The time is coming up fast when we will have the opportunity to visit the Chinese herb garden at Bristol University. This garden is the extraordinary creation of Tony Harrison, member and Council member of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine (RCHM). Every year I take my apprentices to the day that he runs on pharmacognosy and dispensing, and it is a huge pleasure to watch the plants growing in their habitat – of course, we know these herbs mainly from their dried roots, and sometimes it is a revelation to see what they look like as plants.

In the Chinese herb garden, there is also a peony garden, which is glorious in May, and a tea garden that boasts a number of varieties of camelia.

Tony teaches our apprentices how to make creams and tinctures, and he always has something different up his sleeve. For example, last year he cut some branches of the Tong Cao tree, and together we extracted the central pith to see how the product that we use is obtained.

He also teaches how to run a raw herb or a tincture dispensary, and it is Tony’s RCHM dispensary guidelines that form the backbone of the guidelines we use at CCHC to ensure our dispensary is safe.

Just for your information, Tony has made a series of videos on pao zhi, the art of herbal processing: preparing Chinese herbs using, for example, fire, salt, ginger or honey. You can watch these videos on YouTube and they are real gems – you can really see the love that he has for what he does shining through.

This is a photo of our group in the garden last year. Motley crew as we are!