Long before medicinal remedies were sold in pharmacies and grocery stores, healing knowledge in south Louisiana was passed down through spoken language, handwritten notes and the memories of locals.
Today, much of that knowledge is being preserved behind an Acadian cottage through a living collection of native medicinal plants known as the Healer’s Garden.
The garden surrounds a historic 1850 Acadian home at that once served as a schoolhouse on the Mouton Plantation.
Visitors can walk among nearly 50 native and historically documented medicinal plants labeled in English, French and Latin. They can find familiar plants such as peppermint and elderberry alongside lesser-known remedies like lizard's tail, once used for teething pain, and wormseed, which was used to treat intestinal parasites.
The collection reflects healing traditions practiced for generations in Acadiana's Cajun, Creole, African American and Native American communities.
“This is knowledge that has been around for centuries,” said cultural anthropologist C. Ray Brassieur, who helped launch the project in 2010. “So I figured, why keep it away from people?”
The story of the Healer’s Garden began in 2010, when Brassieur, a former professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and president of the Vermilionville Living History Museum Foundation Board, presented his vision for a medicinal garden at Vermilionville to members of the Lafayette Master Gardeners Association.
The concept grew out of Brassieur’s ethnobotanical research, rooted in a 1933 Ĵý linguistic thesis that recorded more than 500 first-person medicinal remedies from Creole French speakers in Bayou Teche communities between Breaux Bridge and St. Martinville.
“The thesis was loaded with the most authentic and rich folk knowledge,” Brassieur said. “I saw it as a resource that could be used in a museum context to teach about traditional folk healing.”
Inside the garden, visitors can find familiar herbs such as spearmint, peppermint and horse mint, which were historically used for fevers, digestion, headaches and colds, along with elderberry, lemon balm and ground cherry. Other plants that were less recognizable but used in local folk medicine traditions included: lizard’s tail for colic and teething pain, wormseed for intestinal parasites and manglier, scientifically known as Baccharis halimifolia, a bitter-tasting tea once believed to cure nearly everything.
Brassieur said the garden was intentionally designed not just as a display, but as a way for people to physically reconnect with the landscape and learn about history.
“We do a lot of education,” said MaryAnn Armbruster, an advanced master gardener and chair of the medicinal demonstration garden committee through the Lafayette Parish Master Gardeners Association. “We tell people about the house, the plants, what they were used for and how they were prepared.”
Armbruster made sure to note that the project was never intended to commercialize folk medicine, but rather preserve and share traditional knowledge before it disappears, which is why plants and remedies at the Healer’s Garden are not sold commercially on-site.
That approach contrasts with earlier eras, when traditional plant knowledge was often extracted, repackaged and turned into products for broader commercial or pharmaceutical use.
Over time, many traditional practices also became stigmatized as modern pharmaceutical medicine grew more dominant.
“Science came along and tried to reject traditional knowledge,” Brassieur said. “People became less willing to share it because they were criticized for believing in it.”
He adds that one of his biggest concerns is that younger generations may lose opportunities to learn directly from elders who still carry traditional knowledge.
“We spend too much time on devices and not enough time with nature,” Brassieur said. “Sometimes we don’t even realize how important what our ancestors know is.”
Today, the Healer’s Garden remains open to visitors with the purchase of a ticket.
“It’s important to maintain the knowledge,” Brassieur said. “If something happened tomorrow and people no longer had easy access to medicine, this is the kind of knowledge communities once depended on.”
During Créole Culture Day on Sunday at Vermilionville, the garden will be open to the public through tours and educational programming.