Blossoms Of The Bush

There are some journeys we plan, and there are others that seem to have been waiting patiently for us to arrive.

Blossoms of the Bush is one of those journeys for me.

For many years I have been drawn to plants, healing, beauty, faith, women’s wisdom and the quieter ways we care for one another. I have studied, travelled, prayed, trained, created, searched and gathered. Like many women, I have taken courses in the things that called to me — herbs, holistic wellbeing, bodywork, food, movement and spiritual practice — without always understanding why certain things felt so familiar.

Recently, something began to shift.

I started looking more closely at Jamaica.

Not simply Jamaica as the place of my family, our food, our language or our memories, but Jamaica as a keeper of knowledge.

The bush.

The balmyard.

Revival.

The women who knew which leaf to pick.

The Mothers who prayed.

The healers who listened.

The grandmothers who knew things they did not necessarily explain.

And suddenly, parts of my own life began to speak to one another.

I remembered stories that had once seemed ordinary. Conversations with my grandmother took on new meaning. I began asking questions about the Jamaica she knew before coming to Britain. I learned more about the traditions that some families spoke about openly and others mentioned only carefully, if at all.

I also began to understand something about my own spiritual journey.

My faith has always mattered deeply to me. God first. Christ is the gate. That has not changed.

What has changed is my willingness to look honestly at the parts of Jamaican spiritual and cultural history that many of us were taught to fear before we were ever given the opportunity to understand them.

I have become increasingly interested in the Jamaican balmwoman: the woman who tended people through prayer, bush knowledge, listening, water, practical care and spiritual discernment.

I call myself a Modern Balm Woman.

Not because I am attempting to recreate somebody from another century, and certainly not because I believe every old practice should be carried forward unquestioningly.

I mean something simpler and deeper.

I am interested in what it means for a Jamaican woman in the diaspora to remember, research, discern and carry forward the wisdom of tending.

To know plants.

To make tea.

To grow things.

To care for the body.

To honour the women who came before us.

To pray.

To listen.

To recognise that beauty itself can be restorative.

And to allow old knowledge to meet contemporary life without either disguising its origins or turning it into costume.

That is where Blossoms of the Bush began.

Botanicals • Beauty • Balm • Belief

Those four words hold the heart of this space.

Botanicals, because plants will be everywhere here: Jamaican bush, British herbs, flowers, gardens, remedies, food and the joy of learning what grows around us.

Beauty, because tending ourselves matters. Skin, hair, scent, adornment, rest and beautiful surroundings are not trivial things. Women have always created beauty alongside survival.

Balm, because sometimes what a person needs is not fixing but soothing, tending, listening and a place to rest.

And Belief, because my own journey makes no sense without faith.

Blossoms of the Bush will grow slowly.

There will be stories and research. There will be herbs and flowers. There will be women. There will be Jamaica and Sheffield. There will be family memory, history, faith, food, beauty and the occasional discovery that sends me running down another rabbit hole.

There will also be questions.

I don't intend to present myself as the final authority on any of this. I am learning, listening to elders, reading the historical record and allowing living people to tell their own stories.

My invitation is not follow me.

It is:

Don't follow me. Grow with me.

Where the Bush Blossoms Blew

That journey will also have a voice.

My forthcoming podcast is called Where the Bush Blossoms Blew.

The name came from an image I could not shake: blossoms carried on the wind from Jamaica, travelling across oceans and eventually landing in places such as Britain, Canada and America.

The people moved.

The plants travelled.

The prayers travelled.

The recipes travelled.

The stories travelled.

Sometimes their original names were forgotten, but fragments remained.

A tea made when somebody was ill.

A Bible kept beside a bottle of bush medicine.

A grandmother who knew more than she said.

A church in England that somehow felt like home because its worship carried an echo of something remembered from Jamaica.

The podcast will follow those echoes.

We will talk about dukunu and tie-a-leaf, bush medicine, balmwomen and balmyards, Revival, Maroon history, the abeng, Jamaican women healers, migration, faith, stigma, family memory and the ways traditions change when they cross water.

Some episodes will be historical.

Some will be personal.

Some, I hope, will eventually be conversations with elders and people who are still carrying these traditions today.

And sometimes we will simply begin with a leaf.

Because I am discovering that a very small thing can open an enormous story.

Perhaps that is what Blossoms of the Bush is really about.

Looking again at things we thought we already knew.

Asking our elders another question.

Learning the name of the plant growing beside the road.

Understanding why our grandmother did something a particular way.

Allowing faith and curiosity to sit together.

And giving ourselves permission to explore our own roots before assuming that everything meaningful must be found somewhere else.

I am only beginning.

But something has changed.

I no longer feel that I am looking backwards.

I feel as though I have finally caught up with something that has been waiting ahead of me.

Welcome to Blossoms of the Bush.

There is much more to come.

Don't follow me. Grow with me.

The Modern Balm Woman