "infotainment" and the dozen very lovely paintings of rose and waterlily, fern and primrose and the like.

CHARLES Nelson probably knows more of the history of plant-use in Ireland than anybody else, and his borrowings from Gerard and Geoffrey Grigson are complemented by the herbals of early botanist-physicians in Ireland such as Caleb Threlkeld and John Keogh. Plants such as henbane, a potent poison in the wrong hands, are still regularly found growing around our Norman ruins.

The pages on henbane do, indeed, carry a disclaimer of responsibility "for any illness or death or other harmful effects resulting from the handling or use of any of the plants mentioned in this book" - a nervous note repeated in its editor's final caution. In his discussion of valerian, he omits, rather oddly, its wide modern use as a (rather smelly) soporific, but he does raise an eyebrow at a folk remedy that spoke of henbane as a cure for insomnia.

No one who can splash out €280 for a lovely piece of book-making is likely, one hopes, to need to save on doctors' fees. Apply to Strawberry Tree (Jon Gardener) at 18, Woodbine Drive, Dublin 5.