Our search tool – a great manual?

In my library, I have a whole bunch of “big” manuals on plants, some of them struggle to reach 100 pages, while others barely make it to 1000 pages long. The word “big” is rather subjective. You are going to tell me, whether you are big or small, the moon is the same size, I’m not the one who says it, it’s taken from the “documentary” darling I shrunk the kids.

In this newsletter, I list the things that we think are essential to highlight in the “big” Phyto-info, at least in its first version, or in the public beta as geeks would say. In fact, it seems to me that the more detailed we could describe the plant and its benefits, the better it would be, right?

That’s who’s going to do another doctoral thesis for us!

Uh… no! One thesis per life is quite enough! And precisely, the idea here is to get right to the point. I don’t know if you are like me, but when I search for a recipe on Google for example, I hate to come across a blog that, before showing me the recipe in question, first tells me about the life of the vegetable or the chef. Sometimes, you have to scroll through the site for hours and hours… well maybe not hours, but you get what I mean, sometimes you have to go through a lot of ads and lots of decorative text before you get to what you’re really looking for… more like a waste of time for me.

So, for our search tool, we put ourselves in the shoes of the user in search of an answer to a particular case. For example, if I have just scratched my hand and it pees the blood and I am far away from a doctor, do I need to know that yarrow was certainly used by Neanderthal men (and women)? And yes, we have found, when I say we, not me, but researchers have found yarrow pollen in high concentration in the Shanidar cave in Iraq on a Neanderthal burial (Débuigne & Couplan, 2019, Le Petit Larousse des plantes médicinales, p. 24). Cool! So I pee my blood and, again urgently before going to see my doctor, what I really want to know is that I can apply yarrow to my bobo because it is haemostatic, healing and antiseptic.

To be honest, my very first approach was to start with a botanical presentation of the plant, but I gave up. Other books do it wonderfully, no need to duplicate information. Our objective is not to help you recognize the plant (you know it and collect it yourself or you buy it from your favorite herbalist), the objective is rather to summarize what is published in certain areas. The illustration in this post shows the various sections we are currently working on. Some very brief practical information, the traditional uses for which the plant is used, the dosages, the plant properties, and for the most ambitious the constituents. Other common names are also important; you might know yarrow as carpenter’s herb or Venus eyebrow. Terms of use can also be useful in the event of drug interactions, and yes that does happen. Yarrow, for example, is not recommended in case of anticoagulant therapy.

As you will have understood, what we want is to be able to provide the answers you are looking for, quickly and without distraction. To return to the idea of sites congested by ads, I can tell you right now, there won’t be any on Phyto-info, I’ll talk about that later.

See you very soon for the next phyto-info newsletter!

sylvie