Louisiana Healing Garden: Medicinal Plants for a Sustainable Future

Louisiana Healing Garden offers a guide to the medicinal properties of everyday plants such as crape myrtle, gardenia, and sweet olive, encouraging readers to learn about these plants and their uses while maintaining a healthy ecological balance in their home spaces.

In this follow-up to Louisiana Herb Journal, herbalist Corinne Martin continues her exploration of Louisiana’s plants and their capacity to provide healing in a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty. Louisiana Healing Garden is an herb book, a garden guide, and an introduction to the web of wild lives that make up our home state. Featuring fifty medicinal herbs, the book invites readers to participate in what Catholic priest and ecologist Thomas Berry called “the Great Work” of finding ways to live that benefit both humans and the places we inhabit.

As the state struggles with increasingly severe storms, land subsidence, rising waters, saltwater intrusion, and the loss of iconic trees, Martin suggests that the recognition and careful use of medicinal plants may help to stabilize at-risk species and areas, reduce the use of toxic applications on aggressive weeds, and support everyday health. Throughout the book, she offers personal reflections on her experiences of finding the herbs and poignant commentaries on some of the gifts and challenges of living in Louisiana.

Each herb listing includes plant identification features, habitat, distribution, medicinal properties, risks, and preparation methods. Martin also shares cultivation tips to aid home gardeners who are introducing healing plants into their landscapes. As she notes, this is not just an herb book. It’s an invitation into a place that is complex, wide, shifting, old, and ever new. With Louisiana Healing Garden as a guide, we can awaken to the many small gifts that surround us, shore up our health, and help to support positive changes in the places we call home.