'If the landscape has a sentience (and let's just say it does) I think it’s glad to have a herbalist within it. It recognises me moving through, it knows what I am, what I’m busy with - I’m not the first and hopefully won’t be the last. When I am out amongst the plants, say I am harvesting from a hawthorn tree, I’m familiar to it. That is a very deep belonging.'
When I met Jacqui on a warm June afternoon, it was her connection to her home, to Scotland, that struck me. Pitnacree is a small collection of houses, split by a single-track road. Jacqui lives on the banks of the Tay, a green landscape which thrives off the river. In winter, you can watch kayakers battle its white rapids and strong currents. Today it meandered lazily, soaking in the sun.
The steading is hidden behind a stone wall, now covered with climbing plants. The garden does not attempt to manipulate or curate the landscape. A modern extension connects two barns of traditional granite. Walking to her door, you pass her clinic and spot a glimpse of the tinctures lining the walls. Jacqui reflects the earth around her, her clothes a natural palette, and her hair twisted in a tortoiseshell clip. But the most striking thing about her was her eyes. I realised later that the river lived in Jacqui’s eyes, the glisten of the sun on the water bottled into human form. She exuded warmth.
My first question to Jacqui was, where did it all begin?
I’ve lived in Scotland for 54 years, qualified in herbal medicine via The School of Phytotherapy in 1994, and moved to Pitnacree 27 years ago, where I have been working in my little home clinic. At first, I worked in an unfulfilling job as a PA at Edinburgh District Council. I was a truly rubbish PA. My acupuncturist would listen to me moaning about how confining I found my work and handed me a leaflet for herbalism because she knew I was interested in medicinal plants as home remedy. I had no idea it was possible to have a career in herbal medicine, but by the end of the week, I was on the course. The freedom of having the opportunity to leave my poorly-suited job is not to be underestimated, and the rest is history!
My first clinic was at Partick Cross in Glasgow – a baptism of fire. I learned quick herbalism and quick prescriptions for a huge variety of illnesses. I cut my teeth there. Glasgow is famous for its ‘costume changes’ where you can have districts of poverty right beside affluence, and my clinic was varied in patients and illnesses. After 5 years I was becoming a bit burnt out. I missed connecting with nature and the physical plants that made up my dispensary’s stock. Pitnacree has been a very good fit for me. Although I would never begin such a huge task of renovating an old house, working, raising a family, and making a garden all at the same time again, at least I can tick the box marked ‘fulfilled’.
I’m attracted to the Scottish landscape for several reasons: its greenness; its quietness; its wetness (the weather’s willingness to give us lots and lots of fresh, clean water!); its seasonality. If the landscape has a sentience (and let's just say it does) I think it’s glad to have a herbalist within it. It recognises me moving through, it knows what I am, what I’m busy with - I’m not the first and hopefully won’t be the last. When I am out amongst the plants, say I am harvesting from a hawthorn tree, I’m familiar to it. That is a very deep belonging.
As I admired Jacqui’s clinic, she continued to explain her process, and I was fascinated by a year's worth of herbs brewing in vats. I asked her what had shaped her into the person she is today.
Going to Africa and seeing the erosion of traditional knowledge that had been gathered for generations, led me to think about the historical Scottish uses of plants, and in particular, in the Gàidhealtachd, where the use of home remedies may have clung on longer than in our cities. If I could time travel, I would go back to then. A time when there were prestigious medicine families who served prominent clans, the Mac Bheata or Beatons in Scotland and the Ó Hiceadha or Hickeys in Ireland for example.
A very different level in society to a Spaewife though. It’s the distinction between being a permitted, full time profession, and helping your community through understanding the benefits of local herbs. Women were prohibited from formal medical training and yet a Spaewife (a Scots language term for a fortune-telling woman) was often called over a doctor in simple illness and cases such as childbirth and midwifery. I read somewhere that of all the witch burnings, not many were herbalists. There were so many herbalists back then that it wasn’t an unusual thing. Nowadays people might see the practice of herbalism as something ‘witchy’ but back in the day, not so much. Knowing your herbs was not a marker of difference - well as long as you didn’t get above your station!
So what would you have preferred, living then, surrounded by Spaewives, or now, isolated in your craft?
A combination of two. I really appreciate the calibre of my conventional medical training and wouldn’t want to be without that. At times, it’s tough being novel, and the profession as unrecognised as it is. My bugbear is when people are on a nature walk, and a botanist refers to herbal usage in the past tense rather than a contemporary skill. That makes me sad.
But travelling back to old Scotland or the old Gàidhealtachd, I would have had a community of traditionally taught healers to talk to and exchange notes with. I think you would have had to be skilled to uphold a reputation. And even then, people might envy your proficiency and burn you! Success has aye been a dangerous business.
On the other hand, the relative obscurity was something I chose when coming here. I crossed that bridge way back in Glasgow. I decided to leave my reputation behind me. I enjoyed being unknown and having time for myself. I was able to experience life more naturally. Part of coming to a rural place was without the overheads that accompany living in a city and maintaining a city clinic, I didn’t have to work every day from 9-5.
Jacqui led me from her clinic to collect some rose petals that would be used to make rose tincture. She explained that tincturing is soaking the herb in a ratio of alcohol and water, which concentrates the medicinal parts of the plants, making teaspoon doses effective. While we stood by her back door, we chatted about the decline of herbalists in the community, and how Jacqui was combating this in her practice.
