Episode 17: Plants, Place and Permission

In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, Rebecca Burns speaks with Jenny Carden, a Medical Herbalist, Moorland Guide, Archivist and Archaeobotanist whose work brings together herbal medicine, archaeology, landscape, history and the lived experience of finding your way back into the natural world.

Jenny’s work is rooted in the simple question: how do we help people feel more confident outdoors, especially when illness, pain, fatigue, fear, lack of access, or unfamiliarity have made natural places feel difficult to reach?

The conversation begins with archaeobotany, the study of relationships between people and plants in archaeological contexts. Jenny explains how much archaeological interpretation has traditionally focused on crops and food, partly because these are the plant remains most likely to survive. Her own background as a herbalist encourages her to look differently at what survives, asking whether some collections of plants might also reveal stories about care, medicine and the ways people once understood the plants around them.

For Jenny, this cross-disciplinary perspective brings great insights because human relationships with plants cross more than one category. Food, medicine, ritual, ecology, memory and everyday life continually overlap.

One of the most moving parts of the conversation is Jenny’s description of ancient finds that bring individual lives suddenly close. A carefully buried dog, complete with a bone and a small object placed beneath its paw, becomes a reminder that people thousands of years ago loved and cared for animals too. In another archaeological context, seeds found alongside infant burials open questions about plants, grief, care and medicine that cannot always be answered definitively, but can encourage us to look at the past with greater curiosity and humanity.

Jenny talks about how her own relationship with the outdoors changed after developing chronic illness. Looking for fungi became a reason to go outside without turning movement into a test of distance, speed or stamina. Instead of asking how far she had walked, she could look closely, with just a few metres containing an entire world.

Much of the language around spending time outdoors assumes a body that can walk for miles, climb hills, keep up with a group and recover easily afterwards. Jenny describes the isolation that can come when your energy is unpredictable, when others only see you on a good day, or when joining an organised walk means worrying that everyone will have to wait for you.

Her approach offers another possibility.

Perhaps connection with nature can begin by looking for mushrooms.

Perhaps it is sitting beneath a tree.

Perhaps it is learning the bark of one species, exploring ten metres of hedgerow, growing one plant in a pot, or finding a woodland path where you can still see your car.

There is no requirement to perform the outdoors in the way we can so often see it presented.

Jenny talks about the strange difficulty many of us have in allowing ourselves simply to be outside. In a culture where time is expected to be productive, purposeful and measurable, even rest and recreation can become another thing we feel obliged to do correctly.

Having something small to notice or gather can sometimes provide the permission we need. Looking for fungi, identifying a plant, collecting something for food or learning to read a map gives the mind enough of a purpose that simply being present begins to feel allowed.

The conversation also moves into the history of herbal medicine, social class and access to knowledge.

Jenny discusses the long history of tensions between formally recognised medical authority and community-based plant knowledge, including Nicholas Culpeper, botanical medicine clubs and the ways literacy, professional status and class affected whose knowledge was considered legitimate.

For Jenny, those questions remain relevant because access to health is also connected to access to place.

If green spaces near housing are lost, if reaching woodland requires a car, if outdoor recreation is presented as something requiring expensive equipment, extensive knowledge or physical fitness, then opportunities to benefit from contact with nature are not equally available.

Even our idea of what counts as a worthwhile natural space can create barriers.

Jenny speaks affectionately about plantation forests, which are sometimes dismissed as ecologically uninteresting compared with ancient woodland. Yet they can offer level tracks, accessible parking, pine trees, moss, fungi and places where someone can feel surrounded by trees without being miles from safety.

It is another reminder that the “best” landscape is not necessarily the most picturesque, remote or wild, and that sometimes the most valuable landscape is the one you can access.

Throughout the episode, Jenny returns to the idea that reconnecting with plants and natural places does not have to become an identity or a complete lifestyle. You do not need to know hundreds of herbs. You do not need a large garden. You do not need to live off-grid, forage everything you eat, or look like somebody’s idea of an outdoors person.

You can learn one plant.

You can notice one mushroom.

You can walk for ten minutes.

You can sit under a tree.

And you can build from there, if you want to.

This is a conversation about finding your own way into relationship with the living world.

A way that respects your body, that fits your circumstances, that feels safe enough to begin, and perhaps, over time, a way that helps the landscape become familiar enough that you begin to feel you belong there too.

Bio

Jenny is a qualified and registered Medical Herbalist, also working as a Moorland Guide, Folk Museum Archivist, Sylvotherapist and Archaeobotanist. She combines these within her herbal practice and Home Apothecary foundation course, encouraging people to connect with the plants and land around them through gaining confidence and experiencing direct encounters, in an accessible way. Her areas of interest are evidence of Medicinal plants in the Archaeobotanical record of Bronze-Iron Age Britain, and issues around social class within medicine and herbalism. 

Links

Find out more about Jenny’s work:

Instagram: @dartmoorherbalist

Website: dartmoorherbalist.co.uk