About FolkRoot

FolkRoot is a living archive of human plant medicine. It documents the herbal traditions our grandmothers carried and our great-grandfathers practiced, before that knowledge slips away.

This is not a product catalog or a wellness brand. It is a working library of remedies gathered from European folk practice, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Native American ethnobotany, African traditional medicine, Caribbean folk healing, Mexican curanderismo, and Cape Verdean tradition.

Most herbal websites cover the same fifty famous plants. They lean almost entirely on European folk medicine and a sanitized version of Ayurveda. African medicine gets two paragraphs. Caribbean folk healing gets ignored. Indigenous American practices get either romanticized or erased. Cape Verdean knowledge is essentially absent online.

This is a problem. Every tradition we exclude is a tradition someone needs. A diaspora kid looking up their grandmother's remedy should not have to dig through obscure ethnobotany journals to find it. A nurse looking for the African traditional context of a plant should not have to settle for a Wikipedia paragraph. A Caribbean elder should not feel that their family's medicine has been left out of the conversation.

FolkRoot is built to fix this. We document eight major herbal traditions in the same depth, with the same care, and with the same standard of evidence. We give equal weight to thousands of years of documented practice and to modern clinical science. Both are part of the same human conversation about plants and healing.

We document what is known, gathered from academic ethnobotany, peer-reviewed research, traditional medicine texts, and primary interviews with elders across multiple cultures.

Every remedy on FolkRoot has been researched across multiple sources. Peer-reviewed clinical literature. Traditional medicine texts. Modern integrative medicine resources. Direct community documentation where available.

We rate evidence honestly. We acknowledge what is well-studied and what rests on tradition alone. We do not sell the herbs we write about, and we do not claim any plant cures disease.

We are not doctors. This is not medical advice. Please see our disclaimer before making any health decisions based on what you read here.

FolkRoot is built by a global team of researchers, herbalists, and traditional medicine practitioners working to preserve and share plant knowledge from cultures around the world. The project is led by a Cape Verdean-American researcher and herbalist, with contributors from communities across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

The Cape Verdean angle is a starting point, not the limit. We are conducting elder interviews across multiple cultural traditions with more communities joining as the work expands.

We are not affiliated with any pharmaceutical company, wellness brand, or supplement manufacturer. We welcome contributions from anyone who carries traditional plant knowledge, from any culture. If you would like to share family remedies, regional practices, or community medicine that has not yet been documented online, reach out.