Herbs with Rosalee

Marshmallow (Althaea officinalis) is one of those plants that can be easy to overlook. It’s gentle, pleasant, and uncomplicated—but that simplicity is exactly what makes it so useful.
In this episode, Amy Boldt and I explore what makes marshmallow such a versatile plant ally, along with some of the ways she has come to work with it over the years, from cold infusions to adding the powdered root to food, and even old-fashioned marshmallow candy!
We discuss marshmallow’s moistening, demulcent qualities, and why it has such a strong affinity for soothing hot, irritated tissues throughout the body.
Amy also shares her recipe for Marshmallow Root Electuary Balls, a staple in her apothecary perfect for soothing a dry, irritated throat. Download your beautifully illustrated recipe card here!
By the end of this episode, you’ll know:
► How marshmallow’s gifts can benefit your GI tract from top to bottom
► Why many herbalists prefer working with marshmallow as a cold infusion rather than a hot tea
► What the taste and consistency of your marshmallow infusion might tell you about the quality and freshness of the root
► Why marshmallow’s moistening qualities make it less appropriate for certain kinds of coughs
► How growing some of your own herbs can help you to become a better herbalist
► and so much more…
For those of you who don’t know her, Amy started her journey on the path to herbalism having been inspired by self-sufficiency. Her interest in medicinal plants and foraging led her to the Maryland University of Integrative Health (now Notre Dame of MD University) where she earned a Masters of Science in Therapeutic Herbalism. Since graduating from MUIH Amy has become a Registered Herbalist with the AHG and is one of Margi Flint’s Legacy Teachers.
Amy also has a private practice as a clinical herbalist specializing in sleep, anxiety, and digestive-related issues, and grows many of the herbs she uses on her herb farm in Westminster, MD. When not seeing clients, she can be found teaching classes in local community spaces, as well as at a number of herb schools and community colleges.
I’m delighted to share our conversation with you today!
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Get full show notes, transcript, and more information at: herbswithrosaleepodcast.com
Would you prefer watching this episode? If so, click here for the video.
You can find Amy at TheWildWomanMedicine.com.
For more behind-the-scenes of this podcast, follow @rosaleedelaforet on Instagram!
Working successfully with herbs requires three essential skills. Get introduced to them by taking my free herbal jumpstart course when you sign up for my newsletter.
If you enjoy the Herbs with Rosalee podcast, we could use your support! Please consider leaving a 5-star rating and review and sharing the show with someone who needs to hear it!
On the podcast, we explore the many ways plants heal, as food, as medicine, and through nature connection. Each week, I focus on a single seasonal plant and share trusted herbal knowledge so that you can get the best results when using herbs for your health.
Learn more about Herbs with Rosalee at herbswithrosalee.com.
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Rosalee is an herbalist and author of the bestselling book Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients Into Foods & Remedies That Heal and co-author of the bestselling book Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. She's a registered herbalist with the American Herbalists Guild and teaches many popular online courses. Read about how Rosalee went from having a terminal illness to being a bestselling author in her full story here.

Have you ever tried an herb that everyone swears by, and it did nothing for you—or even made things worse? Good news: it all comes down to energetics, and once you learn to see people and plants through this lens, you’ll be able to choose the right herbs with confidence.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve asked you to send in your questions about herbal energetics—and send them in you did!
In this episode, I’m answering some of the questions I heard most often:
Why would an herb work for one person, but not for someone else?
What if your signs are mixed and you don’t fit into neat categories of hot or cold, dry or damp?
What to do when your body changes over time?
Can you keep working with the herbs you love, even if they’re not a great energetic match?

