‘What do you want to know about the atropa belladonna?’ said Rocky.

  Atropa sounded familiar. Three Fates sit at the loom of your life. The first spins the thread, the second weaves it and the third snips it. The one who snips it is Atropa.

  ‘Also known as crazy herb and old herb,’ Rocky added.

  ‘Do you have it?’

  ‘We have it. Also known as wild tobacco. It has a relaxing effect, helps with insomnia. They exported huge amounts of it during Communism and just about killed it. It recovered but it’s on the red list again.’

  I could buy a dried leaf of belladonna from him and roll it up like a joint before bedtime.

  ‘Go to where she grows and meet her in person. I’ll explain to you where she grows. You lie down under her, smell her, feel her and drift into slumber like a newborn lamb.’

  That was the best way to know plants, he said: in a state of relaxation.

  ‘She likes shady beech forests. That’s why she only grows in one place on Pirin now. Eagle Reserve. Just don’t eat the fruit.’

  I didn’t go. It was remote and I had no guide to take me. Rocky promised to take me there another time, but there was no other time.

  Belladonna is of course deadly nightshade. Culpeper reports: ‘It is of a cold nature; in some it causes sleep; in others madness, and shortly after, death.’

  Shakespeare’s Juliet successfully faked her death with belladonna. My herbalist told me that it is grown in Scotland and that she uses it for people with severe anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I began to see that the line between poison and cure is fine; as fine as the line between life and death.

  Over time, allopathic Western medicine distanced itself from plant medicine, even as it relied on plants to create its drugs. Biophilia – the human instinct to be one with the rest of nature – was suppressed. The body-as-garden was replaced by the body-as-machine. This reflected the dominant Western view of the earth as a machine, rather than as a living organism. It is this split between the organic and the inorganic world that has made human health go into decline. We became subsumed by the inorganic; metal replaced wood and we lost our way.

  The crushing wheel that eventually ground down organic living was set in motion by Western Christendom. Emperor Constantine I was the first to institutionalise the persecution of healer-herbalists and of the nature-magicians called magi at the time. His punitive laws were implemented in the early fourth century and laid the foundations for the Inquisition. Never mind that the emperor himself had sought the counsel of astrologers and magi to attain the throne, but it was not about belief or practice, it was about power and profit. By the fifth century, Europe’s male clergy had officially monopolised people’s minds and bodies. Freelance healers were punished and even killed, and anyone who wanted to practise healing had to be part of the system and accountable to the clergy. Ironically, senior monks and nuns throughout the Christian world were often herbalists and healers and Hildegard of Bingen systematised this in her writings on herbal, plant, animal and mineral medicine. Meanwhile, lay healers retreated underground.

  Yet, like the roots of plants they only played dead during a very long winter. A crucial part of that winter was industrialisation and urbanisation, and its frozen nadir came in the twentieth century with the rise of a new behemoth: the pharmaceutical industry. In North America and Europe, pharma economy pushed out plant economy completely as manufactured mass drugs became the norm, while plant medicine was marginalised and shamed; humiliated and discarded like the working village. The argument was that phamaceuticals are controlled by man and homogenised in factories, while plant medicine is variable like the weather, but the plain truth is that mass-produced pharmaceuticals are infinitely more profitable for large corporations than plants.

  The communists were not the first with their Pyrrhic shout: ‘IN THE FIGHT AGAINST NATURE, WE SHALL BE VICTORIOUS!’ Corporate capitalism got there first and is still at it. Yet aspirin, the world’s most consumed pill, is extracted from the plant spirea, in body and in name. Spirea is meadowsweet, used for its painkilling and anti-inflammatory salicylic acid for thousands of years, and to repel pests in summer when it flowers in fragrant white bunches.

  In Britain, wild plants are still associated with ‘witches’ because in the phytophobic collective mind, plant use is conflated with the horrific fate of witches at the hands of the church. I go for river walks with a Scottish friend and the first time she saw me collecting St John’s wort she said, only half-joking: ‘In the past, you would’ve been burned for this.’

