Category: Agriculture & Systems Design

Rooted & Resilient | by Marisa Herzer

Reclaiming Our Relationship with Healing Plants

It has been a long standing desire of mine to incorporate medicinal herbs as a part of my resilient homestead ecosystem. Perhaps this passion was ignited the first time we walked across our land, sifting through the tall native grasses and finding little sections of native sage and poppy mallows. The wild onion and garlic, small oak saplings and the plethora of green briar just beaming with life shocked me. Before we saw the property in person, my city mind saw grass and trees, not fully aware of the true diversity and life right at the fingertips of whoever may steward that land.

Medicinal herbs are not a trendy wellness aesthetic, but a truly important key to our ability to heal and thrive without being dependent on any other entity. A resilient society should not lose its relationship with healing plants – but unfortunately we have lost touch with what these remarkable plants can and have done for our species for centuries.

As an agriculturist, I carry a deep belief that losing herbal knowledge disconnects people from their inherent resilience. While I will always carry an appreciation for modern medicine where it’s appropriate, there is a deep importance in knowing the land beyond food production. The dependence our society currently has on larger systems to provide for us concerns me and fuels my passion to influence more independence. To me, this means normalizing medicinal gardening.

There is an emotional comfort in growing healing plants, and we become more resilient in every action we take to become more literate in our wellness. Just as important as a first aid kit, there is an importance in households having an understanding in basic supportive care, like how to grow and use medicinal herbs to treat ailments of all kinds.

There’s something to be said about the knowledge your grandma carries about what will work when you’re sick with a cold, or what kind of leaves will help the burning from poison ivy. If your stomach is upset, she also knows what kind of mix to cook up so you can drink away the pain… and all of this knowledge was carried from her mom through lived experience. It is painful to think that the generational knowledge we have available to us would eventually wash away over time. It’s important that we preserve and practice these skills so they do not disappear with the generations who carry them today. As much as we can buy at the store to cure our ailments, there are just as many things we can grow from a seed, nurture into a living plant and then harvest to care for us in a new way.

More Than a Remedy

There’s a deep feeling of care embedded in tending to medicinal herbs, and the rewarding feeling of taking the time to learn about them and assign new meaning to plants that once looked like weeds growing in a pasture. Your garden serves more than hunger.

The World Beneath Our Feet

What fascinates me even more is that plants are not growing alone. The deeper I study agriculture and ecology, the more I find myself humbled by what exists beneath our feet. Long before we ever harvest a leaf for tea or gather flowers for a salve, an entire community is already at work below the surface of the soil.

Scientists have spent decades studying mycorrhizal fungi, for example, and the vast underground networks they form with plants (mycorrhizal networks). Through these relationships, fungi connect to plant roots and help move water, nutrients and chemical systems throughout the ecosystem. Some researchers have described this to be the “wood wide web,” where plants are able to share resources and respond to environmental stresses in ways we are only at the beginning of understanding.

The way I see it, this is a powerful reminder that resilience is not about independence alone. Even nature thrives through relationship.

The medicinal herbs in our gardens are not isolated organisms fighting for survival on their own but a living network that supports the health of the soil, the vitality of their neighboring plants and ultimately the wellness of everything depending on them. When we grow medicinal herbs, we participate in a system of connection that began well before our time and can continue long after us if we steward it well.

Resilience Is Created Through Relationship

The most resilient gardens feed more than hunger because they teach us how resilience is created in the first place: through relationship.

Just as these underground relationships matter, the way we manage our land matters too. One of the questions that sits at the heart of our work through Frontier West is simple: How do we create conditions for life to thrive?

Diversity Creates Stability

A medicinal garden should not exist as isolated beds of herbs. Just as natural ecosystems contain grasses, flowers, fungi, insects, shrubs, and trees working together: resilient homesteads benefit from diversity as well. Regenerative agriculture emphasizes:

• biodiversity
• living roots
• minimal soil disturbance
• ecological reelationships
• long term soil health

So rather than simply extracting from the land, we deeply invest our participation in systems that continually renew themselves. Permaculture is a wonderful example of this in which plants are placed in guilds to promote healthy interacting networks to ultimately create ecologically sound and economically prosperous human communities.

The Soil is Part of the Medicine

It’s common to think that medicinal herbs are only beneficial once they are harvested, but the quality of the plant begins long before the harvest. Healthy soil biology influences nutrient availability, plant vigor, stress resistance and secondary plant compounds (which mycorrhiza significantly stimulates in plants). To put it simply, the medicine starts in the soil.

Designing for Wellness

At Frontier West, we often think about resilience through systems. Water flow, soil health, livestock integration, plant diversity, and land stewardship are not separate conversations in our world. They are interconnected parts of the same landscape.

When we design properties, we are not simply deciding where a garden should go but considering things like how water moves across the site, how organic matter is built, how pollinators are supported and how plants can thrive within a healthy ecological community – to name a few.

Medicinal herbs have a place in that vision because resilience is not only about producing food. It’s also about supporting wellness, connection, and the ability to care for ourselves and our families.

Resilience Is More Than Stockpiles

As we continue building our Bent Oak Homestead, medicinal herbs are becoming part of the larger vision. We don’t expect them to replace every modern convenience, but we do believe in the resilience that grows when we participate more fully in the systems that sustain us. Learning about these plants, growing them, and understanding their role in the landscape feels like one small way of reclaiming knowledge that was once so common.

Nature teaches us that resilience is more than stored food, supplies and medicine. It is not created by accumulation, but by healthy relationships. The relationships between plants and fungi, soil and roots, families and knowledge, and the people and the land.

Support the Mission — Plant a Seed of Sustainability

Rooted & Resilient is built from real soil, late nights, and lived experience.
If these articles have helped you grow stronger, consider helping keep them alive.

🌾 Buy Me a Coffee — or Plant a Seed →

Your contribution helps fund:

• Future homestead planning templates & resource updates
• Educational posts and future permaculture guides
• Future community toolkits for sustainable living

Every act of support fuels the ecosystem.
Gratitude in advance as you’re part of the frontier now.