Echinacea harvest

To Hereford for a couple of days with our Ethno-botanist Anna Macleod to oversee this summer’s echinacea harvest and extraction process. We’ve been working with James and Emma Lambe at Castle Farm for several years now and one of Anna’s pet projects has been to set up a test-crop of Echinacea Purpurea for us to use in our range of Skin Repair moisturisers. British farmers are really up against the elements at the moment and we battled with the severe rain and local flooding just to get to the farm deep in the depths of the countryside. Fortunately we had a short window of sunshine, just enough to get in most of the flowering Echinacea crop (which is cut by hand, so quite labour intensive) and managed to take some lovely photos which will hopefully appear in our Autumn newsletter later this year. Once the Echinacea is cut it is laid onto racks in the drying room to allow the stems to dry out, ready for chopping. The stalks and flower heads are then macerated in water to make a strong herbal infusion. This then forms the basis of our echinacea extract, and at the end of the process James handed me some of the final liquid to bring back to our labs.

Anna and I also watched cucumber extract being made – a simple process of chopping lots of locally grown, organic cucumbers, tipping the pieces into a huge circular press and siphoning off the fresh green juice – it smelt (and tasted!) really delicious and I shall try and re-create this in my juicer at home with our surplus home-grown cucumbers this year. The juice should freeze well and can probably be made into tasty ice-cubes to subtly flavour water and fresh vegetable juices. I’ll have a go anyway – last year we had vast quantities of cucumbers as they all ripened at once. We sold lots in our village shop and we gave basketfuls to friends, but there is only so much cucumber soup you can make… and I discovered that, unfortunately, it doesn’t freeze well. Still, our piglets hugely enjoyed crunching up the remainder - they may not be so lucky this year if I can turn the cucumbers into a refreshing juice.

Once Anna and I had finished in the farm fields we were invited back to James and Emma’s kitchen for tea. On the bookshelf I spied a real treasure – an original, leather-bound copy of Gerarde’s Herbal. This book was printed in 1633 and Emma very kindly said I could sit and leaf through its pages (after very thoroughly washing my hands). I have often referred to this great botanist’s book over the years, especially when researching my own much smaller books on plants and herbs for the skin. But I have never seen an original copy of this mighty tome and it was an incredible thrill to sit and turn its vellum pages. This volume was published in 1633 and it was quite hard to follow as Gerarde simply documents plants as he finds them. There is no index and the species aren’t even in alphabetical order, so you simply have to sit and turn the pages not knowing what you’ll find next. I found several plants that we use in Naturally Active Skincare though, including Self Heal, Comfrey and St John’s Wort. Amongst the notes, Gerarde has written about medicinal plants being grown “in fields on the edge of a small village outside London called Kentish Towne”. He wouldn’t recognise the place today. An amazing historical record, as well as a fascinating compendium of botanical properties and medicinal uses, which is still very useful and relevant. I could happily have sat in the Lambe’s kitchen until the small hours immersing myself in this extraordinary work – an unexpected and memorable treat at the end of a busy few days.

Some fab feedback today that I wanted to share – every Friday, we circulate a ‘Happy Friday’ report on some of the best customer feedback from that week. Our US team also work on this and this week, there were some encouraging stories:

“I wanted to tell you that both my daughter and I cannot live without the Cleanse & Polish. She has had problems with skin that would break out and it keeps her pores clean and her skin has never looked better. I love your products because they are very gentle and moisturizing.”  “Many, many thanks for your wonderful products and outstanding service.  It's hard to refuse answering feedback when someone personally signs a card”. “ “Thank you for the wonderful skin care products you have introduced to the U.S. Your passion for quality products is exemplary”. “I started using your products about six weeks ago and I've already noticed a big difference. I love the way my skin feels and I actually look forward to the nighttime routine.”

Great to see the word is spreading!

I’ve been working on our Green Policy for my colleague Kate – it’s a very rewarding project and I’m pleased to see all the detail that goes in to make our ethical choices. In some ways, we have always been green but the current focus on green issues has made everyone step a step back, and consider the impact of their personal and working lives on the environment, like never before…  Working with nature has long been our goal – from the very beginning, we aspired to 100% traceability of the ingredients that we used in our botanical formulations, with our team of ethno-botanists dedicated to working with Mother Nature to find the best natural remedies available in our quest to help everyone achieve healthy-looking, radiant skin. This means extracting botanicals from source - literally knowing the field, climate, altitude and soil in which they’re grown, as well as working directly with farmers & growers across the globe, cutting out the middle man and never buying ‘off the shelf’. The ingredients we use have been ‘time-tested’, some used traditionally for thousands of years.

As well as this green & ethical sourcing, we strive hard internally to fulfil our green motto: ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. From using environmentally-friendly protective chips, tissue paper and cardboard outer boxing for our mail order service, to using recyclable packaging and recycled paper in our seasonal newsletter; from our internal ‘Turn It Off’ campaign to keep electrical waste to a minimum, to what we use to clean our offices, and to our new state-of-the-art eco-friendly Green House (with geo-thermal heating and recycled rain water for flushing loos) – being green is a priority for us. To this end, we have worked hard to achieve the ISO14001, an internationally-recognised certification for environmental management systems, highly regarded in the environmental management world.

We feel strongly that what we’re doing – in our small but hard-working way – is progress, not perfection. If we can all make these little changes, we can collectively make a big impact on the world around us.