Wednesday 4 August 2010

Inside Bloomsbury's medicinal herb garden

Who owns our health? This is the question asked by Dr Vivienne Lo who planted our medicinal herb garden in Mecklenburgh Square. The garden includes an intriguing herb spiral landscaped from Welsh slate.

Vivienne says: 'Food is really the basis of medicine in many difference aspects, certainly the kind of potencies attributed to food then become attributed to medicines. But we think the boundaries between food and medicine are obvious when in fact they're not at all. I dreamed up the herb spiral to teach us what's safe and what's appropriate when we are suffering from a cold or virus so that we can deal with these kinds of complaints in an everyday way. My early work has been about self-care in ancient China, and most recently the boundaries of food and medicine, and it's really in that context that I'm building the spiral.'

See the video 'Who owns our health? Inside the medicinal garden'