Blooming healthy

Anyone can keep their plants and garden in tip-top health with homeopathy, says homeopath Camilla Sherr

- Connie Woolston

Homeopathy can bring amazing results not just for humans and animals but for plants too. When my mother’s ornamental apple tree became infested with ermine moth, my husband, Jeremy, a homeopath like me, prescribed the remedy Lac Caninum (Lac-C) for the tree, based on its symptoms. Caterpillars had appeared in clumps and secreted a sticky white weblike substance over the tree’s branches.

Four days after my mother tried the remedy, there was not one caterpillar left on the tree. When the apples next came into season, for the first time, they were sweet and juicy. It turns out it wasn’t an ornamental apple tree after all; it had just been underperforming.

Agrihomeopathy, or agro-homeopathy as some call it, is the use of homeopathy to treat soil and plants. It’s a nontoxic way to overcome pests, disease and environmental stresses like drought, frost and heat, and it promotes healthy soil, seedling growth, flowering and fruiting.

An intriguing Brazilian study shows the efficacy of the homeopathic principle of “like cures like” on poisoned seeds. In Brazil, there’s a problem with high levels of aluminum in the soil, which is known to impair a plant’s ability to absorb water and nutrients. The study’s goal was to see how homeopathic preparations (Alumina and Calcarea Carbonica) affected seeds that were exposed to toxic levels of aluminum.

All of the test samples containing homeopathic preparations outperformed the control group, but seeds treated with the homeopathic potency of Alumina stood out most. Compared to the control sample, they showed about 20 times the root growth.