Its just those herbal remedies, those simple herbal remedies (basic herbalism, Goss)

[Janis Windrough]

Timestamp: Early Winter of Era II of the Celestine Mandate (current Pattern), Era XIV Post Fractum

Janis had already been told twice that Alleria Prime was not a good place for druids to be. There truly was not much that was organic about a sprawling metropolis lined in stone and mortor. Indeed Janis the last thing Janis wanted was to loose touch with Nature while he was braving the city so when he spotted a herb shop, The Vibrant Greenhouse to be exact, he made a note that he should probably stop by. It would be good to perhaps expose himself to an outpost of foilage on a regular basis here in the city.

Sure enough, one brightening when he had some time, Janis ducked into the shop. From the outside the large greenhouse up above did indeed catch his attention and as he entered the building it felt like slamming into a wall of heat and moisture from the chilly winter air he had come from. This feeling was amplified by the crowded nature all the glass jars, and stacked shelves created upon entrence. The collection certainly was extensive. He felt invigorated by the live plant life that was growing around him. This greatly improved his mood and though sweat was starting to form on his brow in the heat.

Janis tried to grab the attention of of old woman who was running around shouting out orders to the two figures following her around. "Ex...excuse me miss. Serale. My name is Janis Windrough, I was wondering if you could help me out?"

[Gossamer]

Nana was bustling around. She grinned half-toothless at the visitor when he came through the doorway and looked around. She knew that look. He was after something. It made her sigh. A gleam like that could only mean one thing. He wanted a tincture to cause someone to love him, or he wanted to poison his father for his inheritance, or perhaps he fancied himself a martyr and wanted to get enough of a dose of falkam to kill his pretty face. Or... if she was very unlucky or he was very uninspired, he wanted a seedling of lemon verbana to plant in his garden so he'd always have some to season his baked chicken with.

"Sure... what can I help you with Laddy?" She said, bubbling with good humor and pleasure as she walked over. The shop today was muggy, so she had the door half-cracked open, and the windows upstairs in the orangery wide open. It hadn't helped much. The feel of the place was still heavy and sweet with the heat and the early forced blooming of the potted orange trees. At least, she thought, it made her shop smell wonderfully... if one could tolerate the fragrance of soil, loam, and peat beneath the tang of the plants.

[Janis Windrough]

Janis was getting a bit light headed from the strong fragrances emitting from the shop. This coupled with the humid atmosphere had worked him a bit dizzy. But it was good...if there was ever such thing as a natural high, this sensory overload was producing it right now. Janis couldn't help but keep the large smile on his face. He had found a nice little outcropping of nature in the middle of the stone metropolis and knew what he saught.

Janis didn't want to murder anyone, or commit suicide or even season a meal though had that thought been vocalized it probably would have made Janis's mouth water. He had come to learn. The woman running the shop seemed happy enough to help so he started. Taking a deep breath to try and clear his slightly woozy head, Janis started. "Well, ya see miss, I am a druid. 'ere in Prime, ya know, its not really...conducive to the whole druid lifestyle. Coming across your shop, well...it seemed like a blessin'. I was hoping that if you had some time, you might be able to teach a thing or two about this flora to me. It's rather silly for me not to know the...subtleties of the plants I love so much. Doncha think?"

As Janis finished he lifted his hand up to touch one of the leaves of the plants closest to him. Janis had a hunch that with his current condition, had he needed to enter clara (which he had absolutely no reason to right now), it probaby wouldn't be too difficult of a thing in such a setting. Such a welcome addition to the city he had grown up in and no returned to.

[Gossamer]

Nana perked up. A student! Wonderful. And a druid to boot. "Oh wonderful, Lad! A druid here? In the city. Thats amazing. Sure I'd love to teach you some herbalism. Its one of my favorite topics, if you can't tell!" She beamed, then bustled over to shake his hand. "Usually I charge 100 gold crowns for my basic lessons, but if you want to work part of that off, I can charge you 50, and you can come tend to the greenhouse for a cycle and help me with some heavy lifting cause I have to do some transplanting soon.... might as well do it now as later." She said. Then she went over to her desk and pulled out a small little book. It was labeled Common Plant Guide of Alleria.

