Maud Grieve

Maud Grieve was an English herbalist and herb-grower who built one of the most important institutions of twentieth-century British herbal medicine: the Whins Medicinal and Commercial Herb School and Farm at Chalfont St Peter, founded in 1905. Her wartime cultivation pamphlets, written when Britain’s supply of imported medicinal plants collapsed during the First World War, were collected and expanded into A Modern Herbal (1931). That book remains in print as a standard English-language reference. Together with Hilda Leyel, who founded the Society of Herbalists at Culpeper House in 1927, Grieve is identified by historians of herbal medicine as one of the two figures most responsible for keeping the British herbal tradition institutionally and bibliographically alive across the first half of the twentieth century.

Life and Context

The Whins Medicinal and Commercial Herb School and Farm was set up at Chalfont St Peter in 1905 (Stapley, 2012). Grieve was a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society and President of the British Guild of Herb Growers (Stapley, 2012). She also published wartime pamphlets on cultivating herbs for medicine (Stapley, 2012).

During World War I, Grieve published a series of pamphlets on the cultivation of specific herbs for medicine (Stapley, 2012). According to Willard, Grieve was running Whin’s Vegetable Drug Plant Farm and produced the pamphlets that became A Modern Herbal in 1931 (Willard, 2021).

The Twentieth-Century British Herbal Revival

Griggs’s account, in Green Pharmacy (1981), places Grieve at the centre of a deliberate revival rather than a rearguard action. “The gentle revolution which again placed medicinal plants firmly in front of the British public was largely the work of two women — Mary Grieve and Hilda Leyel” (Griggs, 1981). Grieve ran the Medicinal Herb Nursery at Chalfont St. Peter from the First World War, producing the pamphlets that became the 1931 Modern Herbal; Leyel founded the Society of Herbalists in 1927 with headquarters at Culpeper House on Bruton Street, putting her personal fortune into the venture and continuing to see patients at age seventy-seven, bedridden with cancer (Griggs, 1981).

The pairing matters because the two women played complementary institutional roles. Grieve produced the reference work (the pamphlets, then the book) that gave British herbalism a usable materia medica written in English by a hands-on practitioner. Leyel produced the dispensary and the professional society. The British Guild of Herb Growers (which Grieve led) and the Society of Herbalists (which Leyel founded) functioned as the cultivation and clinical wings of the same revival.

Stapley confirms that the two women “worked closely” through the 1920s and 1930s as parallel teachers and writers outside the National Association’s college framework: “Mrs Grieve had continued with teaching and writing. Hilda Leyel, author of many books on herbs herself, including a history, The Magic of Herbs, worked closely with her” (Stapley, 2012). The institutional history of how the British Guild of Herb Growers and the Society of Herbalists shared members or coordinated activity remains less well-documented in current evidence, but the collaboration on A Modern Herbal itself is clearly attested.

A Modern Herbal (1931)

A Modern Herbal was assembled from Grieve’s wartime cultivation pamphlets (Willard, 2021) (Stapley, 2012). Hilda Leyel’s editorial role in the project is significant and is sometimes obscured by the conventional attribution to Grieve alone: “Hilda inspired the work that was to make Mrs. Grieve famous, A Modern Herbal. This was a compilation of information leaflets printed during the war with additional material. Having taken on the gargantuan task of editing the whole book, in response to the request from the publisher, Hilda also added North American plants” (Stapley, 2012). Griggs gives a complementary account of the book’s polemical purpose: it appeared in 1931 “for the millions who still believed that herbal medicine had not made much progress since Culpeper and his astrological references,” demonstrating “the full extent to which traditional plant lore had been investigated and confirmed by modern science” (Griggs, 1981).

