A French Herboristerie Where Healing Is Happening
The Body
A former nurse finds a new path healing with herbs as a way to honor the memory of her daughter.
Lola’s Gardens is a plot of land hidden behind a wall along a busy French highway. The gate is small and red, the sign inconspicuous. But on the two days a week it opens, customers queue outside this quaint herbalist shop, a rare and charming fixture in this town in northeast France.
Delphine Léonard, the woman running this herboristerie, began selling her own concoctions of hydrosols, oils, tincture, creams, soaps, and herbal tea after deciding to leave her 25-year career in nursing.
The shift was brutal and traumatic: Her teenaged daughter Lola, for whom she named her shop, had died in a car accident a few years earlier on the same highway where Delphine started cultivating her gardens.
I went to her shop looking for a hydrosol (floral water) to help my husband’s chronic insomnia. We’d seen Delphine selling her products in kiosks during the summer festivals in our small city, Charleville-Mézières.
At 52, Delphine is kicking off a new path in the health business that she intends to keep holistic in nature, not a common thing to do in a country so heavily dependent on pharmacies and a wide range of medicines linked to free healthcare by the French social security system.
The Disappointments of Western Medicine
Delphine spent years working as an emergency ward nurse and an operating room anesthetist at the city’s main hospital, where she saw patients being treated one organ at a time. If someone walked in complaining of a heart problem, only a cardiologist would treat them, even if other parts of the body might be contributing to the issue. Seldom, she said, would a doctor evaluate the entire nature of a patient—including their emotions, which might also be triggering their illness.
“We tend to neglect the globality of a human being,” she told me, remembering the dismal thoughts she had when she was working in the hospital, where most things were approached with calculated speed, rigid diagnosis, and impersonal treatment.
Then there were the side effects of prescribed medicines that might cure one problem but induce another. In the last two years of her nursing life, Delphine moved to a palliative care clinic to help those in pain, providing healing methods in sophrology (a combination of yoga, meditation, and neuroscience), hypnosis, reflexology, and acupuncture.
Her love of plants made her realize their powerful healing properties. The plant’s totum, the sum of its virtues, is “the magic that we don’t see,” she said. Together, the molecules of plants work wonders in the human body. “Their soul speaks to our soul.”
In due time, she began taking courses in sophrology and now teaches in conferences around the region.
A Healing Path Born of Grief
Delphine’s turning point was her daughter’s tragic death. She was frustrated by the injustice of not having been able to save her daughter when she had successfully helped to save others. In grief, she and her husband sold their home and bought the property that is dedicated to their only child’s memory: Lola’s Gardens, a place of healing not only for themselves but for others seeking natural means, one that deliberately veers away from standard modern medicine.
When her daughter died at the start of the pandemic in 2020, Delphine lost the appetite for life. She said ashwagandha herbs from India saved her, living up to their promise to reduce stress and anxiety. For the next two years, she took a night course in herbalism twice a week in Belgium, obtaining a diploma that prompted her to launch her shop.
She first experimented with soaps, then plunged into hydrosols made from plants distilled with steam; these became her bestselling products. By 2023, she had acquired three alembic copper stills heated with wood fires to make hydrosols. She now calls herself une paysanne herboriste, a peasant herbalist.
Delphine and her copper still
In Lola’s Gardens, Delphine Léonard’s favorite plant is mélisse, or lemon balm, used as the base component for many of her herbal products. It is said to be an antiviral that also reduces stress and depression and boosts memory enhancement. Lemon balm is not only in the hydrosols; it’s also in the soaps, tea infusions, and alcohol tincture. Recently, the herbal shop introduced its latest herbal products for women to treat perimenopause and to strengthen hair.
Not more than five people could fit into the shop’s tight space, but adjacent to it is a private room where Delphine conducts her sophrology and sound-healing sessions on a massage table. The window next to her desk offers a view of her immense gardens. In spring, she conducts workshops for those who want to see the magic of her plants.
In the summertime, she will make the festival rounds throughout this remote Les Ardennes region of France, where plants are everywhere and people are again discovering all the good those plants can bring to their lives.
by Criselda Yabes
