Colophon
The Herbarium is an educational field guide. Traditional use is a historical fact, not a promise that a plant will treat a disease. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prescription, or permission to ignore a clinician.
The folio is seven drawers plus a camera. Medicinal herbs and medicinal fungi are the traditional materia medica. Kitchen herbs & fungi are the same plants you cook with — they also live in the medicinal drawers; that crossover is the point. Regulated or restricted plates cover law, licensing, and conservation — habitat notes only, no illicit grow labs. Toxic plates are poison-garden teaching specimens, named so they are not mistaken for tea. Medicinal teas are cups drawn from those plates. Harvest & process is the bench: when to cut, how to dry, how to put a legal crop up. The field lens photographs a plant or fungus and tries to name it even when it is not in the catalog — a name is not permission to eat or harvest.
Restricted plates (psilocybin fungi, peyote, coca, opium poppy latex, unlicensed cannabis, ayahuasca brews, ephedra extracts, and similar) are included so the law, the harm, and the botany can be seen together. They have habitat notes and legal warnings. They do not have cultivation, extraction, brewing, or dosing protocols.
Deadly and toxic plates (datura, fly agaric, internal comfrey, concentrated wormwood) are poison-garden teaching specimens. Do not prepare them as medicine.
Grow labs cover ordinary garden herbs, culinary mushrooms, and a few regulated crops where cultivation itself is legal. Check your own jurisdiction — especially for hemp, kava, kratom, and goldenseal — before you plant or possess anything.
The field assistant is the same kind of reader: it will talk about tradition and safety, and it will refuse illegal how-tos.
Conservation note: leave wild peyote, wild goldenseal, and over-cut chaga stands alone. Buy cultivated material or do not buy it.