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Starvard University · Herbs 101
Grow a windowsill of herbs and learn the four hundred year old stories behind them. Nicholas Culpeper wrote his herbal for ordinary people in plain English, and we read him with affection, with a trowel in one hand, and with modern evidence and safety kept firmly in the other.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
A man named Nicholas Culpeper believed healing plants should not be a secret kept by doctors in Latin. So he wrote a big book in plain English telling everyone which herb grows where, and which planet he thought ruled it. Some of his ideas were wrong, and a few were dangerous. But his garden herbs are delicious, and his book is a wonderful window into the past.
Nicholas Culpeper (1616 to 1654) was a London apothecary who translated the official Latin pharmacopoeia into English, to the fury of the College of Physicians, and in 1653 published The Complete Herbal. Every plant in it gets a description, a place, a flowering time, and a section called Government and Virtues, where a planet rules the herb and the herb is matched to diseases. It is astrology based medicine from the age of the four humors, and this course presents it exactly that way: as history and literature, never as medical advice.
The practical half of the course needs no astrology at all. Mint, sage, thyme, and rosemary are easy, forgiving plants, and Lessons 2 to 5 cover growing, cooking, teas, and drying in plain modern terms. Lessons 6 and 7 then do the honest work: how to weigh an old claim against modern evidence, why some old remedies are useless and some are dangerous, and why herbs must never be eaten or dosed as medicine on Culpeper word alone.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Nicholas Culpeper was a Cambridge educated London apothecary who set up shop in Spitalfields and treated poor patients, by many accounts, without charging them. In his day the College of Physicians guarded medicine as a Latin speaking profession: the official London Pharmacopoeia, the book of approved remedies, existed only in Latin. Culpeper translated it into English in 1649, an act of open defiance, and then in 1653 published his own Complete Herbal, written for the householder, the country nurse, and the poor neighbour who could not pay a physician fee. That democratic purpose is the best thing about him, and it made him famous for centuries.
Open the Herbal anywhere and the pattern repeats: a description of the plant, where it grows, when it flowers, and then a section headed Government and Virtues. Government means government by a planet. Culpeper system, inherited from Galenic and astrological medicine, held that each herb is ruled by a planet or sign, each disease likewise, and cure follows from matching them by sympathy or by opposition. He was candid about his method, writing that he "consulted with my two brothers, DR. REASON and DR. EXPERIENCE" and took a voyage to visit his mother Nature. It is a charming picture of his mind: proud, bookish, hands on, and utterly convinced the stars were part of the machinery.
Read him, then, the way this course will read him throughout: as history and literature of the first rank, and not as medical advice. Culpeper wrote before the germ theory, before chemistry could say what is in a leaf, and before any fair test existed for whether a remedy worked. Some of his plants are harmless foods. Some of his remedies are useless. A few are dangerous, and we will flag the pattern whenever it matters. What endures is the man himself: a sickly, brilliant popularizer who thought knowledge hoarded in Latin was knowledge stolen, and who put the garden at the centre of ordinary people health.
Lesson 2
A kitchen herb garden is the easiest garden there is, because the classic culinary herbs come from dry hillsides around the Mediterranean and forgive neglect that would kill a tomato. Start with the spot: herbs want sun, at least six hours of it, and drainage above all. A windowsill, a balcony box, a strip by the kitchen door, or four terracotta pots on a step will do. If water sits in the soil after rain, mix in grit or coarse sand, or grow in pots, where you control the mix entirely. Ordinary garden soil enriched with a little compost is plenty; rich, heavily fed soil actually gives softer growth and weaker flavour.
Plant for how you cook. The four herbs of the next lesson (mint, sage, thyme, and rosemary) cover an enormous amount of everyday food, and all four are perennials in mild climates, returning year after year. Add parsley and chives if you have room, and basil in summer warmth. One firm rule, learned by every gardener once: mint goes in a pot of its own, sunk in the ground or standing alone. Culpeper warned that mint root, "being once planted in a garden, will hardly be rid out again", and three and a half centuries of gardeners can confirm he understated it. Mint spreads by runners and will colonize a bed, politely at first.
Care is mostly harvesting. Water new plants until they settle, then water deeply and less often rather than a daily sprinkle. Pinch and pick constantly: cutting sprigs for the kitchen is exactly what keeps the plants bushy instead of leggy. Take leaves in the morning after the dew dries, when the aromatic oils are strongest, and never strip more than a third of a young plant at once. That is the whole craft. Sun, drainage, a pot for the mint, and regular picking will give you a garden that pays rent in flavour from spring to frost.
