The Life Lessons I Learned Visiting an Herb Farm
Pretty and potent: Echinacea (a.k.a purple coneflower) is traditionally used to promote a healthy immune response. (Photo: Gaia)
When you’re an herbalist, getting invited to an organic herb farm —in this case, Gaia Herbs’ 350-acre home base in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina — is as close as you can get to being a kid in a candy store, only the treats you’re surrounded with are healing, not harmful. While there, I got the chance to spend time with Gaia’s visionary founder and CEO, Ric Scalzo, and the company’s medicinal-herb educator and consultant, Mary Bove, ND.
Needless to say, I geeked out over the organic-farming practices and rhapsodic descriptions of the medicinal plants. And as I stood under the shade of hawthorn trees listening to Ric and Mary talk, I had an epiphany: There are a lot lessons about life that can be gleaned by taking cues from Mother Nature and the herbs she produces. Here are just a few of them:
1. Observe to find answers
Nowadays, most of the answers we need in our day-to-day lives can be found by typing a few keywords into a search engine. As a result, we spend much of our time poking around our mobile devices and very little time lifting our heads up to look at what’s happening outside of our digital worlds. While at the farm, I was reminded that if we exercise some patience, sit quietly, and look more closely at what is going on around us, the answers we’re seeking will sometimes reveal themselves.
What prompted this thought? Gaia harvests leaves from its gingko trees when the edges begin to turn yellow —a sign that the ginkgolides (the active components) are at their peak. They don’t commence the harvest at a pre-determined date, but rather by watching until the tree shows it’s ready to make the offering.
Related: Stop Hay Fever With These Herbalist-Approved Remedies
2. Gain strength with synergy
We are often stronger when we work in tandem with someone else than when we try to go it alone. The same is true in herbal formulations, where combining the active ingredients of several plants is usually more powerful than a single herb could ever be. By blending certain herbs, they become more bioavailable than they would be on their own — which is to say that they are transformed into something our bodies can more easily absorb. For example, in herbal supplements, you’ll often see turmeric combined with black pepper because the piperine in black pepper increases the absorption of curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric, by 2,000 percent.
Nature constantly reminds us how important it is to join forces for the greater good. Consider how migrating birds fly in a V formation to capture each other’s wing-flapping updraft (an energy-saving trick). Or how penguins huddle together to stay warm. In organic farming, crops benefit from companion planting — the companion plant assists growth by attracting beneficial insects, repelling pests, or providing nutrients.
The point: Many of us want to prove our individual competency, but the truth is, working together often allows us to go farther, faster.
Gaia’s founder Ric Scalzo walks the aisles of his farm every day to inspect the health and progress of the plants. (Photo: Gaia)
3. Stay interconnected
I just mentioned how our personal strength can be boosted by pairing up with others. But even when we aren’t actively seeking partnership, it’s probably happening anyway. Mother Earth shows us that we are one big, interconnected system.
Take, for instance, the health of our guts. That internal eco-system — teeming with trillions of beneficial organisms — controls so many of our bodily functions including immunity, weight management, and nutrient absorption, just to name a few. And many experts theorize that the health of our microbiome is influenced by the microbiome of the earth that our food is grown in, which has been compromised by microbe-depleting pesticides that prevent our exposure to germs in soil.
So, if it’s true that our soil and our stomachs have a symbiotic relationship, then it’s also clear that symbiosis can have positive or negative consequences.
Just by being aware of this co-evolution, we can be more respectful and mindful of how we are all connected — and dependent — on one another.
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