Aroostook herbalist carries on tradition
WADE, Maine — Natalia Bragg has been growing and foraging therapeutic plants for 50 years, sharing what she considers an underappreciated natural heritage.
“There is a whole apothecary in nature,” said Bragg, age 67, who sells tinctures, teas, lotions and plants at her 80 acre farm in Wade, online and at the Presque Isle Farmer’s Market.
On a recent Saturday morning, she recommended the Old Log Driver’s Arthritis Formula when one customer mentioned her father’s arthritis. With cayenne pepper oil as an active ingredient, the salve helps dull pain and promote circulation, Bragg said.
“Rub it right where it hurts,” the directions read. “It is a formula from the 1850’s,” Bragg said. “This was a time, when people knew, you only treat the painful area, not the whole body.”
Bragg’s remedies come from dozens of wild and cultivated plants, trees and the occasional fungus (the like the Chaga birch mushroom), some using roots, others the flowers or leaves.
Herbalists like Bragg, who is not a doctor, can draw criticism from medical professionals who point to a lack of research and regulation, as well as possible risks for interactions between active natural compounds and pharmaceutical medicines. ( St. John’s Wort, a popular German folk remedy for depression that Bragg also sells, can lead to potentially life-threatening increases in serotonin if taken with pharmaceutical antidepressants.)
Much of Bragg’s work, though, is focused on plant-based remedies to non-life threatening ailments, including the range of muscle and joint soreness, that have been used for generations by her family, other settlers and Native Americans, such as Balm of Gilead, Cramp Bark and Chickweed. Bragg also promotes nature as a part of well being — taking regular walks through local woods or tending a garden. She recommends a good walking stick, like those she fashions from beaver poles found along the Aroostook River near her farm.
“There are so many kinds of plants and trees that live here,” Bragg said. She points to Balm of Gilead, a swamp-dwelling tree ignored for commercial timber or even firewood, but with rosins from flower buds that may have antibacterial, antifungal and mild pain relieving properties.
“It is one of those plants that’s not found very many places,” Bragg said. “Back in settler’s times, that tree was a remarkable medical chest, one of the only things that would stop gangrene.
Bragg has accumulated 50 years of knowledge as a naturalist since she started studying herbalism seriously at age 17. It was a family profession of sorts that Bragg traces back six generations to medicinal farmers in London, England, who supplied the King and Queen with herbal medicinals, lotions and soaps, and who settled in Aroostook County in the late 1800s.
Growing up, Bragg spent a lot of time with the elders in her big family, especially her grandmother Eva Randall, who later encouraged her to embrace the wild plants growing in the clay soil at her farm in Wade while cultivating other adaptable plants.
As she enters her elder years, Bragg said she is also trying to get more people to appreciate the great variety of plants that can be used as food and therapy. “You can take a small 10-acre farm and have a very diverse medicinal forest.”
