N icolette Perry is a pharmacognosist — a scholar of the medicines that plants make — whose work on sage and Alzheimer's disease, in collaboration with the neuroscience group at Newcastle University, helped bring a long-standing herbal claim under the discipline of controlled clinical investigation. The research opened a wider line of enquiry into plants for memory and cognition that has shaped much of her career since.
She is Director of Dilston Physic Garden in Northumberland — the working medicinal garden her mother Elaine Perry founded as an extension of that Newcastle research — and runs its programmes on integrative medicine and the place of plants as adjuncts to mainstream therapies. Public talks, courses and walks turn the garden's beds into a teaching room on what is known, and how rigorously, about the chemistry of medicinal plants.
With Elaine Perry she co-authored Botanical Brain Balms, a guide to fifty-six plants — sage, rosemary, lemon balm, ginkgo and the rest — chosen for what controlled studies have shown them to do for mood, memory and the ageing brain.
