Grow Your Own Drugs

Did you know you can have a medicine cabinet in your garden? Botanist James Wong tells how to use plant-based remedies to cure everyday ailments from coughs to eczema.

On one bitterly cold day recently James Wong found himself walking home in a light coat. He's an optimist, he explains. But just to make sure he didn't get a cold, when he got home he made his granny's chicken soup, using echinacea root, goji berries and extreme quantities of ginger, chillies and garlic.

“Well, I didn't get a cold,” he says. “It's something I make all the time. In Asia you don't have a big thick dividing line between food and medicine. That soup would be eaten as dinner even if you weren't feeling under the weather.”

Wong's recipe for his Immune System Booster is in his book, Grow Your Own Drugs, a set of instructions for plant-based remedies and beauty products that accompanies the eponymous BBC Two series starting tonight. Read more