Did you know that medicinal plants and their derivatives are called "simple"? Man has always studied them: two thousand years before Christ, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chinese and the Indians all codified the use and properties of hundreds of plants on parchment and papyrus. All these notes were structured by Greek scholars like Theophrastus, and Romans like Pliny the Elder. He was the first to combine the disciplines of botany and medicine, even though the first was overlooked for a long time. It had to wait for the Renaissance, the Maritime Republics and the drug trade before coming back into fashion and evolving into what is now herbal medicine, the subject that deals with knowledge, collection, preparation and the “simple” products derived from medicinal plants.
The plants you see before you are not just lovely to look at. Their flowers, their leaves, the lining of their bark conceal great treasures. They are the medicinal herbs: plants that contain active principles that man has been able to extract and use for medicinal, cosmetic and culinary purposes, as well as to make distillates...