"You get this, some writing materials, and instruction as part of the class." She said, seemingly excited to have a new student. "Do you want to start today, or tomorrow? If so I have time now to do the first part of your class." She said, handing him another sheet of parchment. It had a list of ten of the most common types of herbs on it, and what they were used for and how to care for them. "I have all of those on hand with the greenhouse upstairs."

[Janis Windrough]

What a wonderful response. Janis was very happy that this woman seemed very eager to be his teacher. She seemed very happy about the fact that he was a druid as well. I mean, yes it was wonderful being a druid and all but Janis didn't need her to tell him that. He heard the possibility of a discount and thought it over.

"Well, I would be happy to help out any way I can, 'specially for a discount..." he but his lower lip as he thought about logistics. He did have another job he had to account for right now and that one meant his room and board, however a solution entered his head. "Perhaps, if its alright with you, I can come by in the evenins' for my lessons and to help out wherever ya might need me."

Hardly before Janis could even finish with that he was being handed some supplies. First a book on the plants of Alleria, that made sense...then some writing tools and a list of common herbs. Janis clumsily tried to balance his newly aquired stack of materials and responded to the question. "Well, my night is free...I guess we can start right here then..." He then realized he had never gotten his teacher's name...well that wouldn't do. "Ex...excuse me but I don't think I caught your name..."

[Gossamer]

ooc: Sorry for the delay. I'm back in action now and posting.

"Why, everyone knows my name! Its... Nana. Thats cause I'm so old, and the fact is so old I've forgotten my own so I just go by Nana. You mind?" She said, leading him up to greenhouse, her sparse little frame easily navigating the spiral stairs to the rooftop room. It was sweltering under the glass, but the plantlife was lush and welcoming, a true comfort for someone who considered themselves a druid.

With that, Nana showed Janis to a tiny little desk and immediately began to make sure he was comfortable. "Now, before we start.... I want to ask you a few questions. For example.. what do you want to get out of this class? Whats your goals. Are you into medicines? Teas? Tinctures? Or do you just want to know what plants heal and what plants kill?" She stated, all the while fetching back a little potted Aloe plant and sitting it down on his desk. She waited for his response... eager to know the young man's intentions.

[Janis Windrough]

OOC: No problem, I was indisposed for a bit there as well so it worked out.

Well then "Nana" it was. He found the description of why exactly she was called that rather odd. A woman who was about to teach him of plants and herbs couldn't even remember her own name? Perhaps this woman was a study in filling your brain with a certain type of info, in this case plants, and forgetting other things...like well...one's name.

Janis wobbled up the stairs after his new teacher attempting to not drop his books and papers because of his by now quite moist hands. When eh finally reached the top of the stairs, Janis plopped down on the desk and immediately removed his jacked and placed it on the back of the chair. Taking a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow and attempt, probably in vein to dry off his hands, Janis took a few deep breathes and then began to field Nana's question.

"Well Nana, It's one thing to to love nature an' respect it but it's quite another to know it. Ya see Nana, as a driud I can do loads o' things with the plants of our land but wouldn't that do a whole lot better if I knew what exactly it was I was doin it too!?!" Janis saw that she had produced a little plant on his desk and Janis began to observe the plant as he moved on to the second part of the question. "Well, I figure I'd like to be as well rounded as I could. Don't need to be much of an expert in any one thing...but I guess I would say I'd like to know how to use the helpful ones and be wary of the harmful ones, maybe pick up a few neat tid-bits on the way too if ya don't mind ma'm." Janis thought she would get the idea from this explination. He by no means wanted to know everything but a basic understanding of a few things would be ideal. Maybe he could learn a few tricks to stick in his sleeve as well...if Nana knew any.

