Blossom & Sage
The Journal
Field notes, monographs, and small recipes
Guide
Soothing Colds & Flu — Herbal Care for Children and Adults
By Silibaziso Moody
Every household has its cold-and-flu season — the runny noses, the sore throats, the restless nights of a child who cannot settle. Long before the pharmacy, families across Zimbabwe and much of the world turned to the garden and the hedgerow for gentle, effective relief. This guide gathers the herbal remedies I return to most often for both children and adults, with clear notes on what changes between the two, and one warming recipe you can make tonight.
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Monograph
Khalimela (Dicoma anomala) — Stomach Bush
By Silibaziso Moody
Across the grasslands, rocky hillsides, and disturbed soils of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, and Mozambique, Dicoma anomala grows low and unassuming — a small, thistle-like plant with silvery-grey leaves and small white flower heads that would be easy to pass without noticing. Those who know it do not pass it. Called khalimela in Ndebele and chifombo in Shona, it is one of the most trusted stomach medicines in the southern African herbal tradition, relied upon for generations for the full range of digestive complaints: diarrhoea, dysentery, stomach cramps, intestinal worms, and the deep indigestion of a gut that has been strained by illness or poor food.
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Monograph
Resurrection Bush (Myrothamnus flabellifolius) — Umafavuke
By Silibaziso Moody
There are plants that survive drought by going dormant — losing their water slowly, shutting down, waiting. And then there is Myrothamnus flabellifolius, which does something altogether more extraordinary. It does not merely survive desiccation. It dies, completely, and comes back. The leaves curl inward, turn brown and brittle as paper, and the whole shrub becomes, to any eye, dead wood. Then the first rain falls. Within hours, the leaves uncurl. Within a day, they are green. The plant was never dead — it was waiting, in a state of suspended animation, for water to return. The Ndebele name umafavuke captures this exactly: the one that wakes up again.
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Monograph
Snot Apple (Thespesia garckeana) — Uxakuxaku
By Silibaziso Moody
The name does not flatter it. Snot apple — uxakuxaku in Ndebele — is one of those plants whose common name tells you exactly what the fruit feels like in your hand: sticky, slippery, mucilaginous, a little strange. And yet Thespesia garckeana is one of the most genuinely useful trees in the miombo woodland of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. Its bark, roots, leaves, and fruit each carry a medicine, and traditional healers across this region have known them for generations. It grows quietly in the margins of cultivation and the edges of dry forest, never demanding attention. Those who have been taught to find it know to look for the leathery leaves and the small, round fruit that turns yellow-green at the end of the season — and then to know what to do with it.
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Monograph
Silver Cluster Leaf (Terminalia sericea) — Umsusu
By Silibaziso Moody
Known as umsusu in Ndebele, the silver cluster leaf tree is one of the most trusted multipurpose medicines across Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Botswana. Its bark, roots, and leaves have been used for generations for gut infections, wound healing, chest illness, and the sustained management of blood sugar. It is a tree that rewards those who know it deeply.
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Monograph
Intolwane (Elephantorrhiza goetzei)
By Silibaziso Moody
Deep in the sandy soils of the miombo woodland, beneath the surface where nothing appears to be growing, the intolwane plant holds something extraordinary. Elephantorrhiza goetzei — known as intolwane in Ndebele and Zulu, and sometimes called elephant root — is one of those medicines that is almost entirely invisible above ground: a low, unassuming shrub with small leaves and modest flowers, concealing beneath it a root system of remarkable size and power. It is the root that has made this plant one of the most trusted medicines in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the broader southern African tradition.
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Monograph
Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) — Umganu
By Silibaziso Moody
Few trees carry the name 'tree of life' and mean it as completely as the marula. Sclerocarya birrea — called umganu in Ndebele and mupfura in Shona — is one of the great medicine trees of southern Africa: a provider of food, oil, shade, and healing whose gifts stretch from the outermost layer of bark down to the hard kernel at the heart of the fruit. Elephants travel for it. Grandmothers harvest it in late summer, racing the animals for the fallen fruit. Children grow up eating it without knowing, yet, that they are growing up inside a pharmacy.
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Monograph
Mexican Poppy (Argemone mexicana) — Umhlaba
By Silibaziso Moody
It grows in the most unforgiving places — cracked roadsides, eroded riverbanks, overgrazed fields baked hard by the dry season sun. Argemone mexicana, the Mexican poppy, arrived in Africa from the Americas centuries ago and embedded itself so thoroughly into the disturbed soils of Zimbabwe, South Africa, and across the continent that most people assume it has always been there. Its bright yellow flowers and spiny, glaucous leaves are unmistakable. Its medicine — once you know it — is equally hard to overlook.
