Ella Vardeman is a graduate student in The New York Botanical Garden’s Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program.

The New York Botanical Garden’s Center for Plants, People, and Culture has a long-standing urban ethnobotany project that has collaborated with several Caribbean immigrant communities over the past two decades. Recently, we expanded our collaboration to work with New York City’s Haitian community, focusing on women’s health.

Urban ethnobotany is the study of how people use plants in cities, and New York City is the ideal place for this field of study. People from all over the world come to live here, bringing with them their traditions, their beliefs, familiar foods, and cultural traditions. They also bring their plants and inherent plant knowledge. For instance, walk down the streets in the area around the Botanical Garden, and you’ll pass by fruit and vegetable markets, botánicas selling medicinal plants and other cultural products, or even a community garden.

For our new research initiative involving the Haitian community, we interviewed 100 women born in Haiti and now living in New York City about their use of medicinal plants for women’s health. Significantly, nearly every participant (97 percent) reported using medicinal plants before they moved here from Haiti. That percentage dropped to 83 percent after they were living in New York—which was mainly due to short-term difficulties settling into a new locale before discovering where to source plants from back home. Haitian women reported using ti bonm (Mentha spicata) for everything from gynecological infections to a daily tea to improve their general reproductive health. Other plants that also have significance in Haitian cuisine, such as cloves or jiwòf (Syzygium aromaticum), were used to prevent infection.

Often, we assume the use of medicinal plants to be a holdover relic of an older generation. Likewise, we would expect older participants in our research project to know more about medicinal plants than younger participants. Regardless of age or time spent outside Haiti or living in the United States, however, all participants possessed the same level of plant knowledge, demonstrating the essential importance of medicinal plants to the Haitian community.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic are both located on the island of Hispaniola. Although they represent two different cultures and political histories, the two countries are united by the same flora across the island—a shared repository of plants that can be used as medicine. Interestingly, when compared to interviews conducted in 2006 with the Dominican community in New York City, there were apparent differences in how medicinal plants were used for women’s health in the Haitian community, mainly in the types of health conditions treated and the plant species used.

What united the two communities was their use of global food plants—species that have been introduced to Hispaniola—for women’s health. In cities like New York, food plants are more easily accessible in grocery stores, markets, and gardens where Haitians reported sourcing plants such as garlic and beets for women’s health. These results supported our previous findings with the Dominican community and highlighted the importance of “healthy” foods and teas for women’s health in the Haitian community.

The survey results, which were published earlier this year in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, are currently being converted into materials to be given back to the community as well as an educational module for health providers to tailor healthcare culturally to the Haitian community.

Urban ethnobotany projects such as ours are important because more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, according to the United Nations. The number of urban dwellers is expected to rise even more over the next several decades. Whether you live in a city or on a farm, plants might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about urban environments. But take a closer look, and you’ll see people’s relationship to plants everywhere amid the paved streets and soaring high-rises.

The article in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine is available here.