[Gossamer]

Nana smiled. "Well, we can fix that. The first thing I want you to know is that with the book I gave you comes a key to identifying the plants in it. You need to know what you have when you look at a plant before you can even know what its medicinal purposes are. And in order to work the plant key, you need to know the parts of a plant. Simple huh? Okay, lets look at the parts first, and then talk a little bit about the plant key." Nana gathered more plants to go with the aloe and to give Janis more examples.

She took a breath and went on. "This may sound very basic to you, but its things you need to know to be a good herbalist. We use, from various plants, selected parts or all the parts depending upon what sort of herbalism we are doing. So in order to do that, we need to know what they are. The parts are as follows.... The Roots, The Stem, The Leaves, The Flowers, The Seeds, and The Fruit." As she said this, she gestured to each and every part, showing them on numerous types of plants. "Not every plant will have every part. But you do need to know what the parts are to follow the key and identify plants until you learn them by heart." She said softly, giving him a chance to absorb what she was saying.

"Now, lets look at some parts more specifically. Then we can tie them in together when we talk about the plant key. Lets look at leaves. There are only two basic types of leaves... stalked and unstalked. Stalked are like maple leaves... they have a tiny stalk called a petiole. The petiole's differ in length from one plant to another. The unstalked are called sessile, and don't have petioles. These are like grasses, that just branch off still mainly attached to main stem." Nana said, demonstrating by showing him lemon grass, then verbana. The grass was unstalked, the verbana was stalked.

Then she stared showing him different types of leaves....simple leaves had only one leaf blade per stalk. Grass had simple leaves, but then so did many stalked plants. The other type was compound, like a clover... many leaves off one plant.

Simple leaves show the undivided blade, or in case it has divisions, they do not reach the midrib. The midrib being the vein down the middle of the leaf that continues on to the stalk.

Compound leaves have a fragmented blade, with divisions reaching the midrib.

Then she demonstrated the margins of the leaves.... there were numerous kinds there too.

Entire leaves - smooth margins completely around the leaf
Sinuate leaves - have little curves around them with smooth edges like waves.
Dentate leaves - have little teeth at the leaf margins
Serrate leaves - have little bent teeth like those of a saw.
Lobed leaves - have divisions that do not arrive at the halfway point between the midrib and the margin.

Then Nana moved on to the shape of the leaves. There were a great deal of them. But, luckily she had plants to demonstrate each type.

Elliptic leaves- eliptical in shape with two or three times longer in length than they are in width
Lancelate leaves - lance shaped, gradually extending at the base and lessening to the apex.
Acicular leaves - needle-shaped, several times longer than wide, ending sharply at the apex.
Ovate leaves - egg-shaped, wider at the base than the apex
Cordate leaves - heart-shaped, more extended at the base than the ovate types and with a cut-back notch
Hastate leaves - halberd-shaped
Linear leaves - strip shaped... not pointed at the ends.

Nana next went into great detail about the veins. They were key in identifying different species of plants. She showed him example after example as she introduced him to the types.

Parallel-veined leaves - like grasses... veins run at the same distance to each other..
Pinnate leaves - there is a main nerve called a midrib, from which the other nerves derive and branch off from like a plume.
Palmate leaves - The nerves diverge from the main point such as the fingers do in the palm of the hand.

Then finally, she spoke of the arrangement of the leaves along the stem. There were three types...

alternate - springing one per node at different levels of the stem (a node being a regular interval along a branch)
opposite - two per node, facing opposite sides of the stem
whorled - several leaves disposed at the same level around the stem
rosulate - forming a rosette, like a ring around the stem

Nana smiled. "Now that you know more about leaves, lets look at the plant key and see how to key out a plant with just using the leaves..." Then she continued on, opening her own copy of the book to the key, and explaining a bit more about what it is.

