02/01/2026
What Our Grandparents Knew About Healing; And Why We Forgot It
Not long ago, healing lived close to home.
A cough was met with honey, herbs, steam.
A cut or rash meant a bath, a poultice, a plant picked from the garden or the edge of the forest.
Our grandparents and ancestors knew how to tend common illness with what grew around them. This knowledge wasn’t niche, it was normal.
Somewhere along the way, much of it was lost.
In our parents’ generation, healing began to move out of the hands of families and into institutions. With the rise of industrialization and pharmaceuticals, power slowly shifted; away from kitchens and gardens, and into clinics, prescriptions, and pills.
And while there have been undeniable medical breakthroughs and life-saving innovations, something else happened quietly alongside them:
A mistrust of plants.
A forgetting of gentle, preventative care.
A belief that healing must come from somewhere else.
Today, more people than ever are living with chronic conditions - IBS, anxiety, diabetes, inflammation.
Our food is grown in depleted soils.
Monoculture farming strips nutrients.
Pesticides disrupt not only ecosystems, but our microbiomes too.
And yet… something is changing.
We’re seeing a return.
A remembering.
A desire for herbalism, for permaculture, for learning what our grandparents took for granted.
People are once again harvesting “weeds” that are actually nutrient-dense foods.
Making simple, potent medicines with their own hands.
Wanting to understand their bodies rather than override them.
The question I hear most is: where do I even begin?
There are so many books. So many courses. So many voices.
So I’ve put together a short, free PDF of my most trusted and foundational herbal reading recommendations the ones I wish everyone started with.
You can download it for free here:
👉 https://share.google/7dT5s1GDJPIRNzgon
Lily of the Herbs BHSc is a herbalist from Warrandyte, Victoria who runs workshops on plant medicine
