A new academic study, covered in detail by Botany One, has put a precise number on something the UK’s herbal medicine trade has long suspected: nobody really knows how sustainable its supply chain is. Researchers at the University of Leeds surveyed 298 plant species sold online to UK medical herbalists and found that 203 of them, more than two-thirds, have never been formally assessed for extinction risk by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The study, by Flowers, Lovett and Hassall, published in the journal Plants, People, Planet, looked at everything a UK herbalist might stock: dried roots, liquid extracts, teas and tinctures, drawn from three major supplier websites. Of the 95 species that had been properly evaluated, 13 fell into categories from Near Threatened to Critically Endangered. Only seven species in the entire list are protected under CITES, the international treaty that regulates trade in endangered wildlife, and just three of those overlap with the species already flagged as threatened.
A supply chain built on guesswork
Some of the plants on herbalists’ shelves are already known to be in trouble. Ginkgo biloba is listed as Endangered; Indian bdellium (Commiphora wightii), used in traditional resin remedies, is Critically Endangered; goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) is Vulnerable. Others, like Devil’s Claw and the pink trumpet tree, depend entirely on wild harvesting from overseas supply chains that are hard for a UK buyer to trace back to source.
That is the real finding of the study: it is not that herbal medicine is inherently unsustainable, it is that almost nobody – suppliers, practitioners or customers – currently has the information to tell safe plants from at-risk ones. Even common British plants on herbalists’ lists, such as dandelion and white deadnettle, sit in the same “unevaluated” bracket as genuinely rare imports, simply because nobody has carried out the assessment.
What it means for UK herbalist practices and their customers
For the UK’s herbalists, and the shoppers who rely on them, this is less a warning than a prompt. A herbalist who can say where a remedy’s ingredients came from, and whether a supplier uses cultivated stock rather than wild-harvested material, is giving a customer real information that most of the trade currently cannot offer. The researchers point to better assessment, clearer supply-chain transparency and wider use of certification schemes as the practical next steps, and that is already standard practice among the more established apothecaries and clinics.
Shoppers looking for a medical herbalist do not need to become conservation experts to act on this. Asking a practitioner where their stock comes from, and whether any rare or wild-harvested ingredients are involved, is a perfectly normal question, and a good herbalist, whether that is a long-established clinic in Westminster or an independent apothecary in Honiton, should be glad to answer it.
The bigger picture
The UK herbal medicine industry sits inside a much larger gap: of the roughly 42,000 medicinal plant species recorded by Kew’s Medicinal Plant Names Service, global analyses suggest only around a fifth have ever been evaluated for conservation status. The researchers’ conclusion is a practical one rather than an alarmist one: sustainability in herbal medicine cannot be taken for granted, and the fix is better data, not avoiding herbal remedies altogether.
For a trade built on plants, that is a reasonable standard to hold itself to, and increasingly part of what separates a well-run herbalist practice from the rest.
