Nat Mady, 31
THE URBAN HERBALISTA
Unlike Thomas and Greenland, Nat Mady came to herbalism via an urban environment. “I was moving in with some friends in Hackney and we wanted to meet people in the area,” she says, explaining how she came to join the local community garden. “At that time I was working full-time as a structural engineer, but in my spare time I started to get involved, and I began to understand how beneficial those spaces were to other people.”
The gardening crowd was a mixed one – couples with children, elderly people – and an incredible range of herbs was grown, thanks to the variety of different nationalities tending plots. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” says Mady, “but we managed to get some funding to run workshops, and there was a lot of excitement around that.” Hackney Herbal, as it was called, had begun, and soon the local council began to notice the benefits, not only of people learning how to self-medicate, how to create products and use them for their health, and how to swap different cultural remedies, but also of attendees spending time in the fresh air, and having positive social interactions. Mady and others began to dry the herbs and sell them to a local café as teas, and by 2014 she was ready to leave her job and take the classes to a wider audience.
“My mum is a biology teacher and my dad is a doctor, and I think he thought, ‘Let’s see how long this lasts,’” she says. “He’s from Egypt and even now I have strong memories of his mother giving me chamomile and fennel tea as a child, so this knowledge is in his culture, too – even if I have to tease it out of him. They’re really supportive now – I think the concept of a social enterprise is quite new, and it’s harder for their generation to grasp.”
Hackney Herbal now runs six-week classes at the Hackney Centre for Better Health, a community hub where people with mental health problems can attend courses on everything from art therapy to yoga and ceramics. Attendees at Hackney Herbal classes learn a variety of skills, including how to make herbal teas and their various properties (digestion, respiratory, congestion); how to make herbal bandages by rubbing yarrow, which can help with healing and blood clotting, into wounds, and then wrapping them up with plantain leaves; how to make a cough syrup and an antibacterial cleaning product.
“The feedback we get is always really good,” she says. “People get really excited by making things themselves that they can take home – what they’re learning is good for their health, and they’re also building relationships with others over the past six weeks. They can have a rough day, and come to the course, and know that they’ve achieved something – we’re trying to remove the myth that you have to be really qualified to do this stuff.”
Hackney Herbal’s courses are now oversubscribed, and the group now runs private ticketed workshops for brands, with profits going towards keeping their mental health courses free and their public event ticket prices down. “The most important thing,” says Mady, “is that people are starting to challenge the received wisdom, whether it’s from politicians or doctors, about what is and isn’t healthy. They’re also starting to turn against instant gratification in favour of achievements that can take a lot longer, but are ultimately more rewarding.”