Along the way, I'll give you a few simple questions you can ask yourself tonight about your constitution and energetics, so you can begin to apply these principles to your own herbal practice.
By the end of this episode, you’ll know:
► What to do when choosing herbs for a person who runs hot—but whose symptoms are cold
► Why your energetics can shift dramatically during different seasons of life
► How preparation can change the energetic experience of an herb
► How combining herbs can help you work around qualities that are too warming, cooling, drying, or moistening
►Why the way an herb is grown can matter—and how to use your tastebuds to determine whether it will work for you
►and so much more…
If this episode has you wanting to go deeper, my Herbal Energetics Course is a great place to learn more. In the course, we’ll move beyond the basic framework and into hands-on practice with taste, temperature, moisture, herbal actions—and yes, lots of plants! Enrollment closes this Saturday, October 3rd, so don’t delay! Learn more and sign up here.
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Get full show notes, transcript, and more information at: herbswithrosaleepodcast.com
Would you prefer watching this episode? If so, click here for the video.
For more behind-the-scenes of this podcast, follow @rosaleedelaforet on Instagram!
Working successfully with herbs requires three essential skills. Get introduced to them by taking my free herbal jumpstart course when you sign up for my newsletter.
If you enjoy the Herbs with Rosalee podcast, we could use your support! Please consider leaving a 5-star rating and review and sharing the show with someone who needs to hear it!
On the podcast, we explore the many ways plants heal, as food, as medicine, and through nature connection. Each week, I focus on a single seasonal plant and share trusted herbal knowledge so that you can get the best results when using herbs for your health.
Learn more about Herbs with Rosalee at herbswithrosalee.com.
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Rosalee is an herbalist and author of the bestselling book Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients Into Foods & Remedies That Heal and co-author of the bestselling book Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. She's a registered herbalist with the American Herbalists Guild and teaches many popular online courses. Read about how Rosalee went from having a terminal illness to being a bestselling author in her full story here.

How do we actually know what’s in our herbs?
Herbs rarely come with nutritional labels, and how a plant is grown, harvested, and stored can dramatically change what ultimately ends up in your cup.
There are two ways we can learn more about what our herbs contain. We can turn to tested data, including resources like Dr. Duke’s Phytochemical Database, but we also have another incredibly useful tool available to us wherever we go: our own senses.
In this episode, I’m using oatstraw as an example to explore organoleptics, the practice of learning about plants through taste, smell, sight, and feel.
► What organoleptics means and why it’s such a useful skill for herbalists
► How tested data and our sensory experiences can work together to help us understand a plant
► What oatstraw’s soft sweetness can tell us about its nourishing qualities
► How its silky, slightly slippery texture reveals its moistening and demulcent qualities
► What oatstraw’s subtle mineral-rich salty flavor can tell us about the plant
► Why you don’t need special equipment or a magical ability to start developing your organoleptic skills
With nothing more than taste and texture, I can already recognize oatstraw as nourishing and moistening. Those qualities fit beautifully with how herbalists work with oatstraw as a soothing plant, especially for the nervous system and for people who feel burnt up and fried out.
There are five main flavors in herbal medicine, and each taste offers us a doorway into how an herb works. Learning to recognize those patterns can completely change the way you experience the plants around you.
And the wonderful thing is that organoleptics is a skill you can learn. You build it one plant at a time by slowing down and paying attention to what’s actually in your cup.
That’s exactly what I teach inside my Herbal Energetics Course.
Enrollment opens only once a year, and this year it closes October 3rd.
Join the Herbal Energetics Course here.

