Buy Herbs and Herbal Supplements

We get the same question by email most weeks: which of these do I start with. The honest answer depends on how much faff you are up for, so start there rather than with the plant list.

Browse herbs by use

Sorting by plant only helps if you already know the plant. Most people arrive with an occasion instead: the evening, the afternoon slump, or a shelf that needs restocking. The three groups below map onto that, and every one of them exists here in loose, powdered and capsule form.

Herbs for relaxation and sleep

Hops flowers are the interesting one for anyone who came here from the seed shop. Humulus lupulus sits in the Cannabaceae family, the same family as cannabis, and the 20g bag holds dried female cones (strobiles), yellowish-green and properly bitter. Germany's Hallertau has records of growing them back to the 8th century. Lemon balm is the gentle counterweight, a mint-family leaf from the Mediterranean with a documented 2,000 years of use and still the base of Carmelite Water and Klosterfrau Melissengeist on German pharmacy shelves today. Chamomile is the one nobody regrets: 50g of Matricaria recutita.

Everyday culinary and wellness herbs

Thyme (Thymus vulgaris) and sage sit here in the same 20g bags you would reach for while cooking, alongside organic powders like nettle, ginger and matcha that go into a smoothie rather than a teapot. Capsules such as Natural Relax and Natural Focus are the no-kitchen option and take five seconds, which is the whole point of them. If you have never brewed a herb in your life, the capsules will not disappoint you and the loose bark might.

Popular herb profiles

One plant is worth going into properly, because it explains the whole bark-versus-leaf split better than any general rule does.

Mulungu bark

Erythrina mulungu is a deciduous tree from Brazil's Atlantic Forest and cerrado, in the Fabaceae family, with coral-orange flowers that open before the leaves and get pollinated by hummingbirds. What you buy is the bark, dried and shredded, 80g a bag. Brewed at 2 heaped teaspoons to 250ml for a full 20 minutes, it comes out faintly aniseed with a mildly spicy edge. Cut the steep short and you get hot water. It is the clearest example on this page of why bark and leaf are not interchangeable.

How we source, pack and post your herbs, and how to store them

Cool, dry, dark, sealed. That is the whole storage method, and it matters more than people expect. Lemon balm is the clearest example of why: its aroma is best in freshly handled leaf and fades once the plant flowers, so a bag left open on a sunny windowsill for a month is a bag of green confetti. Barks are far more forgiving. If you vape rather than brew, the temperatures differ too, chamomile and damiana want a hot 190C while lemon balm runs happily at 140C. Everything posts to the UK in plain packaging with nothing on the outside to say what is in it. One pointer before you order: if you are after dream herbs specifically, calea and the African dream root live over in dream herbs rather than on this page.