I’ve handled a lot of unusual plants over the years, but the baobab tree still stops me when I think about what it actually is. Not what it’s said to do — what it is. A single specimen can be older than most European cathedrals. Its trunk is… Read More »The Baobab Tree: Africa’s Ancient Giant And The Seeds Inside Its Fruit
The question of akuamma vs abere comes up more than almost anything else I get asked about these two plants — and honestly, the confusion is completely understandable, because the botanists and traders who came before us managed to muddle them up too. I stock both, I’ve handled… Read More »Akuamma SEEDS (Picralima Nitida) Vs Abere SEEDS (Hunteria Umbellata): What’s the Difference
After years of sourcing West African plants, I’ve learned that a common name of any plant rarely tells the full story. Take Nauclea latifolia, often called the African peach. Despite its name, it isn’t related to peaches. It’s a tough tree that grows in savanna regions and produces… Read More »Why Is Nauclea Latifolia Called The African Peach If It Isn’t One?
There is a tree growing across tropical Africa that most people in the countries where it grows have never heard of — and yet, for decades, its seeds were leaving West African ports by the hundreds of tonnes every year, bound for pharmaceutical laboratories in Germany, and later… Read More »Voacanga Africana: The Seed Once Shipped By The Ton To Pharma Labs
There is something I find quietly remarkable about the seeds that arrive at the apothecary from West Africa. Mucuna pruriens — the velvet bean — comes in oblong, slightly compressed forms, speckled or almost entirely black, each one carried inside a pod so bristled with irritant hairs that… Read More »Seeds Men Traditionally Carried On Long Hunts Across West Africa
The first time a batch of akuamma seeds arrived at my door, I held one up to the light and thought: this looks like nothing else I work with. Not a nut, not a bean, not a pit. Something stranger. Akuamma seeds — the seeds of Picralima nitida,… Read More »Akuamma Seeds: What Picralima Nitida Actually Looks Like: From Tree To Powder
There is a small, quietly hairy shrub growing across the West African savanna that I find genuinely fascinating — partly because of how far it has travelled from its origins, and partly because almost nobody writing about it online seems to have looked closely at the plant itself.… Read More »Fadogia Agrestis Stem Powder: Its Fascinating History With the Hausa Wrestling Tradition
I came across wonderful kola the way I come across most of the plants we work with — through a name that refused to make sense until I dug into it. What is wonderful kola, exactly? The name sounds almost too cheerful to be botanical, and the more… Read More »Wonderful Kola (Buchholzia Coriacea): What is It & How it’s Traditionally Used
The root arrives looking unremarkable — dried, woody, a dull ochre colour. Then you grind it, and the powder has this deep, warm yellow that almost glows in the bag. I’ve been working with Cryptolepis Sanguinolenta powder for years now, and that colour still gets me every time.… Read More »Cryptolepis Sanguinolenta Root Powder: The Yellow Root Ghana Calls Nibima
The first time I watched a kola nut being presented at a gathering in West Africa, I was struck by how much weight a small, pale seed could carry. Everyone in the room knew exactly what was happening — who could speak, who would hold it, in which… Read More »How Kola Nut Is Shared in West African Ceremonies and Why
