Hi, My girlfriend wants to create a small potted physic/apothecaries type garden in her backyard filled with medicinal plants and herbs. I'm trying to buy her a book on the subject but I'm having trouble finding one. Can anyone recomend a specific book about developing a small physic garden or alternately a good book on choosing and cultivating medicinal plants in the UK? Any suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks, Duncan
There are many good books to choose from, but I would especially recommend Jekka McVicar's New Book of Herbs (DK Publishing) 2002 -- a very comprehensive treatment covering both culinary and medicinal herbs with a list of her top 100 plants, and how to propagate, maintain and harvest them together with important cautionary notes on medicinal uses. A couple of interesting books for background reading: Judith Sumner, Natural History of Medicinal Plants (Timber Press) 2000 and David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield: Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: an Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Timber Press) 2004.