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Monograph
Lantana (Lantana camara) — Ubuhobe
By Silibaziso Moody
Lantana camara is one of those plants that divides opinion sharply. To ecologists it is an invasive weed, spreading across disturbed land with aggressive speed. To traditional healers across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, it is a medicine cabinet growing at the edge of the field — its leaves, roots, and flowers each carrying remedies that have been relied upon for generations. The small, brightly coloured flowers — shifting from yellow to orange to pink and red on a single flower head — are deceptively pretty. The plant beneath them is potent, carefully used, and deeply known.
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Monograph
Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa)
By Silibaziso Moody
In the gardens of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and across the whole sweep of sub-Saharan Africa, roselle grows with an exuberance that is hard to miss — its dark red calyces crowning each stem like small lanterns at the end of the dry season, swollen with juice, tart on the tongue, and brilliant in colour. Known as nhunguru in Shona and as zobo in West Africa, Hibiscus sabdariffa is one of the most beautiful and most medicinal plants in the African garden. Most people know it first as a drink — the deep crimson hibiscus tea that is served cold at celebrations and warm against the cold. What is less widely known is how much medicine is carried in those same calyces, and how long the tradition of using them for the body's health stretches back across this continent.
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Monograph
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)
By Silibaziso Moody
Few plants have been so thoroughly dismissed as weeds and so quietly relied upon as medicine. The dandelion grows in every neglected lawn, every cracked pavement edge, every meadow and garden bed across the temperate world — and in almost every place it grows, some grandmother has known how to use it. Taraxacum officinale is one of the most complete medicinal plants in the northern hemisphere's herbal tradition: a liver tonic, a kidney herb, a digestive bitter, a nutritive food, and a gentle diuretic, all in a single plant that most people spend their weekends trying to remove.
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Monograph
English Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)
By Silibaziso Moody
Of all the plants that have crossed into mainstream herbal medicine from the ancient gardens of the Mediterranean, English lavender is perhaps the one that has travelled furthest — not just in distance, but in trust. Its slender purple flower spikes are recognised across the world, and the oil distilled from them has been used for sleep, for pain, for wound healing, and for the kind of anxiety that settles in the body and refuses to leave. It grows with equal willingness in a Provençal hillside and a Zimbabwean kitchen garden, and it offers the same medicine in both places.
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Monograph
German Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla)
By Silibaziso Moody
Of all the plants that have crossed continents and found their way into homes across the world, German chamomile may be the most quietly beloved. Its small, sun-bright flowers — white petals curling back from a domed golden centre — are among the most recognised in herbal medicine, and the tea made from them has been drunk for sleep, for sorrow, for stomach cramps, and for fever across Europe, the Middle East, and increasingly across Africa, where it now grows in home gardens and is sold in every market that carries medicinal herbs. It is a plant that asks very little and gives with remarkable consistency.
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Monograph
Black Jack (Bidens pilosa) — Uqatothi
By Silibaziso Moody
Few plants are as universally overlooked and as universally available as black jack. It grows in every garden where it has not been invited, along every path, at the edge of every maize field and vegetable plot across Zimbabwe, South Africa, and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Children know it as the weed whose needle-like seeds attach themselves to socks and trouser hems on the way home from the fields. Healers know it quite differently — as one of the most versatile and well-documented medicinal plants on the continent, with a long tradition of use stretching from the homestead garden to formal ethnobotanical research.
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Monograph
Pawpaw (Carica papaya) — Ipopo
By Silibaziso Moody
There are few trees more generous than the pawpaw. Within a year of planting, it is already bearing fruit. Within two, it is feeding the household. And all the while — the leaves, the seeds, the unripe fruit, the milky latex of the stem — every part is quietly working as medicine. Carica papaya arrived in Africa from tropical America centuries ago, and it has embedded itself so completely into the gardens, the kitchens, and the healing traditions of Zimbabwe and sub-Saharan Africa that it is now impossible to imagine the landscape without it.
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Monograph
Sycamore Fig (Ficus sycomorus) — Umkhiwa
By Silibaziso Moody
Along the banks of great rivers — the Zambezi, the Limpopo, the Nile — the sycamore fig grows with an authority that commands attention. Its enormous, spreading canopy, its pale, smooth bark, and its remarkable clusters of figs ripening directly on the trunk and main branches have made it one of the most recognised and revered trees in Africa. Known as umkhiwa in Ndebele and muonde in Shona, Ficus sycomorus has been a food tree, a medicine tree, a shade tree, and a sacred tree for as long as people have lived beside rivers on this continent. Ancient Egyptians used its wood for coffins and its fruit as food. Healers across sub-Saharan Africa have known its medicine for generations.
