The women before me

My most beautiful childhood memories all live in one place – the country house.

It came to us in an unusual way. I was a sickly child, in and out of hospitals, and one day a doctor said the thing that changed everything: this child needs country air and clean food. So my parents found a little house in the countryside, and that is where I spent most of my summers. The land became the place where my soul could fly freely and my imagination could play.

We were the kind of family where my mother would send us out to gather young dandelion leaves. My curiosity for plants began early, there among the green. I had a couple of treasured plant books – and being the Soviet years, much of what I read was unofficial, passed hand to hand: pages copied from Hildegard's manuscripts, thin little home-apothecary booklets with their plain, simple remedies. I would walk through the grass with a book in my hand, trying to understand what was what. This is comfrey. This is yarrow. This is plantain, for the scrape on your knee.

There is one summer I think of often. I had a sudden wish to see what colour flax flowers were. So we planted flax in the ground – for no reason at all except to see those blue blooms, once. That was the land for me. A place where wanting to see something beautiful was reason enough to grow it.

Later came new books. A herbalism school with my dearest friend. New teachers, new women – all of us sharing the same quiet love. Studying plants together, walks into the forest, experimenting, trading what we'd learned. The knowledge kept being passed, the way it always has been, from hand to hand.

And it lives in my home still. With me and my son, plants are simply ordinary. A warming tea in winter. Golden cowslip or lemon balm in the evening. Powerful nettle in spring. Linden flower when a cold comes. Nothing precious about it – just the everyday turning to the green world, the way my mother did, and hers before her.

Isn't it wonderful to think how far back this line reaches? The line of plant-wise women, stretching into times when there were always wise ones who knew how to help with what the earth offered. I am only one small link in something very old.

And what moves me most is the simplicity of it. The freedom. You don't need money. No one is selling you anything. There is only the knowing, and nature offering from her abundance – to you, too, if you learn to find it and use it wisely.

How wonderful, to be one part of that line.