"The plant key provides a shortcut for identifying plants that eliminates searching through numerous descriptions to find one that fits the unknown plant. You can use all kinds of things to identify a plant. Its color, its flowers, its leaves, where it grows.. almost anything. If I show you how to use it via the leaves, you can easily translate it over into other parts of the plant..." She told him to take out his book, open it up, and they looked at a very simple clover plant.

"A key consists of series of pairs (couplets) of contradictory statements (leads). Each statement of a couplet must “lead” to another couplet or to a plant name. Each couplet provides an either-or proposition wherein the user must accept one lead as including the unknown plant in question and must simultaneously reject the opposing lead. The user then proceeds from acceptable lead to acceptable lead of successive couplets until a name for the unknown plant is obtained. For confirmation, the newly identified plant should then be compared with other known specimens or with detailed descriptions of that species." Then she showed him the plant, the type of leaf it had, and ran him through the key, discarding the options that didn't fit... wrong veins, wrong shapes, etc until they arrived at simple Luck Clover as an answer. Then she turned the tag in the tiny seedling and showed him that it indeed was called a Luck Clover.

"Now, that you know how to do that, you can identify any known plant in the Empire easily." She said, smiling proudly at him and pausing to let him ask any questions before she asked him to key out another plant on his own.

[Janis Windrough]

Janis tried to jott things down as fast as his teacher could unleash the knowldge upon him. He was having the whole of knowledge of the shrubbery of the empire imparted on him all at once. There was, however, a mighty clever system. These table gave him all he needed to know.

Janis would alternate between jotting down notes, thumbing through his book and observing the characteristics pointed out by his teacher. A veritable forrest was collecting on the table he has been sitting at because of all the examples. So from all this, Janis had gathered that leaves were key to identifying plants. From just a single leaf, with is trusty book in hand Janis could go through a rather simple process to place the plant that had produced the leaf.

Now Janis was new at this so the intircacies he felt he would uncover with time. Perhaps he wouldn't be the best a deciphering Pinnate of Palmate right away nothing here was really flying over Janis's head. He kept nodding to show he understood what was being said. He was quite shocked that all this knowledge would be so easily obtained with nothing but a book at hand.

"Well ma'm, thats right nifty this whole system." He smiled as he continued to look at the leaves and match them to some statements in the book. "But I bet theres a lot more to these guys then just names ain't there miss."

[Gossamer]

Nana grinned. "Indeed not, young man. Its just the tip of the old iceburg... just the tip! And now, I'm gonna show you some plants... give you some working knowledge. About ten common ones will help you out. Then, if you want to take further classes, I'll teach you how to make medicines from them and do all the nifty stuff more advanced herbalists know." She said with a toothless grin.

The obvious first selection was Aloe. She handed him a tiny potted plant of the stuff, and then turned to her little chalk board and wrote upon it. "Now, all you need to do is pluck a leaf off, break it open, and smear the inner goo on it."

ALOE
Available: Autumn, Winter 55%
Climatic Zone: Temperate
Locale: Grassland
Preparation: none
Cost: 70 Crowns
The leaf of Aloe applied to a wound, will double the natural healing rate of burns and minor cuts.

The second plant was another common one. Basil.. its distinct smell met his nose before she actually handed him the plant. Again, she wrote.. and the directions were very similar to Aloe.

BASIL
Available: Summer 30%
Climatic Zone: Temperate
Locale: Rural
Preparation: none
Cost: 110 Crowns
Basil must be used almost immediately on being picked. The leaves should be applied to the bite of a venomous creature, and it will then have the effect of drawing out the poison. Any damage already sustained will remain. The herb has one upright stalk, and small white flowers.

And finally, there was one more she handed him. It was a small patch of what looked like grass. It had a distinctive smell and color though, so it was easy to tell from common grass.

