Rachel Landon - Superherbs: The best adaptogens to reduce stress and improve health, beauty and wellness

Published by Piatkus

ISBN: 978-0-349-41601-4

Copyright 2017 Rachel Landon

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Illustrations by Lerryn Korda

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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To my dear mum, Agnes Beryl, and
my family: Charlie, Grace, Lou, Harps
and Otis thank you.

A Bit About Me

When I was a little girl my mum, who was forever practical, would point out all the different leaves and flowers in our garden and along the hedgerows that I could rub on my grazed knees and itchy insect bites. She would make a compress of distilled witch hazel, which she kept in a bottle behind the kitchen radio for all our bumps and bruises I can still remember its astringent smell. She showed me how to crush a dock leaf and rub it on my nettle rash till my skin turned green, making me feel like I had magic at my fingertips.

I loved the connection that these precious interactions brought me and my mum, outside in nature where wed silently pick blackberries along the railway track in the fields behind our house, and build bonfires in the autumn months, checking first for any hibernating hedgehogs. It was a complete contrast to the woman I knew most of the time. Mums life was a tour de force: one was an older mother than most in the 1970s, a successful businesswoman, plus a single mum of four. As a young woman she had lived through the Second World War and had understood the need to be self-sufficient, and somehow, within her incredibly busy life, she still found the time to become a proficient seasonal gardener. Our home was in the North West, a half hours drive from Manchester, and was once a farm and in between the ivy-clad barns, the disused pigsties and the rose garden, she found a plot to grow all our fruit and vegetables in long rows, surrounded by clay borders.

One of my jobs, apart from collecting eggs from Farmer Worsley two doors down, was to go out and pull up potatoes or pick green beans for our tea. This was an idyllic time for me, sitting on my own on the steps outside our back door in the evening summer sun, topping and tailing the stubbly gooseberries and shelling fresh peas from their pods with my thumb, eating more than went into the bowl. Wed spend weekend afternoons netting the raspberries to protect them from the young rooks that nested in the big oaks above. This small knowledge of nature was healing and the catalyst that started my bigger love affair with herbs.

Today I have four children of my own from teenager to baby all with different emotional and practical needs, and I try to support them with herbal preparations, flower remedies, homeopathy and handmade balms. My ten-year-old loves the jars of dried herbs and amber bottles of herbal tinctures, beeswax and essential oils. He thinks its very magical, and although were living in London, I try to show them all wild herbs in the hedgerows every season: nettle leaves and wild garlic in early Spring, yarrow and blackberries in late Summer, and sweet chestnuts and hawthorn berries on short Winter days. I try and keep them connected to their natural environment we just have to look a little bit harder sometimes.

My journey to becoming a herbalist started at home with my mum, our garden and my freedom in the fields behind our house. But there was a detour after my schooling finished that started in London, then moved to Paris where I was based as a fashion model in the early 1990s. I was travelling non-stop and doing the rounds of shows in Paris, London and New York, on and off planes, in and out of airports, hotels and cities, arriving in the dead of night and waking before dawn to catch the light for the photograph.

Most of the time I felt incredibly lonely and overwhelmed, and was living on adrenalin. There were no mobiles or wi-fi, so I would have to rely on public phones in the most unlikely of places to connect with loved ones. Looking back this time was a catalyst for where I am today, but at the time I was fraught with stress. I was in my early twenties and still trying to find my feet as a woman, and this stress and high state of alert started to have an effect on my whole well-being, causing hormonal imbalances, anxiety, panic attacks and digestive problems.

Everyone around me my agents, friends, colleagues and family thought I was lucky to be living such a life, and the guilt for not feeling the same and not being able to enjoy the moment only added to my anxiety. At the time, no one discussed anxiety or panic attacks, especially in the modelling world where vulnerability was portrayed with confidence in 1990s fashion.

Every job became a personal challenge to see how Id cope and when I got through it I was thrilled, and then Id crash; I was exhausted my adrenals were shot. My agency in Paris thought I was mad for not thinking myself so fortunate to have been chosen for influential jobs and didnt understand why I might not be coping, so I decided to try and take stock and start to support myself as best I could, starting with my diet.

Paris back then was not really into health food and cooking was not often an option. There were a few juice bars and a scattering of health-food shops but you really had to search for them. I found a gem of a place in Saint Germain, behind a church in a beautiful square that served the best nutritious whole food, with a different dish every day, and my weekly visits started to have a grounding effect.

I began to look again at the herbs I grew up with and started to use them to support my digestion and sleep. I decided to take some time out to study vegetarian cooking at the Cordon Vert cookery school in England. I completed the first course but back then vegetarianism was very much egg- and pastry-based, which I knew instinctively was not the way forward for me.

The opportunity to live across the Atlantic in New York City came in 1994, when I had just turned 24 and the whole revolution in health and nutrition was happening. I felt excited about the prospect of feeling strong and in control of my own well-being and I started my journey of yoga, juicing and reading book after book on nutrition and herbal medicine to find the balance of food and herbal remedies that suited my needs. I started to take courses and for the first time felt empowered and stable in the unlikely frenetic surroundings of Manhattan and the fashion world.

After four years I returned to London, resolute in the idea of studying natural medicine, specifically herbs, working with the whole person, body, mind and spirit, using herbs, nutrition and complementary natural therapies specific to an individuals needs. Hippocrates, who is looked on as the father of medicine, believed health is an expression of a harmonious balance between various components of mans nature, the environment and ways of life, nature being the physician of disease.

Today, as well as having my practice, Im juggling our family of six and all our daily needs, sometimes trying to listen to three different conversations at once, negotiating individuals moods, often with very little sleep, trying to get the work and home-life balance right. It really is a fine balance and something that I know we all struggle with today.

Now in my fourth decade, having lost loved ones, managing work and personal life, trying to balance hormones and negotiate the next third of my life, I realise I experience a different kind of stress to the kind I experienced in my early years. But Im definitely more equipped to cope. I have better nutrition; Ive learnt to say no (which took a while); I know what suits me and what really doesnt; and I use herbs, especially adaptogens, to help balance hormones, keep my cardiovascular system strong, nervous system supported and my whole body system vital and connected.