Lesson 3
Meet the four, first as Culpeper presents them, planet and all. Mint opens his entry with the words "It is an herb of Venus". Spear mint, the garden kind, has narrowish dark green leaves, pale blue flower spikes, and a smell he compares to basil. In the kitchen it is the freshest taste there is: torn into salads and peas, stirred into yogurt, muddled into drinks, and brewed as tea. Grow it contained, as the last lesson warned, and pick it hard, because it always comes back.
Sage gets a grander ruler: "Jupiter claims this", Culpeper writes, and bids him tell us it is good for the liver. The plant itself is a grey green shrubby perennial with pebbly, aromatic leaves, flowering around July in his England. Cooks know it with brown butter, beans, sausages, and roast onions, a savoury depth no other herb quite copies. Rosemary, he says, is claimed by the Sun: "The Sun claims privilege in it, and it is under the celestial Ram". Its needle leaves on woody stems scent roast potatoes, lamb, focaccia, and winter stews, and a single bush by a sunny wall can supply a street.
Thyme completes the four, and Culpeper praise is warmest here: "It is a noble strengthener of the lungs", he writes, calling it a notable remedy, and in the old system thyme too belongs to Venus. In the garden it is a low, creeping mat of tiny leaves for edging paths and pots; in the kitchen it is the quiet backbone of soups, roasts, and stocks, added early and left to melt in. Enjoy the planetary rulers as what they are, the filing system of a vanished medicine. The plants themselves need no astrology. They are four tough, generous herbs, and a cook with these four is never far from a good dinner.
Lesson 4
The simplest use of a herb garden is a cup. Fresh mint tea needs nothing but a handful of leaves, lightly bruised, covered with water just off the boil, and left five minutes; it is the daily drink of half the Mediterranean and needs no sweetening, though honey is welcome. Sage makes a richer, almost savoury tea that cooks in Italy drink after heavy meals. Thyme tea, from a few sprigs, is earthy and comforting in winter. Rosemary tea is the strongest of the four, piney and resinous, and a little goes a long way. One caution belongs in this lesson and will return in Lesson 7: a gentle culinary tea of a familiar kitchen herb is food. A concentrated preparation taken as medicine is a different thing, and that is not what this course teaches.
In cooking, think of the four as two pairs. The soft, bright herbs (mint above all) go in at the end, raw or barely warmed: scattered over grilled vegetables, folded through grain salads, chopped into dressings with lemon and olive oil. The hard, woody herbs (rosemary and thyme, with sage between) stand up to heat and go in early: a rosemary branch under roasting potatoes, thyme sprigs in a pot of beans or a long braise, sage leaves crisped in butter for pasta or gnocchi. A herb butter, made by mashing any chopped combination into soft butter with salt and lemon zest, keeps in the freezer and finishes steaks, corn, and plain boiled vegetables in seconds.
Quantities forgive beginners. Start with less than the recipe in your head suggests, taste, and add. Dried herbs, the subject of the next lesson, are stronger by volume than fresh, roughly three parts fresh to one part dried. And keep the history in its place at the table: when Culpeper recommends mint for the stomach or thyme for the lungs, that is a seventeenth century claim to enjoy as a story over the meal, not a reason to eat or dose anything. The garden earns its keep in pleasure. That is a complete justification, and it always was.
Lesson 5
Drying is how a summer glut becomes a winter larder, and the woody herbs of this course dry best of all. Harvest on a dry morning, after the dew, just before the plants flower, when the leaves hold the most aromatic oil. Rosemary, thyme, and sage can simply be tied in small loose bunches, stems together, and hung upside down in a warm, airy, shaded place: an attic, a porch roof, a kitchen beam away from steam. Small bunches matter, because a fat bunch traps moisture in the middle and moulds. In one to two weeks the leaves should crumble crisply between your fingers. If they bend, they are not ready, and a jar of not quite dry herbs is a jar of mould by Christmas.
Mint and other leafy herbs dry faster spread in a single layer on a tray or screen, turned once or twice, or in a very low oven or dehydrator if your climate is damp. The test is the same: brittle, not leathery. Strip the leaves from the stems once dry (thyme leaves shake off their woody stalks with a rub between the palms), and keep them as whole as you can. Crushing releases the oils, so crush at cooking time, not at storing time. A dried herb kept whole and dark will out flavour a powdered one kept by the stove by months.
Freezing is the other honest option, and for mint it is often the better one, since dried mint loses more of its freshness than the woody herbs do. Chop fresh leaves, pack them into ice cube trays, cover with a little water or olive oil, and freeze; the cubes drop straight into soups, sauces, and drinks all winter. Sage leaves freeze well whole in a bag, and rosemary sprigs freeze on the stem. Label the bags with the month, exactly as with jars, because frozen herbs all look alike by January.
