The Glasgow Guardian talks with the owner of Woodland Herbs, Glasgow’s own complementary health shop.
There is a shop on Woodlands Road, vivid green and oddly elusive. It has been there over twenty years, yet in writing this piece I’ve mentioned its name to friends and have been greeted with the same face of thoughtful hesitance. For a moment they’ll try to conjure up an image of the shopfront they so often walk past but for some reason have never stopped to look at, before replying no… I don’t think I know it. I confess to being guilty previously, of looking curiously at the bright exterior and sunny yellow lettering that reads Woodland Herbs as I passed by the shopfront, but never looking inside.
Twenty four years ago, Graham Swanson and Dr. Anna Hill set up a shop on Woodlands Road. A dispensary and healthcare clinic, Woodland Herbs is the result of their long and sustained interest in herbal medicine.
“A complementary healthcare clinic” is how Graham describes their business, on a rainy afternoon before the start of term – a description which turns out to be highly intentional. “There’s a phrase people say, complementary and alternative medicine – alternative medicine would normally mean an alternative to mainstream Western medicine. Complementary is working alongside, or people having the choice to use both.” Their intention, he is clear, is to help people to optimise their health, but not to encourage a separation between their approach and mainstream medicine.
Graham’s co-owner and life-partner Anna’s background in herbal medicine is a far cry from his own as a chemical engineer, working in a factory in the defence industry. The diversity of their team’s backgrounds is testament to the ‘broad church’ mentality of the business. The intention was never to centre around a particular specialism, but to house a variety of holistic practises and approaches. As Graham lists their services: acupuncture, various massage treatments, reflexology, nutritional and herbal advice, it occurs to me that Woodland Herbs is a culmination of all the alternative approaches, the weird and wonderful things people try when their health becomes a vulnerable and precious thing, with no clear path forward.
On how they compare to more conventional medical businesses such as pharmacies, Graham says it’s “definitely a less mainstream and much more niche business – mainly because of public awareness, public choice. I think the same business in Edinburgh or London would probably have a higher proportion of the general public willing to use it”. He tells me repeat business is what makes up the majority of their income, saying candidly that money is a concern. Woodlands Road, the street lined with churches on one side and pubs on the other, is simply “not a shopping street. It doesn’t have the foot-fall of being on Byres Road, or in Shawlands.”
“There are companies in London that will sell more to one customer than we sell in a week. That’s the gritty reality. Our customers – and who we wish to be our customers – are completely different to a natural healthcare store in a random suburb of London. And disposable income is part of it.” He’s attached to the local area, he says. Born in Glasgow, he’s lived in the city all his life, and today lives a mere “ couple of miles” from the shop.
Do you think it attracts a certain type of person? I ask. “No” he says slowly, considering. “A proportion of the Glasgow residents will never come to something like this. I think it’s tradition, it’s maybe economics. It’s really hard to describe, it’s different to other cities.”
His talk of the difficulties unique to Glasgow, and the probable success a move to somewhere more cosmopolitan would bring, beg the question: why stay here?
Graham explains that it’s not about success. “If you start something like this, it’s hard to think of growth as the principal outcome. Someone who starts a business in complementary health isn’t necessarily the same person who starts a business with financial success being the principal outcome.”
So what is their principal outcome? He talks of everyone involved in the business – the practitioners, clients, customers – and says quite simply their job “is helping to look after people.” Of course, not everyone will want to be looked after by them. Some won’t trust their expertise to be genuine, just as some of their customers don’t trust GPs. “You can’t be all things to all people”, he allows.
“There are people that come to us that, when we suggest ‘check this with your doctor’, they’ll say ‘I don’t do that’ and that’s their choice. But that’s not our perspective.” he says.
One of the problems which exacerbates the distrust people can feel is the lack of regulation. Regulation of herbal practitioners has been on the government agenda since 2011, when Andrew Landsey, the then Secretary of State for Health, announced plans to tighten regulations which would have introduced a compulsory state register of herbal practitioners. However these plans were dropped in 2015.
“It’s hard for a GP to say to their client ‘go see a herbalist’ because the GP remains accountable.” Especially frustrating is the reasoning for plans for tighter regulations being abandoned – the degree of risk in herbalism was not deemed high enough for the practice to be regulated.
As we talk, it becomes clear how strongly Graham feels about the need for increased regulations. He feels the need even more, in the context of the current Government’s approach to health. “We’re now trying to spend all our money converting the NHS to help people to not carry illnesses later on into adulthood. You have access to people who are better positioned [for prevention] and you’ve chosen to make that hard on the grounds that you don’t do enough harm. Rather than saying ‘we could be proactive, legislate this and create an opportunity’.” In his view, his and the current government’s goals are the same: “what we are now talking about is trying to help people take better control of their health.”
I asked Graham if he would like to see more conversation between conventional medics and herbal practitioners. He says there are “already pilots all over Britain – there are herbalists who have got both medical degrees and herbal degrees. There are places where GP’s practises have pulled in herbalists to be part of the team. It’s happening on a small scale in lots of places.” He admits that involving herbal specialists can put undue pressure on doctors, but “sometimes it’s what’s best for the patient.”
Whilst he does advocate for stricter regulations, Graham also tells me there’s a certain beauty in the instinctiveness of holistic treatments. “The reality is, for a lot of these things anyone can do it. People can be intuitive, you do it yourself – if you’ve got an ache or a pain and you rub and it gets better you’re clearly a good massage therapist. Dogs instinctively know which plant they should go and eat when they’re unwell. I think it’s actually quite nice that someone can read up, find out and choose to do what they want.”
Different treatments, or ingredients, go through phases of popularity, he says. “There’s always something that’s in the public consciousness that grows and then sinks. Maybe we’re not financially astute enough to jump on these trends” I mention Rosemary oil, and the fame it seems to be enjoying as a hair growth ingredient, and he nods familiarly. “We have a simple scalp oil that has rosemary oil that we’ve had for fifteen years. And I acknowledge that someone somewhere has done a much better job of selling their product and making rosemary oil suddenly trendy. And they’ll be in the Bahamas while I’m in deepest darkest Scotland instead.” He laughs. “I don’t begrudge anyone. It’s just… funny.”
In all the years they’ve been open, Woodland Herbs has remained “remarkably similar. We’re a little better at most things, we’re a little bigger.” he says breezily. There are no grand plans for expansion, no business empires in the pipeline – they are very happy to remain a small-scale, but steady presence in the area. Graham had said what they wanted most was to look after people, but perhaps to keep looking after people, for as long as they can, is more accurate.
The Glasgow Guardian would like to thank Graham Swanson. This interview was edited for concision.