  And we half-laughed. Because we only half-know how damaged we are.

  ‘It’s crazy,’ she said, the second time I picked it. She was recovering from a mental breakdown. ‘The mood stabilisers have side effects as bad as the illness. And I could’ve taken this when my symptoms were mild. But there is a stigma around plant medicine, so I didn’t.’

  And yet, until the Second World War, foraging for plants and algae was part of everyday life in coastal Scotland.

  Another time, I was picking blueberries in the woods, the ones that are now a quarry pit. A woman with a child passed me.

  ‘Aren’t these poisonous?’ she asked, and inside that question was trauma that led back to the torture chambers of the church where salaried torturers called ‘prickers’ punctured, with long needles, women (and men) who were accused of witchcraft or in possession of nice land that, once the owner was disabled or killed, could be confiscated.

  In late sixteenth-century Scotland, a woman was tried for witchcraft for healing ‘sundry women’ with honeysuckle. Another woman was tried for treating heart symptoms with plantago leaves. Both medicinal plants are still in use today and in the Bach Flower Remedies, honeysuckle is administered to those who ‘live in the past’. Those women were just two of tens of thousands in Christian Europe who helped people with plants and suffered for it. It is significant that the persecution of women-as-witches was at its worst in parts of Europe that were monocultural and religiously homogenous. Cultures that were religiously mixed, like the entire Balkans, did not endure witch hunts. Part of the reason was Ottoman laxity towards local custom. Balkan Islam is syncretic itself, like Balkan Christianity.

  The woman let her child pick a single blueberry and eat it before moving on.

  In Women Who Run with the Wolves, the psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of ‘the injured instinct’. Once your instinct is injured, you make poor choices. You cannot distinguish between poison and food because these choices cannot be made through the mental faculty alone. This injury happens when our wild, creative nature – every child’s nature – is suppressed for too long.

  Most people in the post-industrial world suffer from injured instinct.

  ‘Tell me about the immortal flower,’ I said to Rocky.

  ‘It’s a mysterious plant. Rare and expensive. Forty euros per kilo.’

  The roots had the properties that earned this elusive plant its name, although Rocky couldn’t explain what these properties were. Or wouldn’t.

  ‘Once you taste the root, you can’t forget it. It’s sweet, peculiar. It does something to you,’ he said. ‘You see, there’s always a lot going on with herbs,’ he went on. ‘And if this was a normal country, we’d be able to give our people a living from it.’

  The valley and its mountains still looked like a palace of plants to me, but the masterplan was clearly gone.

  ‘Gutting the forests is the biggest problem,’ Rocky said. ‘Because each tree you cut changes the microclimate. What grows in place of a felled tree? Bramble and juniper. Nothing else.’

  The gravel pits of my river in Scotland will be planted with pine at best, or left to the broom at worst. Monocultures.

  ‘As above, so below,’ goes the old Platonic principle, reiterated in the twentieth century by Carl Jung: ‘The only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without.’

  Monoculture on the ground produces monotony in the mind. In The Lost Language of Plants, the naturalist writer Stephen Harrod Buhner calls this the ‘two wounds’. The external wound and the interior wound, caused by ‘no longer sharing soul essence with the world around us’. The external wound has been discussed and surveyed for a long time; ‘the destruction of the rain forest, the pollution and destruction of rivers … all the desecration of our exterior world’.

  And the internal wound, the invisible one, is experienced by living beings as pain. All kinds of pain.

  Plants become extinct from our planet at the rate of one or more per day. That means that the 742 medicinal plants that grow in this corner of the world can disappear in just two years.

  ‘Take berries,’ Rocky said. ‘All berries like to grow in clean, well-aired places without invasive species. When you cut the forest, invasive species arrive and the air changes, the soil changes, and the berry goes off somewhere else.’

  ‘You should’ve come twenty, thirty years ago, when things were looking hopeful,’ Rocky went on.

