Herbal Healing

Sunday March 12th, 2017

Join us for a guided tour on the medicinal qualities of plants in Amsterdam’s botanical garden, De Hortus. This tour takes place as part of the exhibition All Heal (Valerian) departing from Derek Jarmans Prospect Cottage. His garden and cottage ‘seem to stand as a monument to fragility and defiance’. The garden was, as Jarman wrote not just a retreat, rather ‘a therapy and a pharmacopoiea, therapeutic in its peacefulness’; gardening as an act a form of green therapy. For this Sunday gathering, we zoom in on the medicinal qualities of plants. A form of herbal healing that forms the base for modern medicin and goes as far back as to the Neanderthals usage of yarrow and chamomile as form of self-medication.

De Hortus in Amsterdam was founded in 1638 as a medicinal herb garden, at a time when herbs and knowledge of medicinal plants were of vital importance to the community, after the city had just experienced a plague epidemic. Today, De Hortus carefully harbours this knowledge and its vegetation.

We meet at De Hortus at 12.30, the tour starts at 13.00 and lasts approximately 1 hour, afterwards you’re invited to you join us to Rongwrong to visit the exhibition 'All Heal (Valerian)'.

Herbal Healing takes place as part of Rongwrongs public program For Fans and Scholars, departing from the exhibition ‘All Heal (Valerian)’ and each time highlighting one aspect of this gathering of works and voices. \\ Made possible with the generous support of the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Mondriaan Fund \\

www.rongwrong.org