How to Make Herbal Teas, Decoctions and Syrups: What Herbal Health Information Covers

Herbal Health Information (herbalhealthinformation.com) is a personal site by Linda Bostock, a qualified Medical Herbalist with twenty years of clinical practice, and it states that it will show you how to make herbal teas, decoctions and syrups. The site presents this as part of a broader project: recording herb walks and steadily adding herbal health information so visitors can build up knowledge of medicinal plants growing in the countryside. If you want a step-by-step recipe for each preparation, the site does not publish one in the material available here — what it gives you is the promise of that instruction, set alongside the author's own experience, views and plant knowledge rather than a definitive reference of facts and figures.

What the site actually offers

The homepage is explicit about its scope and its limits:

• It is not a definitive herbal medicine site. Linda writes that "there are plenty of those around if you want the facts and figures."
• What it offers instead is her own knowledge of plants, her views on herbal medicine, her experience, and her passion for healing with plant medicine.
• The stated plan is to record herb walks, weather permitting, and keep adding herbal health information so that readers slowly build up knowledge of medicinal plants in the countryside.
• Alongside that, the site says it will show you how to make herbal teas and decoctions and syrups.

So the preparation methods sit inside a wider, slower educational project rather than a standalone recipe library. Expect the content to be tied to plant identification and the author's clinical perspective.

Where the instruction comes from

The credibility behind the how-to content rests on the author's background rather than on cited sources:

• Linda Bostock describes herself as a fully qualified Medical Herbalist who has run busy healing clinics for the last twenty years.
• She studied Herbal Medicine at the School of Phytotherapy in Bodle Street Green, East Sussex, where students learned the medicinal values of different plants suitable for a variety of medical conditions.
• Notably, she says students had to teach themselves what the plants looked like in the wild, where they might be found, and how to identify them — a gap she and her husband filled through years of walking.

That last point matters if you intend to make your own preparations: the site's approach assumes you can identify a plant correctly before you use it, and it treats that skill as something you develop rather than something the site simply hands you.

What to look for on the site

The homepage lists the main sections you can browse:

If your goal is learning to make teas, decoctions and syrups, the Herb List and the herb walk material are the most relevant starting points, since the preparations are tied to specific plants.

Practical points before you start

A few things follow directly from what the site says:

• Identification comes first. The site's own account of herbal training stresses learning what plants look like in the wild and how to identify them. Making a preparation from a plant you cannot confidently identify is the obvious risk.
• Read the Safety Warning. The site maintains a dedicated safety page, which is the appropriate place to check before using any plant preparation.
• Treat it as one practitioner's perspective. Linda states plainly that the site reflects her knowledge, views and experience, not a definitive factual reference. Use it as a personal, experience-based guide rather than a clinical authority.
• Content is added over time. The site describes itself as a work in progress, with herb walks recorded "weather permitting," so the material you want may not all be published yet.

If you want to contact the author

The site lists a clinic presence in the Thames Valley area — patients can be seen in Reading during the week and in Eton on Saturdays — with a contact telephone number given on the homepage for discussing requirements and booking an appointment. The site also promotes Linda's ebook, How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse Virus, available via Amazon, described as 260 pages with numerous illustrations and priced at £4.99/$6.99. The homepage mentions a subscribe option but does not give pricing or login details for it.

For making herbal teas, decoctions and syrups specifically, the honest summary is this: the site commits to showing you how, grounds that instruction in a practising medical herbalist's experience and plant walks, and provides a Herb List, videos and a picture gallery to support it — but the available material does not yet lay out the individual recipes, so you should check the Herb List and herb walk sections for the preparations as they are added.