I want to write a Scottish Herbal from a working practitioner’s point of view, not a botanist’s. A little ambitious perhaps but I would love to write it in Gaelic in the first instance, to give something back to the Gàidhealtachd. Gaels knew the craft once before, but that knowledge has all but disappeared with the marginalisation of the Gaelic language and specific Gaelic and broader Scottish traditional cultures. I have been learning Gaelic for seven years, so I would see myself as active in the language’s revival. It would be quite something to give Gaelic and Scottish culture a revived piece of cultural heritage.
I want to explore this more in retirement, scratch around in the library at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on Skye, where there may be some old herbals and although a lot of home medicine wasn’t written down, perhaps I’ll be able to make something of what is. I was speaking before about the clan retainers like the Beatons and the Hickeys. They were highly formally educated in medicine and would have been taught in Greek and Latin in European medicine schools. They translated the medicinal texts into Gaelic and at one time ‘leechcraft’ (the art or practice of healing or medicine) in the Gaeltacht was very cutting edge. A different thing from home medicine, which as I said wasn’t written down, but even at that highly trained level there may have been a good usage of local herbs as well as exotic treatments brought in from Europe.
When doing an anthropological study of a medicine tradition you are looking for the cultural nuances, like how old Gaels and Scots felt about illness. Where we might say a bad cough has arisen from a contagion, they might say a damp chest has come from not wearing shoes or even, perish the thought, “casting a cloot before the May (hawthorn) is oot” (a reminder of the fickle nature of Scottish weather, warm one day and winter the next). That is the interesting part for me. Who first decided? Is there any validity? That was my experience when working with the Pokot in Kenya. They felt you got sore knees from too much dancing and the advice would be to stop dancing. It’s not invalid, now, we might say you’ve done too much running. It is the code of how all practitioners decide what herbs to give. I could pick up an old Gaelic prescription and might recognise the herbs but unless you understand their code, it might not work for me. Through learning the language I’m trying to move into the mindset of the old Gaels.
I’m also learning about Gaelic names for the plants in my dispensary. People will scorn that Gaelic is a dead language. Saying the names is a bit like a prayer to me and if I use the Gaelic names, my daily round, the language is alive. There aren’t many people with Gaelic as their first language who would still know the plant names. To my mind, this is my own quiet revival work. The methods and herbs have been spoken in Gaelic before, it’s something I will continue to do.
Opposite the roses was an elderflower tree, its trunk old and gnarled. Jacqui had let it grow so she could lie on the roof of her parked Citreon Berlingo and harvest. It had self-seeded over the years, spreading along the bank. I liked how in Jacqui’s land nature was allowed to do just as it pleased. It made me curious about the fundamentals of her practice and morals outside work.
I value quiet listening. When someone tells me how they are, I give them time and space to speak. That allows me to listen deeply and them to hear themselves. Then, knowing what herbs to use is not as hard as if I am doing it on a purely intellectual or rote-learned level. That’s why I still do hour-long sessions: maybe I could get to the prescription in ten minutes, but I value time to mull over my practice and time for them to think about their health patterns and life in the round. Slow herbalism you might call that.
Time is also important. Probably the most important. No one looks back and thinks ‘I could have done more work’. Allowing people the time to explore, to think, and to ponder still feels revolutionary. There is pressure to be a conventional shape and because this is how I earn my living, to be more business focussed. Having the confidence, and faith, to back off from those pressures and see what grows is a constant exercise for me. I hope in the future we get used to this feeling. We would call it ‘drop-out’ before, but it’s moving sideways, into many income streams, time as currency or something more ephemeral, not contained in a box. That said, “brochan air a’ bhord” as they say in Gaelic, it's important to be able to put porridge on the table. That’s what I have done. I have grown much of my own fruit and veg, cooked meals from scratch, and lived mostly humbly – not too grasping I hope. Those are the values I encourage in my kids too.
When I first moved here, all the old-timers had stories, craic, a brilliant, subtle, sense of humour. I feel lucky to have experienced that just as it was going. When they left, they took with them a sense of the old times. There were no more patched up clothes or ancient tweed jackets. No cars with mismatched doors. I think it still exists in the Northern Highlands, crofter cars I’ve heard them called, with doors tied closed with bailer twine. Down here, in the warm south of the Gàidhealtachd, it has become much more affluent. I have hope for the future, that we will push back against the idea of neat and trimmed gardens and brand new and fancy everything – it takes up so much life to earn the cash to buy and then maintain all the lux stuff. It's boring too. I think our young folks and even some people my age are beginning to understand that particular con.
Jacqui’s goals are simple. To listen to your body. To appreciate nature that lies all around us. She is deeply committed to a way of life we have all but lost. Small advocacies, like writing her herbs in Gaelic, when most of her patients can’t even say hello in their mother tongue. Or taking a symbolic pause, a time which lasts from the winter solstice until Christmas Eve. By only using candlelight, and tuning out electronic devices, this ritual allows Jacqui to experience the season's darkness, and to reset before the festive season and New Year. It is not to detach herself from modern life and technology but to create space in our digital world for quiet reflection.
It was around 4 pm when I said goodbye. Jacqui’s attitude was invigorating, and I didn’t want to leave her world just yet. I headed to the meandering river, under an old railway bridge to swim. I sat in the gentle rapids, listening to the murmur of birds and insects, reflecting on the Gàidhealtachd and a faraway Scotland. Where Spaewives walked along the banks collecting their herbs. At that moment, I felt removed and connected to nature, feeling a deep peace and calm amongst the whiskey water but acutely aware of my iPhone and the modern world that lay on the muddy bank.
She is wearing a linen top made by Ruth Morris (www.roobedo.com) is made from one of the last batches of linen put into production in Fife, before the last linen mill in Scotland finally closed its doors in May 2021.
Comments