Maud Grieve: A Herbalist in War Time

I’ve covered three British herbalists so far on this blog, and each has made a notable contribution to the development of botany and apothecary practice in Britain. This week, we’re going to meet Maud Grieve, whose contribution took a different form.

Yes, she wrote a lot about plants. She wrote A Modern Herbal, in fact. Yet she also contributed to the wartime efforts of the First World War in the realm of medicinal plants.

She’s perhaps not as well-known as the other three herbal writers I’ve featured: Elizabeth Blackwell, William Turner, and Nicholas Culpeper. She didn’t illustrate her herbal, like Blackwell. Nor did she translate Latin texts into English, like Turner or Culpeper.

But she did get people growing–and using–their own herbs. Let’s go to meet her.

Who was Maud Grieve?

Maud Grieve was born Sophie Emma Magdalene Law on 4 May 1858 in Islington. She went to India in 1879, where she met and married her husband, William Grieve. He ran a paper mill, and they stayed in India until the early 1900s. It’s possible that Kolkata’s extensive Botanic Gardens sparked her interest in plants (Making British Botany n.d.).

Maud was a self-taught botanist, though William encouraged her to collect old herbals and gardening books for their library at The Whins, their Buckinghamshire home. She sold seeds as a form of income, and began writing pamphlets about medicinal plants. We’ll come back to these pamphlets later.

William died in 1929, and Maud died on 21 December 1941 in Royston, Hertfordshire. Normally, I’d prefer to write a longer biography, but there is actually little to go on when you look into Maud’s life!

Still, her work with plants is the important part, so let’s get into that.

Maud Grieve and the War Effort

Due to the outbreak of the First World War, the UK struggled to import the plants needed to make medicines.

In September 1914, a month after Britain declared war on Germany, the Journal of the Board of Agriculture published an article, The Cultivation & Collection of Medicinal plants in England, about the problem.

Two websites report that the Board of Agriculture published it as a leaflet, but I can’t find any actual record of it in that format. I could only find the issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts which reprinted the article in October 1914. It’s on JSTOR, if you’re looking.

In it, W. A. Whatmough points out that growing medicinal plants enjoys a long history in England. A Saxon herbal from c.1000 “mentions poppy, chamomile, dill, fennel, pennyroyal, and wormwood” (1914: 995). He describes how people began growing medicinal plants in monasteries and mansion gardens to make up for the scarcity of their wild cousins.

Naturally, Whatmough namechecks the Chelsea Physic Garden and large-scale medicinal plant nurseries in Mitcham in 1756. Yet he also notes the expanding restrictions on land devoted to growing medicinal plants. While British drugs were lauded for their quality, other countries undercut prices, pushing homegrown drugs out of the market (1914: 995).

Whatmough’s original intention with the article was to appeal to druggists to support English drug cultivation. The outbreak of the First World War changed the plan, since demand for medicines suddenly outstripped supply. Belladonna bore the brunt of problems, since two successive wet winters wiped out English-grown plants, while the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 prevented the export of belladonna from Croatia. Stocks were dangerously low by 1914 (1914: 996).

Chamomile, dill, dandelion, valerian, colchicum, foxglove, fennel, henbane, and thornapple also faced similar problems (1914: 996). It’s honestly fascinating to think of there ever being a shortage in dandelions!

Whatmough called for fair compensation for British growers, but also suggested that farmers would “be fulfilling a patriotic duty by replacing the deficiency of healing drugs as far as possible” (1914: 996). He outlined the need for growers to also dry their own plants to provide the highest quantity of herbs possible.

He highlighted various plants that growers should consider, including the best growing conditions for their success: aconite, anise, belladonna, caraway, chamomile, coriander, dandelion, foxglove, dill, fennel, golden seal, henbane, opium poppies, thornapple, and valerian.

Enter Maud Grieve

With a call to arms like this, Maud converted her nursery into a herb garden to help grow some of these plants. She also helped set up the National Herb Growing Association in 1914, which lasted until 1917. Later, she was the president of the British Guild of Herb Growers.

Of course, people need to know how to actually grow herbs. She set up The Whins Medicinal and Commercial Herb School to train people in growing herbs. Students learned to grow, harvest, and dry their own herbs. Terms lasted for thirteen weeks, and Grieve considered 2-3 years enough study to be proficient (Bahrt 2025).

She wrote pamphlets about the benefits of medicinal herbs, something she continued to do after the war. Maud sold these pamphlets, along with seeds and a correspondence course (Bahrt 2025).

In 1919, she created the first herb garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show with horticulturalist Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. Rohde, a former student of Maud’s, went on to publish The Wartime Vegetable Garden in 1940, doing her own bit for novice gardeners, this time during the Second World War. Eleanour included recipes alongside gardening advice, making her manual more useful than the typical vegetable gardening books of the era.

Maud’s war effort didn’t pay off financially. After the war, medicine manufacturers could import herbs again, and business dwindled for Maud. She closed the farm in 1929 after William’s death. But she didn’t stay idle.

A Modern Herbal

I mentioned Maud’s pamphlets earlier. She wrote over three hundred of them, detailing the medicinal use of various plants. The founder of the Society of Herbalists, Hilda Leyel, recognised the potential of the pamphlets and suggested they became the basis of a new herbal.