CALAMUS
Available: Spring, Summer 15%
Climatic Zone: Temperate
Locale: Swamp
Preparation: 1 day
Cost: 280 Crowns
This rush grows in small grassy clumps. It can grow from about 2 to 6 feet in height and has very small yellow green flowers that jut out from the stem. The leaves are long, thin and light green in colour and smells faintly sweet. The root is white with a red brown peel. The root must be peeled and boiled in fresh water within a day of being picked, and should then be drunk by the recipient. Provided no permanent physical damage has been done to the person hearing organs, the herb may restore some small measure of hearing to a totally deaf person, perhaps 10% of normal hearing. In addition the herb has been reported to have aphrodisiac qualities, and is used by certain peoples to make their dogs fierce.

[Janis Windrough]

Now that his general intro was done it was time to get into some more detail. Nana was no slouch, that was for sure. She delved right into it and Janis couldn't ask for a better situation. He didn't mind having all this stuf thrown at him, thats why he had some paper, to write it all down on.

So he was shown three plants, all of them useful on some way. The name of the plant was followed by a good deal of info, all of which Janis was busily jotting down. Nana was one hell of a herbalist as she had examples of each of these right and ready. Janis made sure to note some other things on his notes as well. A rudimentry sketch to the best of his ability was one thing he would be sure to note as well as anything else distinctive such as he perceived the smell or what any features that might stick out to Janis beyond the ones in Nanas description. Having the actual examples right there in front of him was a big help.

Also, as best he could Janis would try to remember back to the key and the various features. In any free moments he had he would try to identify the leaf shape or the veing type. It would be good practice. Granted it wasn't much, but why not start doign what you could now. And these were easy because he already knew what these were.

Soon Janis had a pretty good description of all three of these herbs down on his paper. One thing confused him though. These prices all seemed pretty high. Just how much Calamus would bring in 230 crowns? He decided to ask as much. "So Nana, just how much of each plant bring in the price ya' put up there?"

[Gossamer]

Nana answered Janis quickly with a laugh. "Them's prices of dried plant material. Fresh its much cheaper. And its by the pound. So it takes a great deal to make a pound of each herb. Usually an herbalist only needs a pinch or two, so be at ease, lad." And with that, she pulled out three more plants. Each one was unique. The first was a neat little shrub with fuzzy white leaves and hard odd bark.

DELREAN
Available: Winter 80%
Climatic Zone: Temperate
Locale: Forest
Preparation: 1 hour
Cost: 40 Crowns
The bark of Delrean should be boiled into a paste and then smeared on the skin. It will then repel any insect from coming near the recipient, but the foul stench will reduce their appearance. It is effective for 5-6 hours.

The next was a spikey plant that looked rather formidable.

ELDAAS
Available: Spring, Summer 5%
Climatic Zone: Temperate
Locale: Coastal
Preparation: 2 days
Cost: 90 Crowns
This tall, blue-flowered plant with spike-shaped leaves is the base for medicines against nausea, usually taken in the form of a bitter-smelling and -tasting herbal tea. Eldaas is used to counteract the nausea associated with hangovers, motion sickness, morning sickness, and more
common illnesses. At this strength eldaas can cause dry mouth and constipation. Lasts 1-6 hours regardless of potency level.

And finally, the last plant she pulled out for the session was a very unique plant with a bluish cast to it. She smiled brightly as she laid it out before him.

FLOURE-DE-LUCE
Available: Always 60%
Climatic Zone: Temperate
Locale: Grassland
Preparation: 3 weeks
Cost: 90 Crowns
The Floure-De-Luce is also known as the Blue Flag. It has broad and flat leaves shaped rather like a sword. The flowers are purplish blue and the roots which tend to stretch themselves along the surface of the ground are reddish brown on the outside. The root must be mashed and boiled in water and left to stand for at least twenty days before drinking. This herb removes bruises from a body very quickly (within 1-4 hours).

"And now, I think we shall call it a day. Tomorrow, if you come back, I will give you the rest of your plants, and we can go over a few more tiny details. Then I'd say your training for your introduction to herbalism would be totally complete." The old woman said with a smile.