By Liz Reitzig | Substack.com/@LizReitzig

One of my all-time favourite herbalists never read a word about herbs, medicine, or anatomy.

In fact, she was technically “illiterate” until the day she died.

But she was clearly plant-literate.

In fact, many of our ancestors were plant literate with or without ever having learned to read or write.

Imagine you’re out with some friends in a city. You’re driving to your next destination, and you realize that it’s time to refuel—both the car and your bellies.

What do you look for?

You’d most likely look for fuel and food signs.

How will you know them when you see them?

You’ll know because you’ve seen them thousands of times.

You know what a gas station sign looks like, how to find a fast food place, and what the major ones are. You’ll know from one glance whether they sell burgers, burritos, or a bucket of chicken.

Yet you didn’t read a book about them.

And these logos don’t have words explaining what they are.

You know because you’ve seen these logos thousands of times, and you have immediate, unconscious associations with them.

Consider the logos you see every day. You don’t need context or explanations. You know all these brands, what they offer, and what category they belong to. Sometimes you don’t even need the logo. These brands have established strong connections in our brains, ensuring that when we see certain connected images, such as mascots or even a portion of their logo, we automatically think of them.

 Plants are like that too.

They are a mental map of seasons, places, food, and medicine.

And that’s how the famous underground railroad conductor, Harriet Tubman, a woman we would label “illiterate,” knew which plants would feed her passengers and which plants would heal her soldiers of dysentery, clean their wounds, and treat infections.

Although most Americans know her only as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she was so much more than that.

She was a total badass.

She was an excellent Underground Railroad conductor, in part because she knew the plants along her escape route and what they were for. She used specific plants to keep babies asleep, others to keep dogs from following scents, and still others to keep her charges nourished along the long, slow journey to freedom.

In addition to what she is most famous for—serving as a conductor on the Underground Railroad—she was also the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States. This operation was the Combahee Ferry Raid, in which she freed hundreds of enslaved people.

Part of the reason the army chose her for this role was her expertise in foraging for food and herbal medicine.

Can you imagine what it took to cure soldiers from dysentery, heal bloody wounds, and chase away infections?

But that was Harriet. She knew plants.

Of course she had amazing teachers and plenty of exposure.

This experience with plants and understanding what they were for is similar to our repetitive exposure to logos.

We are inundated with hundreds to thousands of logos daily, and our brains take shortcuts called heuristics.

You don’t consciously think: “Oh, that’s a fast food logo; I can get a burger there.”

It’s practically instantaneous. You see it, and your brain maps out your past experiences. It pings prejudices or affinities for the brand, and even the memories that go with it, including emotional responses to their marketing.

It’s a whole brain and body knowing.

With basic exposure, and even a little bit of teaching, anyone can begin to become familiar with plants the way we are already familiar with hundreds, maybe thousands, of logos.

(And, I would argue, our brains were made for plant and animal identification rather than brand logos. Brands have co-opted that part of our brains to sell us stuff.)

Imagine seeing a plant somewhere in the wild and immediately knowing what it helps with, how to harvest it, and what it means about the climate/region and season you’re in.

Just like we map out meaning and understanding with the logos we see every day, we can do the same with plants.

We can all be more like Harriet.

Her kind of literacy, and indeed the plant literacy practiced by people throughout history and across the world, is the type of literacy that we can relearn to celebrate.

From identifying and foraging herbs to making our own herbal medicines in our own kitchens, becoming plant literate is how we truly democratize our medicine.

Originally published at substack.com/@lizreitzig