Leyel edited the pamphlets, and A Modern Herbal was published in 1931 in two volumes. Together, the herbal contained 888 pages and 96 plates of illustrations. They added North American plants to widen the possible audience. It sold phenomenally well, selling out in 1931. A Modern Herbal only went out of print in 1947.

Leyel also cross-checked Maud’s work against a range of books, including John Clarke’s Dictionary of Materia Medica, Medical Botany by James Morss Churchill and John Stephenson, and the English and French official Pharmacopoeias.

You can buy copies of these original pre-1947 editions, or visit Botanical.com, which contains the whole herbal in electronic format.

There is a disclaimer on the home page regarding medical use, that the herbal was written with the conventional wisdom of the early 1900’s. Some of the information is now considered inaccurate or disagrees with contemporary medicine.

Helpfully, for my purposes at least, Maud included folklore alongside botanical and pharmaceutical information. True, she adds folklore sparingly, but it’s helpful to find it there nonetheless! For example, she tells us that the dead wore crowns of henbane in Greek mythology as they wandered beside the River Styx (Grieve 1995-2026b).

An Example – Golden Seal

I chose golden seal (Hydrastis Canadensis) as our first example since Whatmough highlighted it as an important plant. Also known as yellow root, ground raspberry, eye root, and turmeric root, it actually comes from Canada and the eastern US (Grieve 1995-2026a).

Indigenous Americans passed on their knowledge of the plant’s healing properties, particularly its roots, and it also provided a yellow fabric dye. Its medicinal uses included stomach issues, clearing catarrh, and easing loss of appetite.

Found in the buttercup family, golden seal was introduced into England in 1760.

Another Example – Thornapple

Found in the Solanaceae family, thornapple (Datura stramonium) is also known as jimson-weed, datura, and Devil’s Trumpet. According to Grieve, its poisonous qualities and strange side effects explained its American nickname of Devil’s Apple (1995-2026b).

European botanists thought it came from North America, while North American botanists considered it a European plant. People in London started growing it as an ornamental garden plant at the end of the 16th century. Surprisingly, growing thornapple in your garden was considered unlucky during the “witch mania” in England, since people thought thornapple aided witch incantations (Grieve 1995-2026c).

Grieve included an old recipe for a burn involving datura and elder leaves, and lard. It sounds rather involved, with the maker being directed to beat the leaves, boil them with the lard, and let it stand for a while. Next, the maker heated it over a fire, strained it, added fresh herbs, and repeated the process. Made correctly, the ointment would keep for seven years.

The recipe came from A Plain Plantain, published in 1922 but based on a household receipt book by Susanna Avery from 1688.

Other Works

Maud didn’t just write A Modern Herbal. She also wrote Culinary herbs and condiments (1933).

As you might imagine, Culinary herbs and condiments focused on 33 herbs to use in cooking, including rosemary, basil, and dill. The book also included information on how to grow, harvest, dry, store, and use the herbs.

At least you’d know these plants were edible.

What was Maud Grieve’s legacy?

Maud is perhaps less well-known in wider circles than Nicholas Culpeper, and definitely less well-known in botanical illustration circles than Elizabeth Blackwell.

She made little from her efforts, though she did influence how people gardened, and even viewed growing herbs. While we can’t easily measure how many people did ‘grow for Britain’ or even follow her teachings, we do know people did. Look at Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. She was a student, and went on to write various gardening books to encourage people to grow their own.

Her peers recognised her expertise, and she became a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society and Fellow of the British Science Guild. While she isn’t a plant folklorist, she did include plant lore in her herbal, providing extra context, or even just interesting tidbits, alongside the useful content. As a folklorist myself with a keen interest in plants, I would always put the plant first, but that’s personal preference!

For those who did follow her work, she demystified how to grow and work with herbs. In some ways, we can see her as a later descendant of Nicholas Culpeper, putting useful information into the hands of ordinary people. We can only speculate why her name isn’t perhaps as well-known as Culpeper’s, but we can at least follow her example and try to grow our own.

If you’d like to learn herbalism, and get access to a new plant monograph every month, then I recommend Rowan + Sage’s Herbaria membership. There are tons of monographs already uploaded in the community, and you also get access to plenty of recipes to put your newfound knowledge into practice.

Had you heard of Maud Grieve? Do you grow your own herbs? Let me know below!

References

Bahrt, Nichole (2025), ‘Important women of 20th Century Herbalism: Maud Grieve’, The Herb Society, https://herbsociety.org.uk/important-women-of-20th-century-herbalism-maud-grieve/. Accessed 22 June 2026.

Grieve, Maud (1995-2026a), ‘Golden Seal’, Botanical.com: A Modern Herbal, https://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/g/golsea27.html. Accessed 22 June 2026.

Grieve, Maud (1995-2026b), ‘Henbane’, Botanical.com: A Modern Herbal, https://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/h/henban23.html. Accessed 22 June 2026.

Grieve, Maud (1995-2026c), ‘Thornapple’, Botanical.com: A Modern Herbal, https://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/t/thorna12.html. Accessed 22 June 2026.

Making British Botany (no date), ‘MAUD GRIEVE (née Law)’, Making British Botany, https://www.newbotaniststwo.uk/maud-grieve. Accessed 21 June 2026.

Whatmough, W. A. (1914), ‘The Cultivation and Collection of Medicinal Plants in England’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 62 (3232), pp. 995–1003.