Behind the Leaves
Photographs and field notes on the medicinal plants I keep finding on trails. What they look like up close, where they grow, and how people have used them throughout history.
A catalog I started for myself
This started with a photo of a willow tree by a lagoon near my house, its branches reflected in the still water. I looked it up on iNaturalist and learned that compounds from willow bark helped lead to aspirin, something I had read about in the book Napoleon's Buttons. A tree I had walked past for years turned out to have a real connection to medicine, and I started wondering what else I was missing.
I began researching other plants I had already photographed, then visiting botanical and community gardens to find more. My notes outgrew a spreadsheet, so I built this site to keep photos and research together for each plant: where I found it, how to identify it, and its connection to medicine. Most of the photographs here are mine. The rest are credited reference photos, used for plants I have researched but have not photographed well myself yet.
I am a high school student, not a botanist or a doctor. Everything here comes from published research, herbarium and agency records, and my own notes in the field. I have checked it as carefully as I can, but I am still learning this, so something here is probably wrong or incomplete somewhere. Please let me know if you catch a mistake.
A note on these pages. The medical history here is history and documented research, not instructions for using any of these plants yourself. Several are dangerous if handled or prepared incorrectly. Do not treat this site as a substitute for a doctor, a pharmacist, or someone who actually knows what they are doing.
Browse the collection
Select a plant from the list to see its photos, where I found it, and what I learned about it.
A photo is only the first step.
A good photo can show you a plant's shape, color, and texture, but not what is happening inside it. The compounds that make a plant medicinal, or dangerous, are invisible in a picture. Finding out what they are means looking past the photo and into the research.
That gap is what keeps this project interesting to me. A plant I already had on file could turn out to have a completely different story once I actually read about it, the way an ordinary willow tree turned out to be connected to aspirin.
This chemistry was not made for us.
Many of the compounds that make these plants medicinal did not evolve for humans at all. Salicin in willow bark and taxine in Pacific yew likely started as defenses, chemicals that protect the plant from insects, fungi, or animals that would otherwise eat it. How much of a compound a plant produces can depend on the specific stress of its environment, including the soil it grows in.
That is part of why habitat matters here. A plant growing in degraded or unstable ground is not just harder to find. It may not be making the same chemistry at all. Across Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, erosion, development, and fragmented forest are steadily changing the ground these plants depend on.
This catalog keeps growing.
I still cannot identify most of what I walk past. I just try to keep noticing things, like the yew getting by on very little sunlight, or the devil's club that clearly does not want to be touched, and looking them up when I get home.
This page grows the same way my camera roll does. If you have a better photo of something here, a correction, or a plant you think belongs in this catalog, I would like to hear about it.
Add to the catalog
A plant, a correction, or a better photo. Send a field note below.
Explore responsibly
Stay on marked trails. Leave what you find for the next hiker. Do not gather anything you do not already know how to identify and prepare safely.
Support protection
Consider supporting your regional land trust, watershed council, or native plant society. This is slope-scale work that no single plant, or one student's catalog, can do alone.