A few decades ago, when Daryl Patton left his  military career behind and began rearing sheep and goats, he had no idea the journey he was about to begin. Patton, once a hobbyist of sorts with an interest in the land, farming and nature, is now known as “The Southern Herbalist,” a jack of all trades regarding Alabama plants and wildlife and their use in alternative medicine.

In the early stages of his curiosity, some friends at Jacksonville State University who knew about Patton’s interest in the land and nature suggested that he seek out Tommie Bass, an herb doctor engaged in a practice that has become quite rare. “I went to his shack expecting to stay a few minutes and leave,” Patton says. “Instead, I stayed for hours and left with a burning passion for the plant world which has not let up after 30 years.”

Described by Patton as “one of the last mountain herb doctors left in this country,” Tommie Bass was well-regarded for his knowledge of nature and quickly became a mentor to Patton. “Tommie gathered herbs, roots, and bark in North Alabama for 81 years and was so respected for this that the Wall Street Journal put him on the front page in 1985. The University of North Carolina researched him for years. I spent 12 years in the woods with him learning the old ways of gathering and useing literally thousands of medicinal plants.”

Bass trained Patton to be a “true herbalist” and mountain man. “A true ‘herbalist’ is a person who has an intimate knowledge of plants and their medicinal uses,” Patton says. “There are many people in this country today who are herbal ‘pharmacists,’ but would not know Dandelion or many other plants if they were growing in front of them.”

Patton believes that when the knowledge of an herbalist is applied correctly, herbs can be used to heal illnesses, provide nourishment and aid in survival. “Plants will not only feed you, they will also make your fire, your tools …”

Today, Patton offers outdoor survival classes and operates two schools of herbal medicine, one located in-state and Coltsfoot College that offers long-distance learning via online courses. “The Southeastern Institute for Traditional Herbal Studies takes place one weekend a month on Lookout Mountain. I try and pass on a lot of the herbal knowledge from Tommie and the experience I have gained over the years in order to help them understand and make use of the myriad of plants found in this country, not just the South,” Patton says.

Patton has a deep respect for the abundance of natural resources found in Alabama as well as the herbalist tradition he is a part of. “In Alabama, we have over 3,000 species of flowering plants and this does not count trees, fungi etc.,” Patton says. “The South has over 6,000 species and this makes our region more diverse than the rest of the country. This in turn led to the development of a truly Southern herbal folklore tradition as the Whites, Slaves and Indians all merged their herbal traditions together into a single tradition in which the lines of all three were blurred and merged into Southern Herbal Medicine. No other region of the country can truly claim such a tradition.”

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