How to Strategically Study Herbs

What separates a good herbalist from a truly great one? The kind of herbalist who confidently supports themselves, their family, their community, or even runs a clinic with success? The answer lies in a deep understanding of materia medica—not just knowing what an herb is “good for,” but grasping the unique principles, properties, and characteristics that define each plant.

Many people start their herbalism journey flipping through books, memorizing random facts about herbs, and hoping the information eventually sticks. But there’s a better, more strategic way to study medicinal plants—one that helps you build lasting knowledge rather than relying on sheer memorization.

Memorization is a skill some of us mastered in school, and most of us struggled with. It’s useful for passing tests, but it doesn’t prepare you to help people. If you rely solely on memorized facts, you’ll likely suggest remedies that don’t work because you haven’t fully understood the plant or the person you’re treating. To it’s the difference between learning information about something vs. cultivating knowledge and understanding of it, which to me is what is meant when we say we “learn something by heart.”

Instead, true knowledge requires having solid cognitive framework, a structure within your mind that allows you to study plants intelligently and holistically. This framework ensures the information is deeply anchored in your heart, not just memorized in your mind. 

The Problem With “What’s It Good For?” Herbalism

People commonly approach studying herbalism by focusing on what plants are “good for.” For example, you might learn Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), Willow (Salix alba), or Jamaican Dogwood (Piscidia piscipula) can help with headaches. But when you suggest one (or all of them) to someone in need, they might not work. Why? Because understanding what a plant is good for isn’t enough. You need to know why it works.

This requires looking beyond surface-level information and asking: How does the herb act internally on a physiological level? What systems, tissues, or organs does it affect? What are the core properties that drive its medicinal actions? Is it warming or cooling? Moisteninig or drying?

To truly understand a plant, you need to study its foundational qualities and how they interact with the human body to produce specific effects. My method for studying plants involves understanding fundamental keys, which provides a clear and systematic approach to learning herbal medicine. 

Taste is the first and most fundamental key. Every herb has a specific taste—bitter, sweet, salty, sour, pungent, astringent, or acrid. These tastes are not just sensory experiences. They reveal important clues about the plant’s properties and actions. For example, bitter herbs often support the liver and digestive system, astringent herbs tend to affect the mucosa, toning and tightening tissues, and sweet herbs may support the mucosa and are often moistening, offering nourishment and repair.

Tastes can also hint at an herb’s affinity, helping you predict its effects. Affinity refers to the parts of the body that an herb targets. Does it affect the lungs, kidneys, digestive system, or nervous system? Knowing an herb’s affinity allows you to match it with specific needs. For example, bitter herbs often have an affinity for the liver and gallbladder, expectorant herbs focus on the respiratory tract, and carminative herbs ease digestive troubles.

While affinity answers where an herb goes, action explains what it does once it gets there. For example, an expectorant clears mucus from the respiratory tract and a carminative relaxes tension and wind in the digestive system. Understanding these actions in relation to affinity gives you a complete picture of how an herb works. Taste ties everything together. By learning the patterns between taste, affinity, and action, you can unlock a plant’s full potential. For example, pungent, aromatic herbs with volatile oils often have carminative properties and may also act as expectorants or influence the nervous system. Conversely, bitter herbs can promote digestion and detoxification by stimulating bile flow. Tasting herbs isn’t just about identifying flavors—it’s about recognizing how those flavors translate into medicinal effects.

Lastly, let’s explore the final key, energetics: warming, cooling, moistening, drying, stimulant, relaxant, and tonic. These seven categories form the core of many traditional systems, particularly Galenic, Unani medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Tibetan practices, and North American herbalism.

Many traditions recognize the dynamics of temperature and moisture (hot/cold, moist/dry), with North American physiomedicalism adding stimulant, relaxant, and tonic as a threefold pattern. These classifications complement the temperature and moisture dynamics, offering additional depth to understanding herbal energetics.

For example, an expectorant may clear mucus, but its energetics define how it achieves this. It could be a hot stimulant expectorant, a relaxant expectorant, or a moistening expectorant. All lead to expectoration, but each modifies the process differently and is used to treat a different type of cough. 