  ‘When we could have been Europe’s top exporter of wild plants and organic tomatoes, peppers, you name it, it grows here. Growing, picking, exporting and taking care of ourselves too. It was possible. What you see now is what’s left of us. We’re still here, but we’re much reduced.’

  Us humans and plants.

  Bulgaria is still one of Europe’s biggest exporters of edible and medicinal plants. Every year, between 60,000 and 80,000 tonnes of the 300 most popular species in the wild are collected, though organic herb plantations are on the rise: for calendula, lemon balm and mint. Bulgaria is Europe’s largest exporter of lavender and paprika, for instance. Eighty per cent of those harvests leave the country wholesale and are processed and sold elsewhere, mostly in Germany, Austria, Spain, Britain and Greece.

  ‘Our plants owe their quality to the rich soil and the climate,’ said Rocky.

  To the complex ecosystems which are their home. There are still fertile swathes of land here that have been untouched by agriculture for half a century. In an ecosystem, you have to know which plant to pick when, how, why and where. Every plant taken has consequences. Herb gathering, processing and use in healing practices was secret knowledge for much of human history, yet it was needed by everyone. That’s why every community had its own practitioner or five, usually women but sometimes men.

  For hundreds of years itinerant herbalists were a feature of everyday life. They called themselves bileri. The bileri were herb-gatherers, root-diggers and plant-dealers and the word bileri came from bilé, herb. If you had a pain, they had a bilé. They walked everywhere. They’d arrive in town with their dirty bags and dusty feet, exotic in their long black felt coats and black turban-like head-wraps that were solid with the grime of the road.

  ‘Bilerin bilki sells!’ they called in a drawn-out melancholy voice and children and women gathered around them. What made these travellers special was that they brought plants and recipes from other places. Plant knowledge was jealously guarded by people in the know, but with time it became more accessible, and the wandering bileri contributed to the spread of plant power among ordinary people.

  Even so, there was something about the plant realm that remained perennially hidden from the mundane eye. As late as nineteenth-century France, the spells spoken by women when they picked verbena, for example, were secret knowledge.

  ‘Vervaine is one of very few things that help periodontitis,’ said Rocky. ‘Mixed with mugwort.’

  Rocky and Nafié were herbalists in the sedentary tradition. In the old days, your local plant gatherer-prescriber was the same person because she who digs up the belladonna root, she who picks the lady’s mantle before dawn to gather its special dewdrops, is also she who makes an infusion and says the words.

  ‘Lady’s mantle is prohibited,’ Rocky said. ‘It’s picked in autumn.’

  ‘In Scotland, I pick it in summer,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the leaves and flowers. I’m talking about the roots. Plus you’re in another climate zone. What’s the name in English?’

  He chuckled, delighted. ‘Yes, it looks exactly like a lady’s mantle!’

  Among its many names here are queenly because it’s a queen of herbs for women and shapiché, from shap (foot-and-mouth disease) which it treats. For Culpeper, lady’s mantle will not ‘suffer any corruption to remain behind’ in the body. Lady’s mantle was named Alchemilla in the Middle Ages – and it stuck – because alchemists believed its dewdrops had special qualities. If you drink the round dewdrops inside its leaves, you’ll taste a subtle fragrance.

  ‘Every herb has ten different names in just one language. Regional names, folk names, old names and that’s before you even get to the taxonomy.’

  Rocky had been bitten by the plant bug young. He rose to be the top supplier for the country’s largest herbal business. Then, in the 1990s, something happened. Or rather a number of things happened. One was Rocky’s discovery of the Icelandic moss in high altitude places here. It was a big deal.

  ‘It’s a lichen by the way, not a moss,’ he said. ‘A highly prized, pure plant. I made money from it. But I was followed. They shadowed me and took it from me. It’s not a pretty story. And we’ve work to do now.’

  Icelandic moss, sorry, lichen, is expensive. It’s used for lung disease, bowel upsets and Maud Grieve reports that it relieved the symptoms of advanced tuberculosis. In Britain, it is apparently still found in the Grampians of Scotland, in Wales and Yorkshire. Until Rocky found it here, it was unheard of growing in the southern Balkans.

