A gift for Christmas?The Cherokee Herbal: Native Plant Medicine from the Four Directions
Bear & Company (April 2003), 240 pp. "This book is highly recommended. If you are interested in herbal medicine, lore, and the unusual, Garrett's book should be on your reading list. Excellent."
Product Description
In this rare collection of the acquired herbal knowledge of Cherokee Elders, author, J. T. Garrett, presents the healing properties and medicinal applications of over 450 North American plants. Readers will learn how Native American healers utilise the gifts of nature for ceremonial purposes and to treat over 120 ailments, from the common cold to a bruised heart. The book presents the medicine of the Four Directions and the plants with which each direction is associated. From the East comes the knowledge of "heart medicine" - blood-building tonics and plants for vitality and detoxification. The medicine of the South focuses on the innocence of life and the energy of youthfulness. West medicine treats the internal aspects of the physical body to encourage strength and endurance, while North medicine offers a sense of freedom and connection to the stars and the greater Universal Circle. This resource, also, includes traditional teaching tales to offer insights from Cherokee cosmology into the origin of illness, how the animals found their medicine and the naming of the plants. - Details the uses of over 450 plants for the treatment of over 120 ailments. - Explains the healing elements of the Four Directions and the plants associated with them. - Includes traditional teaching tales as told to the author by Cherokee Elders.This book is not a field guide and doesn't really have any pictures. What is does have is a lot of information on the traditional Cherokee uses of herbs (over 450!), their directional and spiritual associations, and myths and stories about Cherokee herbal medicine. I recommend it to people who want a book on herbalism from a cultural perspective, and I think it blows away "Indian Herbalogy of North America", which couldn't seem to focus on the *Native American* cultural interpretations.
If you, or someone you know has interest in herbal knowledge, don't pass this book up. It's very reflective of what eastern herbs were, and still used by many eastern tribes. Not all the herbs mentioned are given the Tsalagi/Cherokee term, but the ones given not only tell you the name, but the reason why that plant was named so. This book has been the product of helping to stop the loses of so much knowledge. I treasure this one, I feel that you will also. There are no photos, nor sketches of what these plants look like so you'll need to have access to a field guide as well when using this book. But, a field guide doesn't have the description of knowledge this book has, so they go hand in hand, you won't want without the other.
