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 catalog is a set of 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 sections; that crossover is the point. Fruit & vegetable plates are kitchen-garden crops and market fruit, including exotic tropical produce, filed as food first. Garden flowers are edible petals, companion blooms, and decorative cottage plants, with the cautions that belong on a plate you might eat. Regulated or restricted plates cover law, licensing, and conservation — habitat notes only, no grow or dose protocols. Toxic plates are poison-garden teaching specimens, named so they are never mistaken for tea. Medicinal teas are cups drawn from those plates. Harvest & process is when to cut, how to dry, and how to store a legal crop. Natural remedies gather household protocols with traditional adult doses and the safety warnings that belong next to them. Companion planting is who shares a bed and who must be kept apart — named guilds, not a pest-control guarantee. Lookalikes are named mix-ups — foxglove for comfrey, hemlock for parsley — so a kettle is never a guess. Every plate, lookalike pair, and month in the grow lab has a print sheet you can take to the bed. The printable plates drawer (Part XIII) is the catalog of those sheets — every specimen, every lookalike pair, and each month of the grow lab. The bed planner (Part XIV) takes a timber bed’s length and width and returns plant counts, companion warnings, trellis notes, and a botanical plan of the mix. Seed starting (Part XV) takes a last frost date and a USDA zone and returns when to start indoors, transplant, or sow outdoors for the vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruit in this folio. 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 notes 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 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.
Photographs, accounts, and harvest reminders are described in the privacy policy. The published source is on the download page.