Name: Maud Grieve
Start: 2023-06-17T14:00:00+01:00
End: 2023-06-17T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Amersham Museum

All of the museum’s in-house exhibitions are FREE to visit after admission to the museum.

COME INTO THE GARDEN!

1 April to 29 October 2023

Enjoy our beautiful herb garden, including a new temporary display about Maud Grieve (1858-1941), local medicinal plant expert.

Born in London in 1858, Maud Grieve spent her early married life in India, before she moved to Chalfont St Peter in the late 1800s.

At the outbreak of World War One, she turned her beautiful garden into a herb farm to meet the urgent need for medicinal plants. People across the country were turning to local plant supplies as so many medicinal supplies had previously come from Germany.

Maud also helped to set up the National Herb Growing Association in 1914. In Chalfont St Peter, she established a training school first for women, and then ex-servicemen from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Belgium. She also supplied plants and seeds, writing pamphlets to explain how to grow them successfully.

Her book A Modern Herbal was published in 1931, bringing together her advice pamphlets. It is still considered relevant today, but all traces of her garden have gone. Find out more about the medicinal value of plants in Maud’s works throughout the garden.

Funded by the Chalks, Cherries and Chairs Landscape Partnership.

Image credit: RHS Lindley Library

Sickness and Health

February to July 2023

How are you feeling? From healing herbs and astrological almanacs, to medicine chests and COVID tests, our temporary exhibition explores medical history in Amersham’s past.

If you were sick or injured in past centuries, the options available were often very different from today. You might turn to friends or neighbours for advice or treatment, drawn from plants in the garden or supplies in the kitchen. If you could afford it, you might pay for a doctor to treat you. If you could manage it, you might go to the apothecary or pharmacy to buy a ready-made medicine to make you feel better. If you were extremely unwell or badly injured, you might have to go to the workhouse infirmary, pest house or hospital.

Haddions Pharmacy, Old Amersham — Haddon’s Pharmacy, Old Amersham

On show are fascinating objects from our collection including bottles and medicines from King’s and Haddon’s pharmacies, a medicine chest from the late 1800s and another issued during the Second World War, optometry instruments from Laurie Haddon’s optician business, a doctor’s bag, and more recent items reflecting the COVID pandemic. Find out about 17th century medical writer John Tanner, medicinal plant expert Maud Grieve (1858-1941), GP Dr Humphrey England and his wife nurse Polly England, and obstetrician Dr Beatrice Turner (1891-1964).