NOTE: All medicinal plant images are in the JPEG format. Most browser can view them directly, and there are a variety of shareware and freeware viewers available for all platforms.

I have listed plants by genus, and chosen to use the most widely published latin names, even though many (far too many) of them are undergoing rather drastic changes in nomenclature.

The photographs and digital images are heavily weighted towards western North America.
This is where I live, these are the plants I use, and about whom my books are written. Elsewhere on this site are links to many other medicinal plant images from OTHER parts of the world.

Preparations, parts used, and many aspects of therapy for some of these plants will be found in the clinical manuals on this site. This is all well and good for we collectors of information...as long as none of us forget that this alone is at best intellectual elucidation, at worst, sophistric bullshit. At the heart of using botanical medicines is the plants themselves.


Foolish things:
a blacksmith who never touches horses, a musician with only music paper, a physician who sees no patients, a theoretical ballet dancer, a pharmacist reduced to counting pills, an herbalist who gathers no plants. The rest of this site is intellectual...this part is the sensorium, given the peculiar limits we all share...computers, modems and the Web.

Images by genus, with thumbnail JPEGs in each section:

A
B
C
D-G
H-L
M-O
P-R
S
T-Z

All images, lithographs, illustrations and distribution maps indexed by genus
All images, lithographs and illustrations, indexed by common name

We also have some photos taken on field trips.


There is the old Crude Drug Buyer's Primary Rule:
Properly gathered and handled dry botanicals MUST resemble as closely as possible the physical appearance of the LIVING plant. The images here are meant to help lock that reality in our eyes.

PHOTO NOTES: All 35mm photographs or slides by Mimi Kamp, Robyn Klein, Ginger Webb, Henriette Kress, Elaine Stevens, Cristina Orci, John Egbert, Kristina Parks, Britta Blödorn, Kim Hill, Donna Chesner, Hasso Wittboldt-Mueller, David Parke and myself were digitalized using either one of several UMAX scanners or Kodak's PhotoCD format. The balance of images by Donna Chesner and myself were taken using either Apple's Quicktake 100 or 200 or a Canon Powershot A50 camera...with a few videocaptures thrown in.

These images are the property of the credited photographers, and these images are made available on THIS site with their specific permission. If you wish to use these images for other than personal or teaching purposes, or need to use them for any commercial purposes, please contact me at hrbmoore@mindspring.com.

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