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Monograph
Broom Cluster Fig (Ficus sur Forssk) — Inkwane
By Silibaziso Moody
Along the banks of rivers, in the cool shade of kloofs, and spreading its broad canopy over the margins of forest and farmland across Zimbabwe, South Africa, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, the broom cluster fig is one of those trees you learn to recognise by its figs before anything else — small, round, reddish-green fruit that grow in dense clusters directly from the trunk and main branches, crowding the bark in a way that seems almost improbable. Known as inkwane in Ndebele and muonde in Shona, Ficus sur has been a medicine tree, a food tree, and a shade tree for as long as people have lived alongside rivers in this part of the world.
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Monograph
Monkey Bread (Piliostigma thonningii) — Ihabahaba
By Silibaziso Moody
Along the edges of woodland, in the dry savanna, and scattered through the farms and homesteads of Zimbabwe and much of sub-Saharan Africa, the monkey bread tree grows with a quiet familiarity that belies the depth of its medicine. Known as ihabahaba in Ndebele and muhacha in Shona, Piliostigma thonningii is one of the most widely used medicinal trees across the continent — the bark, roots, leaves, and pods each carrying a distinct healing tradition stretching back many generations.
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Monograph
Mango (Mangifera indica) — Umango
By Silibaziso Moody
Almost everyone knows the mango as fruit — the heavy, golden flesh of summer, eaten over the kitchen sink with juice running down the wrist. But the mango tree is far more than its fruit. Across Africa, India, and the Caribbean, every part of the tree — the bark, the leaves, the seed kernel, and even the ash of burned leaves — has been used in traditional medicine for generations. Mangifera indica arrived in Africa through centuries of trade, and it has been absorbed so completely into the healing traditions of Zimbabwe, South Africa, and East Africa that many people no longer think of it as an introduced tree at all.
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Monograph
Fever Tea (Lippia javanica) — Umsuzwane
By Silibaziso Moody
In almost every homestead garden across Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Mozambique, you will find a low-growing, rough-leaved shrub with small white or lilac flowers and a smell so distinct that a single brushed leaf is enough to transport you back to a grandmother's kitchen. Lippia javanica — called umsuzwane in Ndebele and Zulu, zumbani in Shona — is one of the most widely used medicinal plants in southern Africa, and one of the most trusted. It is the plant people reach for first when a fever arrives, when a chest tightens, when the long cold of the dry season settles in.
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Monograph
Sour Plum (Ximenia caffra) — Umthunduluka
By Silibaziso Moody
Along the banks of seasonal rivers and on the margins of dry woodland across Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa, the sour plum grows quietly — a small, thorny tree whose bright red fruit is one of the great wild foods of southern Africa. Children know it first as something to eat on the way home from the fields. Healers know it differently: as a tree whose bark, roots, leaves, and fruit kernel each carry a distinct medicine, and whose gifts have been passed down through generations of women who knew how to read the bush.
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Monograph
Lucky Bean Tree (Erythrina abyssinica) — Umgqogqogqo
By Silibaziso Moody
In late winter, before a single leaf has returned to its branches, the lucky bean tree erupts in a blaze of deep scarlet flowers — one of the most striking sights in the African bushveld. Known as umgqogqogqo in Ndebele and muNhangati in Shona, Erythrina abyssinica has been a medicine tree across eastern and southern Africa for as long as people have lived beside it. Its seeds, bark, roots, and leaves each carry a different medicine, and traditional healers have long known how to read the whole tree.
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Monograph
Wild Medlar (Vangueria infausta) — Umviyo
By Silibaziso Moody
Growing in the dry woodlands and thornveld of southern Africa, the wild medlar is one of those trees that those of us who grew up in Zimbabwe knew first as food — the small, round fruits eaten straight off the branch in late summer, mealy and slightly sharp on the tongue. What many people do not know is that every part of this tree is medicine: the bark, the roots, the leaves, and the fruit itself.
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Monograph
Corn Silk (Zea mays)
By Silibaziso Moody
The fine, golden threads that crown an ear of corn are one of the most overlooked medicines in the kitchen garden. Corn silk — the long, silky strands tucked beneath the husk — has been used for centuries across Africa, the Americas, and Asia to soothe the urinary tract, calm inflammation, and support the kidneys. Most people throw it away without a second thought.
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