Tobyn, Denham, and Whitelegg’s The Western Herbal Tradition (2011) cites Grieve in this authoritative way at multiple points. On the origin of the plant name lady’s mantle, they note that “the earliest clearly identifiable reference appears to be in Jerome Bock, alias Hieronymus Tragus, who first, according to Grieve, appended the name lady’s mantle to the plant in the early 1500s” (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011). They check her attribution against Bock’s actual text and find it slightly overstated, since Bock writes that “others call it our lady’s mantle.” The citation pattern itself shows how A Modern Herbal functions in the field: as the first place historians of herbal medicine look for English-language attribution of folk and Latin plant names (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011).

A second example, also from Tobyn et al., concerns the wormwood entry in the British Pharmacopoeia. (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Tobyn et al. record: “Grieve records that the drug ‘Absinthium’ (rarely employed) was directed in the British Pharmacopoeia to be extracted from Artemisia maritima ‘which possesses the same virtues in a less degree, and is often more used as a stomachic that the common wormwood. Commercially this often goes under the name of Roman wormwood, though that name really belongs to A. Pontica’” (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011). Here Grieve is cited as a documentary source for what an early-twentieth-century pharmacopoeia actually said. (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

The Wartime Crisis and Its Aftermath

Garlic was used at front-line casualty stations as an antiseptic dressing for suppurating wounds, and in 1916 the British Government asked urgently for tons of garlic bulbs at one shilling per pound (Griggs, 1981). Sphagnum moss, used for centuries as “the peasant’s bandage,” was officially approved by the War Office in 1916; in Perthshire the Duke of Atholl lent shooting-lodges to accommodate gatherers, and Presbyterian ministers exhorted congregations to gather moss on the Sabbath (Griggs, 1981). Stapley adds the technical reason for the moss’s revival: it absorbs twenty to twenty-two times its own weight in liquid (Stapley, 2012). By the end of the war up to a million dressings per month were being sent to military hospitals (Stapley, 2012).

This was the institutional context in which Grieve’s pamphlets circulated. Britain’s pharmaceutical supply was suddenly dependent on domestic herb cultivation; the Whins farm was already running before the war began; the courses on growing, collecting, and drying medicinal plants had real wartime applications. A Modern Herbal, assembled afterward, captured a body of working knowledge that could otherwise have lapsed once peacetime imports resumed.

Scholarly Assessment

Griggs’s Green Pharmacy (1981) identifies Mary Grieve and Hilda Leyel as largely responsible for the revival of medicinal plants in Britain, noting that Leyel invested her personal fortune and battled for recognition of qualified herbal practitioners (Griggs, 1981).

Stapley’s History of Plant Medicine (2012, ch. 25) records that Maud Grieve set up the Whins Medicinal and Commercial Herb School and Farm at Chalfont St Peter in 1905 (Stapley, 2012). She was a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, President of the British Guild of Herb Growers, and a Fellow of the Science Guild (Stapley, 2012). She also published wartime pamphlets on cultivating herbs for medicine (Stapley, 2012).

Willard’s History of Herbal Medicine (2021, Lesson 3) gives a brief but accurate restatement: Whin’s Vegetable Drug Plant Farm; A Modern Herbal in 1931 from her WWI pamphlets (Willard, 2021).

Tobyn, Denham, and Whitelegg’s The Western Herbal Tradition (2011) cites A Modern Herbal for plant nomenclature (e.g., the name “lady’s mantle” (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)), traditional attribution (e.g., the Virgin Mary association (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)), and pharmacopoeial detail (e.g., the British Pharmacopoeia’s direction for “Absinthium” (Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)).

See Also

• hilda-leyel
• a-modern-herbal
• society-of-herbalists
• british-guild-of-herb-growers
• english-herbal-medicine
• national-institute-of-medical-herbalists
• herbal-medicine
• twentieth-century-british-herbal-revival

Sources

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.

frontmatter: dates

• [GAP: specialist source needed — no dedicated Grieve biography published; birth/death dates not attested in any Library source; Griggs covers her only briefly]

Life and Context

• [GAP: specialist source needed — no biographical source covers Grieve’s personal life; Modern Herbal itself (in Library, unextracted) does not contain an author biography]

Scholarly Assessment