Storage is three enemies fought at once: light, heat, and air. Use clean, completely dry glass jars with tight lids, label them with the herb and the month (you will not remember, nobody does), and keep them in a cupboard, not a sunlit shelf, however pretty the jars look there. Most home dried herbs are at their best for six to twelve months; after that they fade toward hay and should be replaced by the new season crop. Culpeper world depended on exactly this craft to carry summer into winter. Ours has shops, but a jar of your own rosemary, dried from your own bush, is better than anything in them.
Lesson 6
Every entry in Culpeper ends with claims, sometimes pages of them: herbs that cure the falling sickness, stop bleeding, cure bites, and comfort every organ in turn. How should a modern reader weigh a claim like that? Begin with what the claim rests on. Culpeper evidence was tradition, authority, analogy, and the stars: a plant ruled by a friendly planet, shaped like the organ it treats, or praised by Dioscorides and Galen. That is not nothing as history, because tradition sometimes preserves a real observation. But it is not a test. A remedy credited whenever a patient recovered will collect glowing reports even if it does nothing, because most illnesses end on their own, as the Hippocratic writers already knew.
A modern test asks harder questions. Can the claim be stated precisely: this preparation, this dose, this condition? Does the plant contain anything that could plausibly do it, in amounts a person could actually take? Above all, has it been compared fairly, ideally in trials where neither patient nor doctor knows who got the herb and who got a dummy, so hope and politeness cannot bend the result? Some traditional plants pass parts of this gauntlet, and a few famous modern drugs began as folk remedies whose active ingredient science isolated, purified, and dosed exactly. Many more claims fail: the effect vanishes when the test is fair, or the dose that works is the dose that harms.
So the honest verdict on the Herbal is a mixed one, and mixed is not a dodge. As a record of what people grew, ate, hoped, and feared in 1653, it is superb. As a guide to flavour and gardening, much of it still serves. As medicine, its claims are unproven until modern evidence says otherwise, planet by planet and plant by plant, and some of its remedies are known now to be useless or dangerous. Never eat or dose a wild or garden plant as medicine based on Culpeper alone: old names can be ambiguous, lookalike plants can poison, and a seventeenth century dose is a guess. Enjoy the book. Test the claims. Keep the two activities separate.
Lesson 7
This lesson is plain on purpose, because it is the most important one in the course. First: herbs are not automatically safe because they are natural. Plants make chemicals to defend themselves, and some of those chemicals are potent. Herbs can interact with real medicines in real ways. The best known example is St John wort, a traditional herb that speeds up the breakdown of many prescription drugs, including some antidepressants, contraceptives, transplant medicines, and blood thinners, so the drug quietly stops working at full strength. Other herbs can add to the effect of a medicine, for instance by thinning the blood further alongside an anticoagulant, or by lowering blood sugar or blood pressure on top of a drug doing the same job. If you take any regular medicine, tell your doctor and pharmacist about every herb and supplement you use, and ask before starting a new one.
Second: identification and dose are safety issues, not pedantry. Culpeper names are four centuries old and can point to more than one plant, and gardens and hedgerows hold poisonous lookalikes beside harmless herbs. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of an old book description, a picture, or an app alone, and never give concentrated herb preparations (oils, tinctures, strong extracts) to children, or use them in pregnancy, without medical advice: essential oils in particular can burn, poison, or trigger seizures in small bodies. The culinary use in this course, leaves in food and gentle teas from familiar kitchen herbs, is the safe lane. Stay in it.
Third, and simplest: know when an herb garden is the wrong tool entirely. Chest pain, trouble breathing, signs of a stroke, uncontrolled bleeding, a high fever in a baby, sudden severe pain, suicidal thoughts, or any symptom that is rapidly getting worse means get medical help now, in person, not a tea and a wait. Herbs have their place, and it is a good one: flavour, pleasure, a garden at the door, and a wonderful old book to read in the evening. Medicine for illness belongs to evidence and to doctors. Culpeper, who treated the poor for free and wanted them cared for, would not have disagreed with sending you to one.
Sources
This course is taught from one famous book, free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You met the apothecary who defied the Latin doctors, planted and picked four generous herbs, learned their planetary rulers as the stories they are, and practised drying, storing, and judging old claims with modern eyes. You also learned the safety rules that let a herb garden stay a pleasure. Congratulations, and may your mint stay in its pot and your rosemary outlive us all.
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