A note from our co-founder Jacob on what plants have to teach us, and why it's worth relearning.
Sick season has arrived.
Two kids in school means every cold in the area eventually finds its way toward our front door. And this time of year, I sometimes wonder what people did before the pharmacy aisle existed.
For most of human history, the answer was plants. Not just for sickness. Plants were food, medicine, flavor, material, ritual. And knowing them wasn't a specialized skill. It was part of knowing how to live.
A few years ago, I spent some time in Ecuador with the Sápara, an Indigenous community that for many years had relatively little contact with the outside world. Their population had dwindled substantially, and they had made a difficult decision: begin letting outsiders in so they could share some of what they knew before that knowledge disappeared with them.
One day, I walked through the jungle with Manari Ushigua, a Sápara leader and healer. Every few steps he'd stop and point something out. He seemed completely attuned to everything around him: the plants, the tracks, the texture of the ground, what was happening overhead.
Then he'd share what he knew about whatever was in front of us. Which part mattered, how to prepare it, what to combine it with, what it was used for, who should use it, and when.
Boil these leaves and drink the water. Crush these and steep them. Use the bark from this tree, but the flowers from that one. Combine this plant with one growing nearby, or one growing miles away. Cut into a branch and collect what's inside.
This wasn't theoretical. He showed me plants they used to bring down fevers, keep wounds from getting infected, and even preparations he said were used for hepatitis. When I wasn't feeling 100% after arriving, Manari went off and made something for me too.
Some plants weren't medicine at all. One was used as a dye, and they painted my face with it. I assumed it would wash off that night. It lasted about a week.
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He wasn't carrying a book. He didn't pull out his phone. He just knew. He was as tuned in to the natural world around him as most of us are to our phones—the news, the people we follow, what's changing, what's happening next. His information stream was the plants, animals, weather and land around him.
It made me want to redirect a little of my own attention. I didn't need to know hundreds of plants. I'd be happy to really know the ones growing around me.
What I found even more fascinating came after I asked how they had learned all of this. I assumed the answer would be generations of trial and error. That wasn't what Manari told me. He described knowledge coming from the plants themselves, through dreams, visions, and ceremonies. I'm going to save that for another letter, because it raises a whole different set of questions about plants, perception, and communication.
What I haven't been able to shake is how much knowledge they were carrying, and how easily it could disappear if it stopped being passed down. We already know this kind of knowledge can be enormously valuable. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 25% of modern medicines are derived, directly or indirectly, from medicinal plants.
I'm not saying something should be accepted simply because people have done it for a thousand years. But I don't think a thousand years of accumulated knowledge should be casually ignored either. We have extraordinary tools now for figuring out what works, what doesn't, and why. It seems worth pointing some of them at what people have been using for generations.
For me, that starts pretty small. There are rosemary bushes all over my neighborhood, and I almost always pinch off a piece on my walks, rub it between my fingers, and smell it. Mostly because I love the smell.
Then I learned researchers have actually studied rosemary aroma and its effects on memory and cognitive performance. Suddenly that bush you've walked past a thousand times gets a little more interesting. Which brings me back to cold season, and what I reach for before a cold ever really arrives.
Yin Qiao, a traditional Chinese herbal formula, is my absolute go-to. It has lived on my counter and in my travel bag for years. If I feel even the hint of something coming on, it's one of the first things I reach for. I've had enough good experiences with it that I won't travel without it, and I've probably pressed it into the hands of half my friends at this point.
That's my experience, not a clinical trial. But it makes me curious what else we've overlooked, especially the things we can simply grow, steep, or brew ourselves. That’s what I want to spend more time on here: what people have learned from plants, what we’ve forgotten, and what we can bring back into our own lives.
There’s a lot of useful knowledge hiding in plain sight.
