Our roots:

The Herbal Medicine Trust was incorporated as a CIO in 2022, the end of a long process to modernise the trust and make it future proof. Previously, the trust was known as the NIMH Education Fund which was established in the 1970s to create a school of herbal medicine.

In the early days, the trust founded the School of Herbal Medicine in Tunbridge Wells and bought clinic buildings in London and in Preston. Much change in the intervening years meant that the school closed as herbalists began to be trained in universities, and then change came again as those universities, realising the high costs of clinical training, began to close their courses. Facing an acute crisis in herbal medicine education, the trust founded Heartwood Education in 2017, now a thriving college offering online education with links to over 60 clinical training centres in the UK and abroad.

Most of the trust funding has come through legacies, including one particularly generous gift by Elizabeth Cracknell who left her home with the wish that it be used by the trust. The house itself was unsuitable for a college or healing centre, but this incredible gift was used as the seed that became Heartwood Education. Elizabeth Cracknell is remembered and honoured by an annual prize awarded by the trust for outstanding work in herbal medicine announced each year at the conference of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists.