What are premium herbs and how does wildcrafting work?

Pharmacy Garden uses herbs from Southeast Europe.

According to the latest estimates, the flora of Serbia alone contains 3272 species and 390 subspecies, making Serbia a country with very high floristic diversity and density per unit area, compared to other European countries.

Medicinal herbs from Southeast Europe are characterized by extremely high quality, i.e., a high content of active substances.

This is due to very favorable environmental conditions.

Precipitation, temperature, number of sunny days, humidity, and soil quality strongly influence the quality of the herbs.

Due to a low degree of cultivated land, especially the hard-to-reach hilly areas of the country (where most of the wild herb collection also takes place), soil, air, and water resources are not affected by pesticides, heavy metals, fertilizers, and other harmful synthetic substances.

Therefore, herbs from Serbia have a quality that cannot be compared to, for example, greenhouse-grown herbs found in the grocery store. Not only that, but since the herbs are hand-picked directly from nature, the climate footprint is also extremely small.

That is why we at Pharmacy Garden have focused on basing our products on herbs from this region.

How does wildcrafting work?

There are approximately 4,000 organized collectors (or rather collector families) in Serbia. The actual number of individual collectors is estimated to be about 12,000 people. In addition, there is also a great public interest in collecting wild herbs, similar to mushroom or blueberry picking in Sweden.

To protect the plants from overexploitation, some of them are under legal protection.

Serbia conducts habitat and landscape protection within the framework of 489 nature protection areas, including 5 national parks.

5.9% of Serbia's entire territory is protected area, with an increasing trend.