The areas surrounding Fes are incredibly fertile and varied, with the Rif mountains to the north, the Atlas to the East and South and the coast to the west. Many locations are well-known for particular herbs, and the abundance of the land of the region was one of the driving forces behind the flourishing of the herbal medicine tradition in the city. Whilst a few plants were carried all the way from India and China, the vast majority of the plants used today in Fessi medicine are from its own surrounding hills.
The town of Sefrou is half an hour’s drive from Fes in the direction of the Middle Atlas mountains. As is the case in all Moroccan towns, the urban sprawl of the town is ever increasingly encroaching upon its beautiful hillsides, but still there remain some really beautiful corners of quiet, where the beat of your own footsteps is still the only thing competing with the trill of birdsong. Even just on one side of the town, the landscape is phenomenal. From orange desert hills to flowing waterfalls and pine forests, it’s only made better by the occasional wild tortoise having an early afternoon nap.
We went up with Brahim, a local friend who knows and loves these hills. Effortlessly leading us over not-quite-bridges and down scrubby hills, the only thing that stopped him was the occasional greeting from an elderly neighbour. Knowing I’m a herbalist, he often stopped to contemplate a particular plant, telling me, we use this for such-and-such a purpose, I’ll find out it’s name for you… He was particularly helpful for me and a herbalist friend in the summer when we did a similar walk as we gathered material for a collaborative piece of work - in fact he probably knew more than us about the local plants at that point!
Whilst in the summer we were surrounded by fields of wild mint, the theme of this week was orange marigolds. I’d never seen so many wild marigolds, and I decided they were so much better than our cultivated ones, with their delicate heads and petite stems, they cling to hillsides and meadows, creating a blanket of dewy amber, a days-long sunset underfoot. We also saw the beginnings of the carob pods growing that usually fall in the late summer and into the winter, and of course, stoic wild olive trees abound.
Next time we’ll go to Bouleman or Taounate to discover pennyroyal and wormwood later on in the spring, but until then… some marigolds for you all.
