Isla Burgess 

LIZ BRESLIN 

An eminent medical herbalist who has made her home near Wanaka has finely tuned herself to the natural world, and is helping others to do the same.

Isla Burgess has long been searching to understand and move within the natural world as if we’d had no artificial Cartesian split between humans and everything else.

One of the focal points of her master’s degree in holistic science addressed the question: Can quantum physics provide an understanding of the tohunga’s world?

Four and a half years ago, Isla moved ‘back’ here, to the area where she feels connected. Though she grew up in Dunedin, it felt like coming home. As a child, she’d go on family holidays to Middlemarch and remembers the utter peace of sitting in a raincoat by the river in the rain. As the third of four children, peace wasn’t always an easy commodity.

Walking around town now, Isla notices plants and their connections in the same way other people might casually study shoes or haircuts. She explains, "I had a tutor who said ‘Every subject well studied creates a new organ of perception,’ so when you are finely tuning yourself to the natural world then you study the phenomena in a different way.”

Isla revels in 14 and a half hectares (35 acres) of land and she’s been busy planting natives and deciduous trees and creating herb, fruit and vegetable gardens over a whole hectare.

She’s a Fellow of the NZ Association of Medical Herbalists, teaches online courses and has, this week, brought out her second book, The Biophilic Garden, through her own publishing imprint, Viriditas Publishing. The cover shows the life cycle of a rose and the inside pages approach plantlife from the angles of thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting. It’s a Jungian thing.

Other than a bit of skiing at Treble Cone, Isla’s commitment to her passion is total and it’s been quite a journey from science teacher to an international speaker on the herbalist scene, with a focus on the area of women’s reproductive health.

At school, she says she was "not very good at being confined and prescribed from 8.30 to 4,” but found her own rhythms in running her own herbal medicine college, which she established in 1990 in Cambridge (the one in the North Island). She describes the time as "a decade of real excitement in the herbal medicine world.”

During that time, Isla was keen to be mentored by the best in "different ways of seeing the world and our relationship with that world”, and so, every week, she would call Tuhoi tohunga Hohepa Kereopa, and ask him to take her on. Every week, she recalls, "he would say ‘phone me next week’ and one day I phoned and he said ‘come tomorrow’ so I had to drop everything and go.”

That first time, "we went into the bush, he stripped the berries off a tute plant, which I knew was poisonous, looked me in the eves, said "hold out your hand,” squeezed the juice out and said "drink”. I realised it was a test of trust and I drank it. But I found out afterwards the juice is the only part of the plant that is not toxic.”

That was the start of a series of really challenging tests. Next year it took Isla only one phone call, and his influence is still huge in her life. "He’s not alive now but his presence is definitely in this book.”

Through her teaching and her books, Isla feels a "huge responsibility to educate people about how to use local plants to enhance their health and wellbeing.”

She’s blogging about the book launch, facilitated by "the wonderful people at Wanaka library”. Click MORE below for the blog, and to find out many more details about her work.

And as to the quantum question? Well, Isla says, she "can’t give a definitive yes/no answer to that, but can say that if one fully engages in that world an understanding of both is enhanced.”

PHOTO: Supplied