Black Herbalism's Healing Legacy

A descendant of enslaved people deepens her knowledge of her heritage and her ecosystem as she helps revive the tradition known as Black herbalism

Text and photos by Alyson Morgan
Conservation
Mar 26, 2025

Alyson Morgan harvests New England aster on her property in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin.

IN SPRING, IF YOU QUIET YOURSELF ENOUGH, you can almost feel the rhythmic, jubilant dance of the bumble bee tethering from bloom to bloom, intoxicated and effervescent on prairie pollen. The bee gathers and fills its pollen baskets, marking each stop with a unique scent to let others know which flowers it has visited and where pollen is low. Native bees—including the rusty patched bumble bee here in Wisconsin, on the traditional lands of the Ho-Chunk and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, where I live—are efficient pollinators: diligent, courteous and thoughtful. They exemplify how, as part of a community, we sustain each other.

As with the bees’ exchange of pollen data, African American herbalism was grounded in kinship networks. Passed from generation to generation, granny midwife to granddaughter, plant medicine served as a way for enslaved Africans to create safety nets of healing and communal care in the face of brutal, systemic oppression aimed to break them apart.

Today, with so many species on the brink of collapse, hyperlocal herbalism helps me reestablish intimacy with the living landscape, offering resilience for me and the ecosystem around me. I believe plants’ healing potential is underfoot.

An image of azure sage spread out on a cutting board for a sage honey recipe.

With its popularity surging, sage—such as prairie sage, above—is at risk of overharvesting. If you use it, grow your own, selecting a variety native to your area. Lucretia VanDyke calls it “a plant that helps me remember how to give back.”

What we often call Black herbalism traces its roots to the Western African religious practices of Yoruba and the concept of ashe, in which healers listened closely to plants to connect with the spiritual forces of living, growing things.

When Africans were kidnapped and brought to what is now the United States in the 16th through 19th centuries under chattel slavery, learning the plants of this foreign land became an act of resistance and a means for enslaved people to support their physical, psychological and spiritual health.

Unlike in Western medicine, healing and wellness in African American herbalism can’t be divorced from the practice’s communal and spiritual elements. “It is only in modern conventional medicine where spiritually based herbal practices are absent or uncommon,” says Lucretia VanDyke, an herbalist and author of the book African American Herbalism.

Even before leaving their homeland, Africans braided seeds into their hair, carrying with them the germs of nourishment and healing. Once in North America—or Turtle Island, as it is known by many Indigenous groups—Africans began to interweave plant knowledge shared by Indigenous Peoples with their own expanding knowledge of the land. Rather than relying solely on the crops they tended, African Americans sought out remedies in the wild plants in the world around them. “The woods teemed with usable plants that grew on the perimeters of plantations,” says Sharla M. Fett, a professor of American history at Occidental College and author of the book Working Cures.

Folk healing depended on the abilities to identify plants in still-strange surroundings and to use those resources to meet the needs of the ailing—including knowing when to harvest a plant, at what point during the day and lunar cycle it would be most potent, which part of the plant to use and how much was safe to give, according to Fett. “Herbalists had deep repertoires of knowledge acquired through apprenticeship and intergenerational training,” she says. “It is important not to romanticize enslaved herbalists as having some kind of organic, natural understanding of plants because that misses the ways in which herbalism was part of African American intellectual brilliance, gained not through textbooks but through oral training and practice.”

In time healers learned, for example, that spotted bee balm—native from the East Coast to the Midwest and south to what are now Texas and New Mexico—had antiseptic, antimicrobial and antibacterial properties. Rich in thymol, the leaves could be brewed into teas to relieve sore throats, fevers and digestive ailments, while chewed leaves could treat bites and stings. With a flavor profile similar to oregano, bee balm also could season food, and for enslaved peoples, food was medicine. “Soul food” originated from enslaved Africans turning a little into a lot. “Plants had crossover uses,” Fett says, citing collard greens that “might be cooked for food or used as a poultice for headache.”

Butterfly weed—native along the East Coast, with pockets west to California and north through Colorado to Minnesota—also known as pleurisy root, is a natural expectorant and sweat inducer. Indigenous Peoples taught enslaved Africans how to simmer its roots to treat respiratory ailments; powdered roots also can treat cuts and bruises. (The Omaha and Ponca names for the plant translate to “raw medicine” and “wound medicine.”) White folk adopted it as an antebellum remedy for respiratory inflammation.

Beyond the benefits for humans, spotted bee balm and butterfly weed continue to play critical roles in their ecosystems today. Spotted bee balm serves as a host plant for the larvae of gray marvel, hermit sphinx and orange mint moths, as well as food for many native sweat bees, wasps and bumble bees. Butterfly weed’s clusters of tangerine flowers attract kindred-hued monarchs, among a diversity of other pollinators, from blue milkweed beetles to hummingbirds. Just as African American healers depended on the natural world for survival, so do entire ecosystems depend on such plants. As VanDyke says, “The world is so smart, if we just let it be.”

Butterfly weed (above) and spotted bee balm (below) are among the native plants growing near Morgan’s homestead.