When starting your herbal studies, you need to learn actions, energetics, and affinities and recognize their interplay. These concepts are rooted in taste, which serves as the foundation of this framework. Mastering these principles enables you to understand how herbs interact with the body, which is crucial before diving into individual plants.

There’s much more you can explore about herbs, including botany, chemistry, pharmacy, folklore. However, from a clinical perspective, understanding these keys is essential to unlocking a plant’s therapeutic potential.

To truly learn an herb, you need to study it. Glean your knowledge from tradition through the form of books, teachers, and cultural knowledge, but don’t let study replace direct experience. A great herbalist tastes their herbs, grows them, harvests them, makes medicine, observes their life cycles, and sits with them. By combining these practices you build a well-rounded educational experience for yourself. 

How to Strategically Study Herbs

To get started, choose a taste and explore three to five plants that embody it. For example, study the general properties of bitterness—how it stimulates digestion, increases bile production (choleretic), and promotes bile secretion (cholagogue). Study its energetics as well. In this case, bitters are typically cooling, draining, and drying. Next, choose three herbs that taste bitter, such as Gentian (Gentiana lutea), Dandelion root (Taraxacum officinale), and Oregon Grape root (Mahonia aquifolium). Finally, taste and compare them to assess the intensity of bitterness and note any secondary tastes or mouthfeel.

For example, Gentian tastes purely bitter and strongly drying. Dandelion root is less bitter, slightly sweet, and possibly moistening. Oregon Grape root is bitter with hints of astringency and a stronger liver-oriented action. Now that you understand their tastes, it’s time to assess their actions and energetics. All three serve as bitter tonics for digestion and liver stimulation. However, Oregon Grape excels as an alterative for skin conditions due to its pronounced liver focus, and Dandelion is gentler, with sweetness tempering its bitterness, making it less cold and drying but still beneficial for the skin. Understanding these nuances refines your ability to differentiate herbs and apply them effectively. While Dandelion and Oregon Grape may overlap in applications, Oregon Grape’s intensity makes it stronger for certain conditions.

What you’re doing is taking a strategic approach by selecting a taste, choosing three herbs that embody that taste, and studying their actions, energetics, and affinities. Then, you cross-compare them to identify similarities and differences.This approach helps you deeply understand those herbs. Tasting them enhances the learning process. 

Next, you can pick an herbal action and apply a similar method. For example, choose three diaphoretic herbs. Study diaphoretics broadly: their qualities, characteristics, and typical uses, like addressing febrile conditions or fever. You’ll notice some are stimulant diaphoretics—hot, spicy, and pungent—while others are relaxant diaphoretics, often bitter or acrid rather than spicy.

For instance, compare Lobelia (Lobelia inflata), Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), and Cayenne pepper (Capsicum annuum). These are all diaphoretics, yet distinctly different from each other. Lobelia is acrid, Boneset is intensely bitter, and Cayenne is very pungent. Energetically, Lobelia is highly relaxant, Boneset is cooling, drying and relaxant, and Cayenne is hot and stimulant. After understanding their tastes and energetics, assess their actions. Lobelia is spasmolytic and expectorant, Boneset is antimicrobial and bitter, and Cayenne stimulates circulation, warms the body, and equalizes blood flow.

This comparison highlights nuances and helps you decide when to use one herb over another. By analyzing their differences in taste, energetics, and additional properties, you deepen your understanding of their applications. Additionally, juxtaposing similar herbs and learning about their differences can help you learn when to use one over another. 

For example, Blue Vervain (Verbena hastata) and Blue Flag (Iris versicolor) are both bitter herbs, yet they differ significantly. Blue Vervain is primarily a nervine, spasmolytic and cold, while Blue Flag is alterative, acrid, and warm. This lends them distinct uses despite sharing the same bitter-tonic action. The first method focused on zooming in on taste, while this method zooms in on a specific action. For instance, with diaphoretics, you could split them further into stimulant and relaxant categories and study three herbs from each group, becoming even more specific.

