Plants can cure you so grasp the nettle

MYRICA gale, sweet gale. Bog myrtle. This shy Scottish plant, well known to our ancestors, is finally taking centre stage again. If you have grandparents, listen to their stories, one day you might rediscover a hidden gem.

Bog myrtle is a small deciduous shrub with reddish brown buds that grows in bogs, wet heaths and fens. It used to be common throughout the UK, but as we gradually drained wetlands its habitat was removed and it retreated further north, finally making its home in the Scottish Highlands.

The leaves of this sweet scented plant are resinous and it was used to flavour beer. Another well-known use was as an insect repellent. The bark was hung in wardrobes and stuffed into mattresses to repel fleas.

Recently, a Scottish company has started harvesting this plant to extract the oil, which has insect repelling properties. With 750,000 of commercial and government funding for research into this plant, this has huge commercial potential for the Highlands.

Bog myrtle, like many plants, was thought of as a medicine, and at one time was the standard treatment for scabies. The leaves were made into "gale tea", which was a cold remedy as well as being a useful astringent for upset stomachs.

Belonging to the Myricacea family, there are about 50 species of wax myrtles worldwide. They are nearly all aromatic and have a history of being used as a medicine.

They are found in soaps, stomach remedies and catarrh mixes. They can still be found in many herbal dispensaries: it is no surprise to me that this is one of the plants that has been "rediscovered".

As a practising herbalist, I have more than 250 plants in my dispensary that have medicinal uses. Some of them are plants that many people think of as weeds - stinging nettle, dandelion, couch grass, yellow dock, to name but a few.

When I first took over Napiers Herbal Dispensary 15 years ago, herbal medicine was almost forgotten. It was a dusty old shop on the corner of Bristo Place that had stood still for the previous 15 years.

The herbal shop had been there since 1860 and there was a wealth of herbal knowledge there - every pore of that building knew about herbs.

John Napier, the last family member to run the business, used to walk the hills around Edinburgh collecting plants. He would collect dandelions from Duddingston, and hawthorn from Haddington and coltsfoot from the Water of Leith.

He knew the value of his surroundings - he didn't simply see a hedgerow, he saw a medicine chest.

He used golden seal to treat ulcers, which is anti-bacterial and anti-microbial, long before we discovered that ulcers can be treated with antibiotics. Golden seal has antibiotic-like qualities.

All the plants in my dispensary have been used as medicines for thousands of years. There are records of the Romans using garlic and ribwort plantain for sinus problems, and we now know that garlic has anti-catarrhal actions, as well as being anti-microbial and anti-bacterial.

A large percentage of the drugs that doctors use were originally derived from plants. The most common is aspirin. It was originally developed from the salicylates contained in willow bark.

Herbalists have for centuries used willow to relieve pain, as an anti-inflammatory and to reduce fever. While long-term use of aspirin can cause stomach problems, willow is considered a gentle remedy with no known side-effects and actually reduces stomach acidity and inflammation. Herbalists believe that using the whole herb, rather than isolated constituents, is the best approach.

Plants have given us many medicines; periwinkle gives us vincristine and vinblastine which are used to treat cancers; ephedra gives us ephadrine; foxglove gives us digoxin; poppies give us morphine, and a more recent discovery is that the yew tree gives us taxol, which is helping many cancer patients. There are still discoveries to be made, and much of the knowledge of where to look to is held in old herbals and in the memories of our grandparents.

Herbal medicine is the world's oldest form of medicine and in world terms is still the most widely used form of medicine. In the hands of a trained and qualified herbal practitioner, herbal medicine is a very successful and powerful form of medicine.

Napiers is now the largest herbalist in the UK, seeing more than 10,000 patients a year. The tide has turned and people are now looking back to the old remedies, looking for answers to some of our modern health problems.

Dee Atkinson is a medical herbalist and director with Napiers Herbal Health Care, 0131-315 2130, www.napiers.net