The saying ‘this is the coolest summer for the rest of your life’ seems uncomfortably true.
Down here in Devon, this June is hotter than last year. Who knows what July and August will bring? Maybe some snow!
When it’s 34 degrees outside and you literally feel like melting, the last thing you want is someone telling you to drink more water – because you already know that. Well I hope you do.
What I suspect you want is something that makes you feel like a human being again, instead of someone who thinks they might be living in the fires of hell.
And that’s where the old plant knowledge comes in, maybe.
I’ve been foraging and working with plants for decades, long before the wellness industry decided to turn every hedgerow into a marketing opportunity. Before all that silliness, people across Europe were doing something remarkably sensible.
They’d go into their gardens or onto the field margins and pick peppermint and lemon balm. Bruising a handful of leaves, they’d pour cold water over them and leave them to steep.
What the science does tell us – and this does matter – is that none of these will magically lower your core temperature.
But the scientific record isn’t the totality of human knowledge and wisdom. Take lemon balm and peppermint: people have drunk them across Europe for centuries.
These plants are a gift. We drink them for comfort. They’re hydration with botanical intelligence.
Now most people prepare them incorrectly. They assume you should brew them hot, leave them on the worktop until they cool down, then stick them in the fridge. That isn’t how these teas are drunk in countries where they know how to handle heat.
There’s a genuine difference between a cold infusion and a hot infusion that has cooled down.
Pouring boiling water over plant material releases certain compounds. When that tea cools, the plant chemistry doesn’t reset to its cold state. You’ve got a hot-brewed infusion that happens to be cold.
That is not the same thing as a cold brew.
Cold water poured over the same herbs and left overnight produces a very different drink with different compound profiles, different bitterness etc., and it’s often softer and more palatable.
The temperature at which you drink the tea matters too. Cold liquid going into your body during heat exposure has measurable physiological effects: it lowers skin temperature, reduces cardiac strain, and shifts your thermal comfort zone.
Warm water hydrates you, yes. Cold water hydrates you and begins to cool you.
Prepare for a heatwave in advance. Make cold-infusion herbal drinks and keep a supply in the fridge.
Put the herbs in cold water and leave them overnight. You can use fresh or dried herbs. I prefer fresh, because that’s what I have around me.
And for pity’s sake, if someone collapses in the heat with serious heatstroke, forget the herbs. Get them into the shade, get cold water on them, and call 999.
At the end of the day, plants are here to help us live well. They’re not here to replace common sense.
Many people I know avoid modern medical services and big pharma, and they face the consequences.
The way my friends and I teach plant medicine is this: it’s not alternative medicine, it is integrative medicine.
Both/and, NOT either/or.
And evidence-based first, then lived-experience and anecdotal second. Because science has not mapped the entire plant-human relationship. But we always start with the hard data.
Over and out.
A diagnosis doesn’t have to mean handing your body over.
Often when you go to the doctor and see a consultant, as soon as they name something, that’s it. Your condition has been bagged-and-tagged, and suddenly the medicine is in charge and you are a passenger.
Nearly 50 years of clinical practice has taught Simon Mills something different: informed people get better outcomes.
The next Herb Hour is an hour with him.
He’s running it to help you to understand what’s actually happening, what you can do, and whether herbal and nutritional support is safe alongside your current medication.