Remember, being a skilled herbalist is about specificity, not generalities. While you can sometimes select an herb generally, it’s often more of a gamble. The more specific you are in remedy selection, the more successful you’ll be.

A fun exercise you can practice is selecting herbs traditionally used for a specific health condition. For example, pick three or five herbs commonly used for headaches. Look at their actions, affinities, tastes, and energetics. Then ask yourself, what about these herbs makes them effective for treating headaches? What physiological changes contribute to their medicinal effect? How do these herbs differ from one another? How are they similar?

Consider headache remedies like Lavender, Jamaican Dogwood, and Willow. These herbs are very different yet commonly used for headaches. Lavender is aromatic, nervine, and calming. It’s also relaxant, aromatic and bitter, making it suitable for tension headaches, often caused by mental stress. Willow, on the other hand, is bitter and astringent, with cooling, draining, and drying properties. It’s ideal for headaches where there’s excess heat and dilated blood vessels, causing throbbing. Willow helps to constrict blood flow to the head, alleviating this type of headache. Finally, Jamaican Dogwood is a potent anodyne herb, used not just for headaches, but for a wide range of pain, from musculoskeletal to spasmodic and organ pain. It’s a broad-acting pain remedy.

This differentiation is key to applying herbs effectively for specific symptoms or conditions. When considering a remedy for a symptom, compile a list of herbs, then evaluate their actions, affinities, energetics, and tastes. Next, ask yourself, what type of pain or headache will this herb address?

A headache isn’t just a headache. There are tension headaches, hot/excess headaches, cold/deficient headaches, and headaches located in different areas—temporal, occipital, vertex, frontal, etc. Each type calls for a different approach. One herb might be perfect for a specific headache type but worsen another. This specificity is vital. You can apply this same approach to organ systems. Pick five liver herbs, evaluate their overlaps and differences, and study their actions, tastes, and energetics.

This learning method isn’t linear. It’s not just about learning what an herb is “good for.” Instead, it integrates multiple facets, helping you see patterns and connections. Aside from mastering the fundamentals and learning to see patterns, this process will also help you build a cross-referencing system. For example, imagine needing Oregon Grape root, but it’s unavailable. In that case, you’ll know how to replace it with another herb based on whether you’re using it for skin, liver support, or as a bitter tonic for digestion. This ability to distinguish analogs (similarities) and differentials (differences) allows for precision in choosing the right remedy.

This process installs a mental structure that helps you retain information and choose herbs intuitively. Instead of memorizing isolated details, you’ll understand herbs holistically, which makes your knowledge more accessible and practical. But it is in the tasting of the herb itself that you truly learn and remember it! Learning herbal medicine requires some memorization, as with any discipline. However, by consistently applying a structured approach, you build a cognitive framework in your mind—one that helps you retain information and access it more easily. This framework acts as a database, enabling you to select herbs intuitively, rather than memorizing them as isolated pieces of information.

We all know cramming doesn’t work. True learning, especially in herbal medicine, comes from regular, focused study. A method I find effective is scheduling specific days and times for study sessions, ideally no longer than three hours at a stretch. Shorter, consistent efforts—like 30 minutes a day—are often more effective than sporadic long sessions. Build this time into your schedule. 

If you want to be a great herbalist, you need to dedicate time to your studies. This requires diligence and consistency, so set a routine and stick with it. Clear away distractions such as turning off your phone, avoid the social media pull and scrolling spells, and set aside other things that will pull your attention away. The first step to a successful study period is to clear your mind, which requires discipline. Ultimately, you can anchor this discipline in your aspiration of becoming a great herbalist to keep you moving forward on your plant path.

If you’re interested in learning more about a strategic approach to herbal study, consider exploring one of my favorite courses, Materia Medica Monthly. This program offers an incredible level of depth—each monograph spans over twenty pages, supplemented by three videos that delve even deeper. Whether you’re just beginning or looking to enhance an already-established practice, Materia Medica Monthly is an invaluable companion on your plant path. By studying herbs in a systematic, logical way (instead of relying on rote memorization), you’ll deepen your confidence and competence as an herbalist.