The Green Fuse

Subtitled 'our deep connection with the power of plants', this inspiring book describes Hilary's fascinating journey after experiencing 'feelings of supreme well-being' while following the Breuss Diet - a 40-day herbal cancer cure that initiated a profound inner process through reading Jung's autobiography with its emphasis on dreams – she includes a number throughout the book. Its deeper message is that the decline in the medicinal use of plants from the British Pharmacopoeia between 1864 and 1993 – an incredible 522 entries – is symptomatic of the loss of traditional knowledge held by indigenous tribes and the corresponding alienation from nature as we have developed a mechanistic and pharmaceutical approach to medicine and health. Central to the narrative is the story of her house and garden at Chevenoz in the French Alps of Haute Savoie, where she not only created a herb garden but also developed a range of products including tinctures, dried herbs, infused oils and incenses - a deeply satisfying process. Hilary explores the use of herbs in major world healing systems and their central concepts of connection and balance, as well as the continuing role of herbal medicine within a holistic context with an energetic basis.

She devotes a chapter to important ideas and influences, including Edward Bach's flower remedies, Goethean science and Steiner, Alexander von Humboldt and Maria Thun's biodynamic calendar – also courses at Schumacher College. She delves more deeply into shamanic traditions with their embodied modes of perception transcending the boundaries between inner and outer. The garden comes vividly to life for the reader, especially in appreciating the rhythm of the annual cycle, all this beautifully illustrated. These rhythms are also shamanic in connecting with seasons, sun, moon and planets, and the principles of 'expansion and contraction, birth, growth and death.' (p. 195) Traditional festivals are aligned to this cycle. The energy of life corresponds to the spirit of creativity, strongly present in this book and in the author's drawings of the Green Man as well as her beautiful quilts and wood carvings. This energy is also vitalism, derided by mechanistic orthodoxy that sticks within its self-limiting boundaries.

Hilary devotes a chapter to plant profiles that include shamanic journeys to the spirit of different plants, but also details for cultivation and of therapeutic uses. These include Lavender, Juniper and Rose and lead to a deeper energetic insight and sense of connection, joining head and heart, science and spirituality, objective and subjective. Hilary remembers what we have forgotten as a culture and opens up different levels of existence and meaning that are also integrating healing avenues reconnecting us to soul, spirit and the beautiful planet on which we live. Her story embodies an ecological spirituality with expanded human capacities that also unfold resonantly in the reader.