The Herbarium

A record of medicinal plants: what each one is, what part of it is used, what is in it, what people have historically done with it, and what it will do to you.

It is organised around the plant, and it always will be. You can look up a species. You cannot browse by ailment — there is no symptom index, no condition filter, no list of what to take for a headache, and that absence is deliberate. A herbal is organised around what you want fixed. A herbarium is organised around the specimen. The first is instruction wearing a reference coat; this is the second.

Every entry leads with evidence status and hazard, before it says a word about what anyone used it for. If you have arrived here from a search engine, the first things you read should be what is known and what is dangerous.

What is in an entry

• Botanical identity — the accepted binomial, its family, and the names it gets confused with
• Part used — root, bark, leaf, flower, seed, resin. This is the organising axis, and it is the most revealing one: taking a root kills the plant and taking a leaf does not, which is most of why some species are in trouble and others are not
• Constituents — the compound classes, and the named markers where there are any
• How three traditions classify it — Galenic, Chinese and Ayurvedic ratings of the same plant, which frequently disagree
• Evidence, from a fixed vocabulary rather than prose: trial support, mixed, no support, or untested. Untested is not a negative finding. It means nobody has looked
• Hazard, likewise: serious, caution, or low — with the interactions and the regulatory position
• Historical use, attributed and in the past tense, with no dose and no preparation

Where this comes from

Nomenclature is checked against the GBIF backbone taxonomy rather than asserted from memory, and an entry says at the bottom whether that check has been done. Plant names are reshuffled constantly and synonyms are where errors hide, so a listing that simply looked authoritative would be worse than one that shows its working.

Evidence status draws on the Cochrane reviews, the World Health Organization monographs and the European Medicines Agency's herbal assessments. Toxicity draws on the NIH LiverTox database and the published case literature. Conservation status is CITES. Australian regulatory status is the TGA.

What this is not

It is not medical advice, it is not a formulary, and it contains no doses. It is a reference work about plants, written by people who are not your clinician and have never met you.

The one useful practical sentence, and it is the same one on every page in this section: tell your pharmacist and your doctor about anything herbal you take. They can check interactions in minutes and they will not lecture you.

Why so much of this is marked untested, and why people persist anyway

Read straight through, both collections can look bleak: a great many entries say the trials are mixed, or absent, or negative. It is worth saying plainly why that is not the whole picture.

Some of it is that nobody has looked — "untested" is not a finding, and for most of the world's plants no one has ever run a trial. Some of it is that the thing being tested is genuinely hard to test: a herbal preparation is not a defined molecule, and two samples of the same species can differ by an order of magnitude in what is actually in them.

And some of it is that people are reporting something real that is not coming from the material. Expectation, ritual, attention and the act of taking your own difficulty seriously produce measurable effects with identifiable mechanisms — this is the placebo effect properly understood, and it is neither imaginary nor an insult to anyone experiencing it. What it is, precisely, is covered in the placebo effect and the meaning response, which is worth reading before drawing conclusions from anything here.

The one thing it does not license is inferring what a substance does from how somebody felt after taking it. That is what the evidence column is for, and it is why these records keep the two apart.