Big news! Morgan Botanicals is relocating to CO! We are off on a journey of a life time.

Over the next couple weeks we will be packing up and moving onward, leaving behind California and making our way to new land. I will be continuing my herbal education at the North American Institute of Medical Herbalism and am filled to the brim with gratitude. I am so very excited and honored to have the chance to study and learn from another group of amazing herbalists. I'll also be starting my clinical training and mentorship for American Herbalist Guild professional recognition.

Clary sage was once thought to make people immortal and many believed that it could clarify the brain, the eyes and even the “inner eye”, and that those who drank a tea of the leaves and flowers could see the future. Today, clary sage is used as a flavoring in everything from cigarettes and omelets to muscatel wine, but it does have many medicinal properties too. In fact, it has a medicinal pedigree going back to the ancient Greeks, but it's probably not the first herb you think of to treat complaints like hot flashes, indigestion and anxiety.

The young tops of Clary were used in soups and as pot herbs. It gives a new lift to omelets, and was used to flavor jellies. The leaves were chopped into salads. Culpeper recommended a 17th century sage dish where the fresh leaves were first dipped in a batter of flour, eggs and a little milk, fried in butter and served as a side dish. The flowers have an aromatic flavor and make a lovely contrast in salads. All sage flowers are edible after removing all greenery and stems.

Mallow is one of the earliest cited plants in recorded literature. Horace mentions it in reference to his own diet, which he describes as very simple: "Me pascunt olivae, me cichorea, me malvae" ("As for me, olives, endives, and mallows provide sustenance")

Know your weeds: Look down, because Common Mallow (Malva neglecta) probably grows around you. The flowers, leaves, young shoots and roots are edible, either raw or cooked and are very nutritious. The seeds alone contain 21% protein and 15.2% fat.

Since antiquity, mankind has used the velvety mullein plant for many purposes. From Roman times, the stem- stripped of the leaves and flowers and dipped in tallow- was carried as a torch in religious processions. Why not make a giant torch eh? Well, they are smoky, stinky, and tend to drip hot flaming bits everywhere ...... Perfect for a cave? Maybe.

Mullein was known in Greek as Flego and Fluma, that is, "to set on fire." According to one writer, "it served as a wick to put into lamps to burn." The leaves were rolled and dried and used as wicks for oil lamps and candles, and made excellent tinder.  John Parkinson, a seventeenth-century herbalist, "used the stalks dipped in suet whether to burn at funerals or otherwise, and so likewise the English name High Taper, used in the same manner as a taper or torch."

“A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world, what difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset.” - Oscar Wilde

I tend to have interest in anything historical and/or herb related and I'm a great fan of herbal liqures, wines, beers, sodas etc. I’ve made beer, I’ve made wine, I’m working on sodas and I’m intrigued by liquors. I’ll probably never make this but non-the-less very interested by the medicinal history. I’m also deeply intrigued by some of our most controversial and self-impoverished artists, writers, poets, musicians, free-thinkers, and the like and find it fascinating that this herbal drink was the "beaverage du jour" or drink of choice among these great thinkers in the mid to late 19th century. It inspired many and appeared in works by Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh, it was drank by the scandalous playwright Oscar Wilde, the eccentric Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the poets Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe, and the famous 20th century author Ernest Hemingway, just to mention a few....intriguing right? I’d say so.