Rue's Garden Herbals

Long ago, in housees that could assign a room to it, was a still-room. Or maybe it was part of a room. This was the herbal pharmacy for the family. In the still-room were stored herbs for remedies and beauty products. Without a pharmacy on the corner, women were responsible for treating their families of various ailments. So treatments were passed down from generation to generation and friend to friend and recorded in the still-room book. This book held the wisdom and accumulated lore of recipes and remedies that had been used for many years. It would include how to gather and process plants, how to prepare medicines and how to store them. Here would be found herbs drying and distilling and the various implements and containers needed to keep them. Some friends of mine have herbal still-rooms even now, but most of us rely on the already-prepared concoctions in our medicine cabinets!