Dr Anne Stobart

Anne Stobart is an experienced medical herbalist and researcher into herbal history and medicinal agroforestry. She has advised on the design of healing gardens and permaculture projects. During her career in adult, further and higher education she gained a postgraduate degree in Women’s Studies at the University of Exeter, beginning a persisting interest in the history of medicine and women healers. She is trained as a consultant medical herbalist with expertise in relevant clinical sciences and materia medica. In 2000, Anne joined Middlesex University to teach on, and subsequently manage, the honours degree programme for professional clinical practitioners of herbal medicine. Her doctoral thesis formed the basis of Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England which was published in 2016. Anne was a lead founder in the establishment of the Herbal History Research Network which has promoted scholarly activity and links between herbal practitioners and historians of medicine. She jointly edited the publication Critical Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicine: From Classical Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (2014) which brings together a wide range of herbal history research articles (and is now available as open access). She is a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Herbal Medicine. In 2025, Anne received the Lesley Matthew's medal from the British Society for the History of Pharmacy, its highest honour, for original and scholarly work in the wide-ranging history of British pharmacy.

After leaving her Middlesex University post in London in 2010, Anne focused on the Holt Wood Herbs project in Devon, redeveloping a redundant conifer plantation as a woodland source of medicinal plants. Through this project she sought to develop sustainable ways of cultivating and using medicinal trees and shrubs, drawing on past practices and promoting new and regenerative approaches using permaculture design principles. A publication arising from this project is fully referenced and is The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook. Subsequently she has established the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust website to encourage further education and research into designs supporting biodiversity and resilience of medicinal plant supplies. Anne has also published research articles on historical recipes and the history of herbal medicine, and has a continuing interest in research into agroforestry and permaculture related to herbal medicine.