My Grandmother’s Garden… Where Healing Once Grew

By Omolola Olakunri

‘Herbal medicine is not an ancient pharmacopoeia waiting to be decoded. It is a complete healing system, deeply intertwined with cultural practices, spiritual meaning and an intimate understanding of the natural world. It is a complex traditional method of healing that existed long before modern medicine arrived with its laboratories, measurements and crisp white coats.

Sacred plants and their healing properties flowed through generations, passed from teacher to student through careful observation and lived experience. This was not knowledge acquired from books alone, but from watching plants closely. Their growth cycles, their response to rain and sunlight, the precise methods of harvesting and preparation. It required patience, discipline and reverence for nature.’

My Grandmother understood this language of plants.
She rose at sunrise to take slow walks through her garden. She collected the tendrils of the Ewe Abamoda plant, a rhythmic plant that opened itself to the early morning breeze. Its potency lasted only until sunset. It was useful for the healing of kidney stones and normalising blood sugar.

She would smile when she found it. She spoke to plants as though they were living companions and thanked them before cutting their stems. She gathered herbs carefully into the folds of her wrapper, never taking more than she needed.
Then she moved on to the fern clinging stubbornly to palm tree barks, to guava leaves, pawpaw leaves, the dried jericho plant and corn silk growing wild around the compound.
All medicinal plants. All beneficial to mankind.

I watched my grandmother mix plants, bark, roots and seeds with the precision of a pharmacist. The whole house often carried the smell of boiling herbs, bitter leaf, fermented bark, ginger, garlic and smoke rising together in thick clouds from blackened clay pots in the outer kitchen.
There was scent leaf for stomach troubles. Dogonyaro for malaria. Guava leaves boiled for diabetes. Corn silk for prostrate. Neem baths during chickenpox. Pawpaw leaves and pineapple bark for asthma. Ginger, garlic and turmeric crushed together for coughs during harmattan season.

Mama knew which roots must never touch metal, which leaves lost potency after noon, and which remedies worked only when freshly crushed.
To her, nothing in nature was wasted. Everything had purpose. Everything played a role in restoring the body to balance.

I witnessed neighbours run frantically to our house, banging on the front door and calling my grandmother’s name when they faced emergencies modern medicine could not immediately address. I remember the woman next door whose son was having an epileptic seizure, his teeth clenched, eyes rolling backwards, his body jerking violently in her arms as she cried for help.
My Grandmother took the child from her and reached for one of the many dark bottles lining the floor of her room. She administered a measured spoonful, rubbed something pungent onto his chest and continued speaking softly to him.
Within twenty minutes, the boy had recovered. Calm. Restored.

People came from far and near.
Women struggling with infertility. Men seeking remedies for diabetes and prostate illness. Mothers carrying feverish children. Labourers searching for strength. The old seeking relief from aching joints.
Even we, her grandchildren, were not spared.
Every Sunday we lined up reluctantly for our Sunday/Sunday concoctions. Dark bitter liquids boiled, squeezed or blended from leaves and roots we could not identify. We hated the taste and swallowed with grimaces while she watched with satisfaction.

But we were rarely sick. Strong and healthy. And that, to Mama, was proof enough.
Yet I observed all of this with detachment.
I thought herbal medicine was simply my grandmother’s hobby. Most times I was amused as she wandered through her garden talking excitedly about some stubborn root pushing through the soil after rainfall.
I would smile indulgently.
Her son, my father, always took her for regular medical checkups. Mama was never ill, but he believed in giving his mother the very best modern healthcare available, and everyone humoured her fascination with plants.

Mama had learned herbal medicine from her mother. It was knowledge meant to pass naturally into the next generation. But the generation after Independence in the early sixties, embraced the prestige of Western medicine. It’s exact science, measurements, polished clinics and educated certainty.

Compared to hospitals and pharmacies, herbal stalls looked crude. Dried twigs tied in bundles, powders in bowls, bark wrapped in newspaper, dark bottles crowded on dusty wooden shelves.
It became easy to see how one system was celebrated while the other was allowed to fade quietly into oblivion.
Coupled with the growing belief that herbal medicine was primitive, fetish or backward, many people detached themselves from indigenous healing traditions entirely.
Even I, raised by a grandmother deeply rooted in prayer and faith, drifted away from it too.

Until now.

Now it is becoming impossible to ignore that plants and roots still have an important role to play in human well-being. Modern science itself continues to rediscover what indigenous communities always knew: many healing compounds originate from nature. Across the world, people are returning to herbs, roots and organic remedies in search of wellness, prevention and balance. Dried hibiscus flowers known as Zobo are made into refreshing natural drinks. Steeped soursop leaves in hot water have disease fighting properties… the seeds of pawpaw get rid of parasites.
Once mocked as ‘local medicine’ nature’s bounties are now packaged into capsules, teas and wellness products and sold back at premium prices.

This is not to say herbal medicine is beyond scrutiny or incapable of harm. Like pharmaceuticals, herbs require knowledge, precision and responsibility. Charlatans exist everywhere. Not every dark bottle contains wisdom, just as not every white coat contains truth.
Perhaps the future of healing lies not in rejection, but in reconciliation.

And I think often now of my grandmother.
Of her quiet confidence. Of her dawn walks through dew-covered gardens. Of the reverence with which she touched leaves and bark. Of the dark bottles lined carefully against the walls of her room. Of the wisdom she carried so naturally that we mistook it for ordinary village habit.

My grandmother has been gone for over a quarter of a century now, and I ache at the knowledge that I never sat beside her long enough to truly learn.
Instead, after her death, my indifference was literally akin to the burning of her library of roots, herbs, seeds and remedies.
At the time, it felt like clutter.
Today, it feels like standing by while knowledge burned.
Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy, not merely that we abandoned herbal medicine, but that we abandoned the wisdom of listening to the earth itself.
And now, generations later, we are trying desperately to remember what our grandmothers already knew.

*Omolola Olakunri wrote from Abuja