The Healing Tree: Botanicals, Remedies, and Rituals from African Folk Traditions (PB) (2024)

A practical guide to traditional African approaches to healing with remedies and cultural history from one of the most respected authorities on the subject.

The Healing Tree celebrates the forest: its powers, spirits, magic, medicine, and mysteries. Author Stephanie Rose Bird shares how trees have provided her with personal healing, then allows us to share in that process for our own benefit and, by extension, provide healing for Earth's beleaguered forests.

Reclaiming traditional botanical and herbal practices has never been more important than it is today. So much of our future depends on our ability to use ancient Earth knowledge. Although many botanicals and herbals have been published, they tend to focus on Europe and the Americas. For many, the word "rainforest" is synonymous with the endangered Amazon Basin, as if that were Earth's only endangered patch of healing green. Africa, the Mother Continent and reputedly the birthplace of the entire human race, remains largely ignored. Yet African wild lands are as endangered as the Amazon. Equally endangered are the traditional indigenous cultures of Africa, caretakers of sophisticated botanical medicinal systems whose roots stretch back to the proverbial dawn of time.

In this crucially important book, author Stephanie Rose Bird recounts the story of the sacred wood: how to live in it, learn from it, derive spiritual enrichment from it, and how to preserve and protect it. The book offers functional, accessible recipes, remedies, and rituals derived from a variety of African and African American traditions to serve mind, body, soul, and spirit.

Bird's book follows her own personal journey, but Africa is always her touchstone, the persistent and tenacious ancestral mother wisdom and spiritual foundation that refuses to fade away. The Healing Tree preserves this knowledge, presenting it as relevant and viable and demonstrating in intimate detail how vestiges of that knowledge took root in the Western Hemisphere, in African American culture, and more broadly in American culture in general.

This book was previously published as A Healing Grove from Lawrence Hill Books (9781556527647). This edition includes a new preface by the author and a source guide for the botanicals discussed within.