Herbal Reality

18 September 2025

Herbal Reality is a free online resource to learn about how plants can be used as medicine. Our content is written by our community of herbal experts, from medical herbalists, to phytotherapy researchers, foragers, healthcare and industry professionals and educators. Calling on their experience, skills and expertise, we commission high quality, rigorous and reliable content to share insights about herbalism and its vast healing potential.

Amidst an ever-growing burden of illness, herbalism offers a means to sustain health, prevent disease and support individuals with acute and chronic illness, serving to fill therapeutic gaps and work alongside conventional medicine. For those that are new to herbalism, Herbal Reality seeks to inspire our readers to learn about the herbs that can be found in their kitchens, gardens and hedgerows and empower them to explore using them as medicine for themselves and their families. Catering to our diverse readership — encompassing herbalists, students, doctors, academics, herbal business owners and herbal curious public alike — for clinicians, our content serves as a valuable resource to stay up to date on herbal safety, current healthcare topics, integrative medicine opportunities and sustainability and quality challenges facing the botanical industry today.

Over the past five years, we have published 228 monographs, 90 conditions articles, and over 400 articles on health, herbalism, sustainability and research. We have also created resource pages, developed our health quiz, and produced four seasons of our Herbcast. Over this time, we’ve welcomed over 2.5 million readers to our website, and over 20,000 of our readers have signed up to our newsletter, which shares snippets of the 13 articles that we publish monthly.

Our monographs are an especially valued resource, each offering a rich profile including information on each herb’s actions, traditional and modern uses, history, energetic qualities, constituents, clinical research for therapeutic use, safety, preparations and dosage, growing guidance, sustainability status and details about any quality concerns. Our library of monographs comprises herbs from across the globe, used in Western, Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine practices — from marigold to ashwagandha, from liquorice to yarrow.

For anyone seeking to learn about herbal and holistic approaches to certain conditions, such as asthma, high blood pressure, cough or anxiety, our conditions articles are curated to share information about the pathophysiology, risk factors, signs and symptoms, and the herbs, diet and lifestyle changes advised as treatment by qualified herbalists. Organised by body systems — cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, etc. — our ever-growing conditions section also offers diverse insights from Ayurvedic, TCM and Western perspectives.

As well as publishing on our website, our content is also shared via social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack, and our podcast series is available on Spotify and Apple Music, reaching an array of audiences across various mediums and platforms.

Herbal Reality not only seeks to connect people to herbs, but to herbal practitioners that can offer further information, bespoke medicine and professional support and guidance. Our resources pages signpost our website visitors not only to herbalists, but to schools, events and glossaries. Herbal Reality also assists individuals seeking to pursue further study to become medical herbalists who lack the financial resources, by offering bursaries to students attending professional training courses at Betonica School of Herbal Medicine and Heartwood Education.

Herbal Reality has been guided by our mission to share traditional, scientific and practical insights into herbal medicine that inspire a deeper understanding of the power of plants and natural healing. We strive to empower, engage and evolve society’s cultural relationship with healing plants and medicines by offering free, reliable information about herbalism. 

All that we have achieved so far is thanks to the support of the Earthsong Foundation. After five years of funding from the Earthsong Foundation, Herbal Reality is now reaching out to our ever-growing abundance of followers for their donation to support continuation of our work.