Caribbean Herbalism: A Beginner’s Guide to Traditional Wisdom and Modern Herbal Healing

From the forest to the pharmacy, the bush to the medicine bottle, explore how plants and traditional practices from the Caribbean have traveled around the world to help heal people of all cultures.

For millennia, people have utilized plants as foods, medicines, hallucinogens, clothing, shelter, perfumes, dyes, and even poisons. In the Caribbean, medicinal and practical use of plants began with its first inhabitants, the Amerindians. New plants and knowledge were introduced through both triangular trade with Asia, Africa, and Europe and the enslavement of Africans and Indians from Southeast Asia, culminating in the modern-day system of Caribbean herbalism.

Caribbean Herbalism tells the rich and complex stories of Caribbean people and the plants that have sustained them. Inside you’ll find:

A practical guide to a meaningful selection of herbs and their traditional uses Botanical field notes and drawings that tell the stories of the Indigenous, African, East Indian, and European plants that inhabit the region Culturally important traditions, remedies, and recipes Interviews with Caribbean people And so much more

This book offers practical tools you need to build a relationship with plants and make common Caribbean herbal remedies like bush teas, bush baths, herbal wines, infused alcohols and oils, and more!

Aleya Fraser is a land steward and ethnobotanist with a strong lineage of land-based people. She has spent the last 12 years managing and founding farms and deepening her herbal knowledge through communing with elders, practice, and scientific research. Aleya uses her bachelor’s degree in physiology and neurobiology as well as the ancestral wisdom in her fingertips to guide her studies and research interests. She blends her upbringing in Maryland with a strong focus on Trinidadian roots in her writings. She is considered a pollinator of people and weaver of landscapes.

Aleya also managed and cofounded farms in Baltimore City, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in Northwest Virginia, and now, in her ancestral lands of Trinidad and Tobago, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She can be found on social media at @naturaleya or naturaleya.substack.com.