How the industrious apothecaries of the past and their physic nurseries have contributed to the medicines of today

The physic garden – so redolent of the magical powers of natural healing, of foraging in the wilds, of planting and picking, of potioning and lotioning and creating remedies from herbs and flowers, from roots and fungi, from sticks and twigs… The very thought of being able to swap the chemist’s brown plastic bottle of pills for a basket filled with echinacea, lavender and chamomile, with peppermint, St John’s wort, ginger and feverfew, with – as 1960s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel sang – parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme harvested from a beautiful medicinal nursery delivers a powerful placebo effect that immediately becalms the spirit. Yet behind this romanticism lay hard-working physic nurseries – living, breathing laboratories – where equally industrious apothecaries learned their craft.