  ‘There’s another nice lichen, old man’s beard,’ Rocky said. ‘It grows on pine and oak and most others. It’s not choosy. You chew it for a headache and it’s a natural antibiotic. You’ll spot it by the white thread inside.’

  ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘there’s a plant that makes you laugh for three days, and on the fourth day sends you off to the graveyard. Still laughing in your coffin.’

  ‘What is it?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Ah. I’m under strict prohibition. Can’t disclose its name.’

  ‘Bryony?’

  ‘No, but you have promise!’, he said. ‘You see, there are herbs I can’t name because they are classified. People aren’t supposed to know them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they can harm you. Only pharma companies handle them.’

  Really? That sounded interesting. But he would not say more. I wondered to whom he was beholden, who held him in a grip. If he fell out with his nameless boss, he could be destroyed overnight.

  ‘I’ve tried my hand at all sorts of things,’ Rocky went on. ‘In the ’90s, we got into salt-curing sheep and goat skins and we made potato crisps, and sold them to the big chains, me and my nephew.’ His nephew had been trained as Rocky number two.

  ‘But he went to Finland and didn’t come back,’ Rocky said. ‘Have you tried our potatoes?’

  I knew from Danera’s potato salads that they were packed with flavour.

  ‘Cos they’re organic. In Greece they put chemicals in the potatoes to boost crops and it makes them watery.’

  Rocky was quite the phyto-patriot. In the ‘murky years’ of the 1990s Transition, Greek dealers came to buy plants from Rocky at rock-bottom prices, then repackaged them as Greek or EU gourmet foods for the international market. A bit like today. Lots of locals had gone to Greece to work in agriculture with poor living conditions and wages.

  ‘It pained me to see our boys and girls working their butts off in the potato fields of Greece for 25 euros a day. Now they go to the West for better money and it still pains me.’

  But 25 euros was still the rate for manual labour here, from logging to painting and decorating.

  A stack of crates were filled with a pink-flowered plant whose leaves looked and smelled minty. Rocky brought a leaf to his face and sniffed it.

  ‘Wild basil.’

  I grasped the extent of his eye problem then. He was more blind than not. That’s why he stood so close, because he couldn’t make out my face. The plant’s popular name was cat’s paw, because the florets were like soft paws.

  ‘Good for ladies’ problems, indigestion, kidneys, prostate, skin. A regenerative plant,’ he spoke as he pottered about the room.

  ‘But it’s more potent than people realise. Such a strong antioxidant, one of these days they’ll start treating cancer with it. Mark my words.’

  He handed me a small pack of ground red chillies.

  ‘Our chillies, organic and sweet.’

  Later in Scotland, I looked at a packet of organic chillies in my cupboard. It said: ‘Country of origin: packed in the UK’. I went through my whole cupboard: the same story, time after time. I was eating foods picked by people in places not mentioned. The ‘Authentic Italian sundried tomatoes, produced in Italy’ admitted in tiny letters that these were ‘non-EU sundried tomatoes’. Even the oil in which they were marinated came from somewhere not mentioned. They looked like they were authentically Albanian.

  But there are exceptions, showing that honouring the origin of a plant doesn’t take away from the authenticity of your food experience, it adds to it. One seller I use lists the country of origin on the labels of its herbs. It seems important to know that the passion flower is from France, the slippery elm from the USA, the marigold from Egypt and the rose petals from Pakistan. It makes me curious about the hands and faces, and lives of the people who picked the plants through which I run my own hand.

  ‘Go on, ask me specific questions,’ Rocky reminded me.

  ‘Tell me about mandrake,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have it,’ he said at once. ‘But we have white bryony.’

  Like the mandrake, white bryony is a ‘man-plant’ with humanoid-shaped roots.

  ‘Also known as wild hop or false mandrake.’

  Since antiquity, people have believed that you can’t pull out mandrake with your hands or it will make a screaming noise and strike you dead; so you had to tie a dog to the plant and make it run. In Arabic, it was called beid-el-djinn, eggs of the djinn.