Your tongue can tell you more about an herb than you might think.
In this episode, I explore one of the most useful skills in herbalism: learning to listen to the language of taste. The five flavors—bitter, sweet, pungent, salty, and sour—each have so much information to offer about a plant’s qualities and actions in your body, giving you a practical way to understand herbs (instead of trying to memorize endless lists of which herbs are “good for” which conditions).
I’ll guide you through these five flavors as we take a walk through my garden, highlighting each of the flavors with a different herb. For each of these herbs, you’ll learn how it tastes (though of course, the best way to learn this is to taste it yourself!), what that taste is telling you about the qualities of the plant, and some ways you can use those qualities to guide how you work with the plant.
Plus, I’ll introduce you to the Flavor Wheel, a simple tool I created to help you match the taste of an herb with its energetics and actions. You can get your own copy of the Flavor Wheel when you sign up for my free mini Herbal Energetics Course, which is happening right now and for a short time only! Sign up here.
Here's some of what you'll hear:
► Do you tend to feel hot, tense, and wound up by the end of the day? You'll hear why a bitter herb can be such a good match.
► Do you notice dryness in your throat, skin, or digestion? You'll learn how a sweet, slippery plant softens dry tissues throughout your body.
► Are you feeling frazzled, overworked, and spread too thin? You'll find out which pungent, aromatic herb can bring steadiness and clear focus.
► Have you ever wondered how an herb can be salty when it tastes nothing like table salt? You'll get the answer and why it matters.
► Curious why one bright, sour plant has such a long relationship with the heart? You'll hear how it supports both the physical and emotional heart.
The more you taste your herbs, the more you realize that plants are constantly giving us clues—you just have to learn their language. And that’s what I love about this approach: it gives us a way to slow down, pay attention, and let the plant tell us something about itself.
If you’re ready to learn more, come join me in my free mini Herbal Energetics Course! I’m looking forward to seeing you there.
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Get full show notes, transcript, and more information at: herbswithrosaleepodcast.com
Would you prefer watching this episode? If so, click here for the video.
For more behind-the-scenes of this podcast, follow @rosaleedelaforet on Instagram!
Working successfully with herbs requires three essential skills. Get introduced to them by taking my free herbal jumpstart course when you sign up for my newsletter.
If you enjoy the Herbs with Rosalee podcast, we could use your support! Please consider leaving a 5-star rating and review and sharing the show with someone who needs to hear it!
On the podcast, we explore the many ways plants heal, as food, as medicine, and through nature connection. Each week, I focus on a single seasonal plant and share trusted herbal knowledge so that you can get the best results when using herbs for your health.
Learn more about Herbs with Rosalee at herbswithrosalee.com.
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Rosalee is an herbalist and author of the bestselling book Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients Into Foods & Remedies That Heal and co-author of the bestselling book Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine. She's a registered herbalist with the American Herbalists Guild and teaches many popular online courses. Read about how Rosalee went from having a terminal illness to being a bestselling author in her full story here.

I once heard from a woman who had been studying herbs for two years and had gathered an entire cabinet full of them. But when her mom caught a cold, she stood in her kitchen with the kettle on and couldn’t bring herself to make her a cup of tea.
She was afraid she might get it wrong.
If you’ve ever felt that way, I want you to know that your caution isn’t a problem. In fact, I think it’s the exact instinct a good herbalist is built on.
In this episode, I’m sharing a simple way to approach herbal safety so that fear doesn’t have to keep you from actually working with the plants you’ve been learning about.
► Why being cautious about herbs doesn’t mean you’re behind or aren’t ready
► Why many familiar herbs, including ginger, peppermint, rosemary, and turmeric, may already be part of your everyday life
► When an herb, medication, pregnancy, health condition, or individual circumstance means it’s time to slow down and look more closely
► How to recognize when you can move forward, when you should proceed with caution, and when it’s best to step back and seek other help
► The simple green, yellow, and red “stoplight” framework I created to make herbal safety easier to understand and remember
After more than twenty years of teaching about herbs, one thing I’ve learned is that complicated information becomes much more useful when you can turn it into a framework that sticks.
That’s why I created this herbal safety stoplight. 🟢🟡🔴
Once you have a reliable way to assess the herb and the person in front of you, you don’t have to let fear make every decision. You can approach herbs with both care and growing confidence.
I teach this framework inside my free Mini Herbal Energetics course, where you’ll also receive a printable herbal safety guide you can keep and return to whenever you need it.
Join the free Mini Herbal Energetics course here.