I came to herbalism when I moved into a humble cottage whose former occupant, an herbalist, had planted a garden with care and love. She walked me through the property, less than an acre in the middle of town, identifying what was where. From there, I went down a rabbit hole of learning, finding people and asking questions. When my husband and I bought 38 acres of farmland and woods in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, it was with the dream of regenerating the soil, nurturing the native plants and deepening our relationship to the land. Eight years later, my small family has the privilege of cohabitating with bobcats, fishers and white-tailed deer.

I continue to familiarize myself with what grows on our land. Bloodroot and bluebells hide beneath the unfurling fiddlehead ferns of spring; thimbleweed dots the edges of our wild apple orchards in summer; asters open their petals in the ochres and ambers of autumn. The plants here may differ from those that surround you. “Find the medicine of your distinct area,” VanDyke advises. “Make friends with at least five plants” and use them “every which way you can.”

Knowing the native species I live among roots me in my desire to reclaim my own history. I’ve begun to honor the land as a sovereign entity—not only a resource to be coveted, consumed and exploited but a living and interdependent network home to our soils and souls alike. Instead of going online, clicking a button and purchasing any herbal supplement I want—an instantaneous transaction that comes at an environmental cost—I turn to the plants I can forage and grow. This act of divestment has become a ritual that connects me to my ancestors. Walking through the woods and my garden, I wonder which plants they knew intimately and which they turned to in times of need or joy. I now see every leaf, every insect, as sacred, with the possibility of reciprocal healing rippling across the prairie. An aster is not just an aster when it’s surrounded by monocultural fields of sprayed corn. Its very existence is an act of resistance.

So is keeping the tradition of Black herbalism alive. Today, much of this collective wisdom and experiential knowledge has been lost. I can think of plenty of reasons why: Many folks don’t have a relationship with or access to land. Places where native plants grow are declining. As an oral tradition handed down among a population for whom literacy was illegal and, by necessity, often practiced in secret, early African American herbalism left no reference books behind. And modern herbalism has become part of a multimillion-dollar wellness industry dominated by European lineages and white voices.

One way to reconnect with our ancestors is to turn to the stories we carry in our bones and to those who honor our forebears by serving the wider community. But a closer relationship with plants shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for just a few. In an era of ever-increasing climate catastrophe, I see an invitation for all of us to listen to the natural world. Can we all emulate the bumble bees by learning to tread lightly and understand what the Earth needs from us? I argue my dispossessed and displaced ancestors would think so.

Find more information on two common native plants and recipes for home use below.

PRAIRIE SAGE

Prairie sage (Salvia azurea, below, with bumble bee), also known as azure sage, blue sage and pitcher sage, is native to the southeastern United States west to Texas and Utah, and north through the Midwest into Michigan. The genus name Salvia derives from the Latin word “salveo,” meaning “to be well, to be in good health or to save.” A perennial that’s part of the mint family, prairie sage attracts a large variety of pollinators, from long-tongued and sweat bees to hummingbirds. Thanks to its many properties—antibacterial, antifungal, antiseptic, antispasmodic, astringent, expectorant and diuretic, to name a few—sage is considered a sacred plant across many spiritual and cultural traditions. It is known as an ally in cleansing, imparting wisdom and clarity, and warding off negative energy. As its use has risen in popularity, it has led to overconsumption, highlighting the need to invest in growing native varieties.

SAGE HONEY RECIPE

Ingredients:

Glass mason jar
Half-jar of fresh sage or quarter-jar of dried sage
Local raw honey to fill jar

Instructions:

Begin by sanitizing and drying the jar. Chop fresh sage; more surface area increases potency. Fill the jar half-full with sage. If using dried sage, sift and crumble it, filling the jar one-quarter full. Top with local raw honey. Stir with a wooden spoon or chopstick to mix and release air bubbles. Top off with honey, leaving half an inch of space from the rim. Cover with a lid and store in a cool, dark place for 2 to 4 weeks. Use as desired in teas or hot water.

NEW ENGLAND ASTER

North America is home to more than 150 native species of aster, including the perennial New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, below), which is mostly clustered in the central and northeastern United States. Asters are hardy and grow well in the sandy soils of prairies, thickets and roadsides. Their nectar-rich flowers feed migrating monarchs and serve as host plants for more than 100 butterfly and moth species, which in turn support birds from warblers to flycatchers. The Iroquois and Blackfoot used New England aster as a soothing tea for digestive and respiratory support. Leaves and flowers were chewed or infused into oils to treat skin irritations, cuts, burns and wounds, and roots were used to relieve pain. With a name meaning “star” in Greek, asters also were seen to impart a calming effect on the nervous system. Enslaved people’s remedies often were simpler than white folk remedies, due to a lack of time to prepare complex medicines and a lack of access to ingredients like alcohol, although some historians suggest enslaved people’s medicines required only one or two plants to be effective due to healers’ sophisticated botanical knowledge.

ASTER TEA RECIPE

Ingredients:

Pick aster as the blossoms begin to unfurl, typically late summer to early autumn, in the morning after the dew has dried but before the heat of the day sets in. Dry the leaves and flowers for tea. Store in an airtight container.

Instructions:

Infuse 1 tablespoon of fresh flowers and leaves or 1 teaspoon of dried flowers and leaves in 8 ounces of hot water for 10 minutes. Strain and add honey.

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