04/11/2026
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🌿 SPRING TONICS🥂 A Spirited History 🌿 🫖 🍸
"Traditionally, tonics were seen as medicinal substances taken to give a feeling of well-being or vigor. But anything invigorating physically, mentally, or morally could now be said to be a tonic. A kind greeting can be a tonic. So can nature, gardening, art, and music. All refresh the human spirit. Health. The word comes from the Old English for “whole,” as in the state of your whole being—mind, body, and spirit. The old herbalists used herbs to address the root causes of illness; their garden botanicals were a prescriptive and dietary means to balance the whole system and maintain good health. In contrast, much of the focus of modern Western medicine has been on suppressing symptoms, with pills. But household botanists understand that the foods we eat and the tonics we sip support our overall health and well-being, before we need a capsule. I do my best to stay well by finding ways to support my health from my garden. The tonic of fresh air and exercise, the tonic of working in my garden, the tonic I sip to refresh my spirits, the spring tonic that renews after a long winter, or the gin and tonic I sip on a sultry summer night.
Cultures with limited sources of fresh food in winter often have traditions regarding the restorative and curative powers of spring’s earliest plants. Spring tonics were seen as a means to restore vigor after a long winter’s diet of mostly preserved and less vital foods; they could be as simple as eating a particular dish of greens, sipping on an herbal tea, or partaking in a wide range of blended botanicals that were used to increase stamina, keep the body regular, or invigorate mind and body, as some use coffee or chocolate today.
As a gardener, my spirits soar when I harvest the first greens of spring. I know that I am imbibing all the vibrant life force and energy stored beneath the ground through winter, whether by adding chives to cheese or making a rhubarb cobbler or lovage soup. It’s wonderful to stir your senses with an early spring salad of violets, arugula, and sorrel cultivated in your own backyard.
First Nations and early settlers also delighted in eating the first “knots and buds” (tender leaves, buds, and flowers) of spring. Much as we do today, they found great satisfaction and rejuvenation consuming these vital outgrowths of warming earth and sun. They drank sassafras tea, ate beets and spinach to improve the blood, chewed on parsley for the vibrant green flavor that chlorophyll imparts. These settlers were firm believers in the tonifying effects of spring greens, which were said to stimulate digestion, cure scurvy, combat rheumatism, and ease constipation after a long cold winter of preserved foods and relative inactivity.
One beloved spring edible is the ramp (Allium tricoccum). First Nations and early settlers valued these ephemeral native leeks as both a spring tonic and a culinary onion. Like garlic, these members of the onion family are used to improve health, cleanse blood, and protect people from illness. They have scientifically proven antiseptic and expectorant properties that can assist with colds and virus. Research also shows that ramps supply vitamin C, minerals, and allicin, which has antimicrobial and antithrombotic (blood-thinning) properties— all attributes that make it an enviable tonic for early spring.
Because the earth needs the tonic of co-conspirators too, I have learned to cultivate both ramps and fiddleheads in the woods and gardens around my home, doing my part to strengthen, instead of deplete, wild populations. But if these native plants are scarce, my Italian grandmother’s simple dish of dandelion greens is a spring tonic fit for any table. They are known as an edible liver and kidney tonic, and there are always more than enough to go around.
Not all tonics, however, were homegrown or foraged; many were created as pharmaceuticals. These apothecary tonics and bitters, ubiquitous from Eurasia to the New World, reached their pinnacle in the 19th century, as people fell out of sync with the tonic of nature and found themselves working in cities and factories. They were intended to provide vigor for weary workers and aging bodies. Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis), and their Asian relatives were used as male tonics to increase libido. Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) and motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) were used as female tonics for women’s health; and nerve tonics made with nervine herbs (skullcap, chamomile, valerian root, hops, lemon balm, St. John’s wort) were tinctured and popularly prescribed to women with melancholic and choleric tendencies— typically depression or boldness, no doubt brought on by being an intelligent, spirited, or sexual woman in the buttoned-up Victorian era.
Their male counterparts, who were generally freer to carouse, often self-prescribed with alcohol. In the bars they frequented, a new generation of cocktails was made using bitters from mugwort, passionflower, wormwood, angostura bark, orange peel, and other botanicals—tonics intended to support liver and kidney functions that were undermined by the consumption of alcohol in the first place.
As the temperance movement suppressed public consumption, producers found legal loopholes in the historic method for tincturing herbs in alcohol to preserve them. Mass production, along with new means of advertising and delivery, helped a generation of Victorians to disguise booze as a botanical wonder drug. In the process, they profited from bottling swigable doses of alcohol-based tonics that could be purchased without stigma. Unfortunately, many of these patent medicines and cure-all tonics became vehicles for delivering addictive doses of alcohol and narcotics to unsuspecting consumers and families.
Meanwhile, overseas, tonics were taking another turn. Quinine powder prescribed to combat scurvy was so bitter that British officials stationed in India and other tropical outposts mixed the powder with soda and sugar. By 1858 the first commercial tonic water came to be a staple medicinal—with an alcohol chaser. That pairing was the gin and tonic. And for those drawn to the temperance movement, a new generation of syrupy tonics like sarsaparilla, root beer, and cola were designed to appeal to wholesome industrial workers while temporarily jacking them up on co***ne, o***m, or caffeine. Feckless producers were eventually reined in: the coke in Coke was removed, the lithium in 7-Up was struck down, and only the fizzy, sugary pablum remained. For better or worse, all these shady tonics helped usher in the age of modern medicine and medical reform.
Unfortunately for gardeners and domestic botanists, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, and for almost a century, herbs and herbalism were demeaned as the stuff of old wives’ tales—until herbs were finally analyzed scientifically for medicinal use. I could say I use caffeine like a tonic at times. Certainly, the early Coke ads promoted it that way. But mainly I see tonics as any refreshment from my garden or spice drawers that supports my well-being, whether that means breathing in the scent of a rose, sipping a cup of restorative ginger tea, or drinking beet kvass.
Any week, in every season, is improved by tonics. Friday night I was uplifted by some spruce beer and an herbal gruit at my local brewery. Next morning’s tonic evolved from a gift of frozen homemade wild grape juice: I brought the thawing juice to a high heat and turned it into an oxymel, simmering it down with cider vinegar from a neighbor’s orchard and local honey. Suddenly, in the middle of winter, I was sipping small doses of sweet, piquant, late summer from a spoon, nectar from the vine, and a tonic that tonified my gut; with the addition of vinegar, it acted like a roto-rooter for my arteries and provided me with a much-needed megadose of vitamin C. Saturday night’s tonic came in the form of a Sazerac (said to be the oldest cocktail in America) made with wormwood absinthe and Peychaud’s Bitters. Sunday was a good day for a dose of lemon balm in the teapot, and Monday called for ginseng to wake mind and body. Tuesday brought sunshine, a tonic all its own. Wednesday, it took a strong dose of coffee to bring me back into the world, and some kombucha, like a probiotic version of the grape oxymel, accompanied lunch. Thursday, I drank a Moxie with my sandwich to get through the afternoon. In New England, we still call soda tonic. Perhaps, as the old herbalists would say, it’s just in our blood.
*(From my book - https://www.amazon.com/Heirloom-Gardener-Traditional-Plants-Skills/dp/1604699930 Happy & Healthy Spring! The Heirloom Gardener - John Forti
