Azir: Rosemary in North African Medicine, Memory, and the Women Who Harvest It

Ancestral Wisdom · Health & Wellness · Sacred Plants & Spiritual Wellness

A Plant With Many Names

Across the Maghreb, rosemary rarely goes by “rosemary.” A study of plant names in Morocco’s central Middle Atlas, where Amazigh (Berber) and Arabic dialects live side by side, recorded at least eight vernacular names for Rosmarinus officinalis: yazir or azir, klil, iklil al-jabal, aklel, ozbi, tamezzerya, barkkela, and hachicht lerneb. The researchers, Mariame Najem and colleagues at Moulay Ismail University, noted that rosemary is one of the few medicinal plants whose names are not shared with any other species, a detail that matters in a region where look-alike names can lead a harvester to the wrong, and sometimes toxic, plant.

The list itself is a record of shared life. The Middle Atlas is home largely to Berber communities of Amazigh culture, and Najem’s team interviewed healers, herbalists, and druggists in Amazigh or Arabic dialects, depending on the language each person spoke. A single shrub answering to names from more than one tongue is a small archive in itself: evidence of neighbors who have gathered on the same slopes, traded the same remedies, and taught their children the same plant for a very long time.

Names matter because they show who did the knowing. Notice how that Middle Atlas record was made: not by searching old manuscripts, but by sitting with living healers and listening in their own languages. That framing matters for everything that follows. What we are looking at is a living pharmacopoeia, held in memory and practice, not a folk curiosity waiting for a laboratory to validate it.

The Mountain Harvest Is Women’s Work

Behind every bottle of rosemary oil there is a hillside, and behind every hillside there is a set of hands. The global trade tends to speak of rosemary as a commodity measured in tons and carnosic-acid percentages. The people who gather it know it as a season, a slope, a sack carried home on the back.

The people who actually cut the plant are very often women. In December 2024, AFP reporter Aymen Jamli visited Tbainia, a village near Ain Draham in Tunisia’s northwestern highlands, where a women’s collective called Al Baraka (“Blessing”) has harvested wild herbs for two decades. The report cites official figures that Tunisia produces around 10,000 metric tons of aromatic and medicinal herbs a year, with rosemary making up more than 40 percent of the country’s essential-oil exports, mainly to France and the United States. AFP reports that women make up around 70 percent of the agricultural workforce and are the main breadwinners for many Tbainia households.

In Morocco, too, much of the harvest is wild. Mehdi Benchekroun, a Moroccan grower and exporter interviewed by the trade outlet HortiDaily in 2024, described a production model that relies largely on the adjudication of wild-grown parcels in forests and mountains, with harvest rights granted by the authorities. He estimated wild rosemary at around one million hectares against roughly 10,000 hectares under cultivation, and said his own farm relies on a local women’s workforce. His is an industry voice with a commercial interest, so the figures are best read as estimates, but the basic picture is clear: an international trade built on wild plants and rural hands.

What the Drought Is Taking From the Hillside

The same AFP report documents what a changing climate means on the ground. Tunisia was in its sixth year of drought, and the Tbainia harvesters said the plants now yield less oil. Al Baraka’s leader, Mabrouka Athimni, told AFP: “We’re earning half, sometimes just a third, of what we used to.” Another harvester, Mongia Soudani, described filling a single sack where she once filled three or four, and wildfires in 2023 burned roughly 1,120 hectares near the village.

In Morocco, the HortiDaily interview described drought delaying the allocation of harvest parcels in 2024, with some regions possibly receiving no allocations at all so the wild stands could regenerate. That is sound stewardship, and it is also a lost season of income for the families who depend on the harvest. When the global market wants more rosemary oil and the mountain has less to give, the burden falls first on the people with the least room to absorb it.

Azir in the Household Pharmacy

Ethnobotanical surveys give us a way to hear this knowledge without inventing voices for it. In 2016, researchers led by Mohamed Reda Kachmar interviewed 200 people across the province of Taza in northeastern Morocco, including herbalists and traditional healers. Azir was cited by 60 percent of informants, making it one of the three most frequently used plants in the region, behind only oregano (Origanum compactum) and pennyroyal. People used the leaves and flowers as decoctions and infusions, taken by mouth or used in massage, mainly for stomach and digestive complaints and, less often, for heart conditions.

That picture of rosemary in North African medicine, as a warming tea for the gut and a rubbing herb for the body, is worth pausing on. It describes a plant used in ordinary homes for ordinary troubles, prepared with water and heat rather than distilled into a concentrate. The Taza survey is one province, not the whole region, and it records use, not proof that a remedy works. What it does preserve is method: which part of the plant, which preparation, and which complaint, as reported by the people who actually use it.

Honoring rosemary in North African medicine means honoring that method, too. Najem’s Middle Atlas research makes a point that should humble anyone who buys herbs online: similar vernacular names can lead to confusion between species at the moment of harvest, which is why experienced local knowledge of the living plant has always been a safety system, not just tradition.

From the Cooking Pot to the Laboratory

Before it is medicine, rosemary is food, and it remains one of the most familiar culinary herbs in the world. Laboratory work helps explain why the plant draws scientific interest. A recent dermatology review by Aditya K. Gupta and colleagues summarizes that rosemary contains antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial compounds, and that one laboratory study found a rosemary constituent, 12-methoxycarnosic acid, acting on an enzyme involved in pattern hair loss.

Findings like these do not prove that any particular household remedy works in the body. They are a reminder, though, that kitchen habits and laboratory results sometimes point in the same direction, even when the laboratory arrives centuries after the cook.

Regulators are more cautious than the wellness market. The European Medicines Agency’s Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products, which reviewed rosemary oil again in 2024, recognizes it only as a traditional herbal medicinal product for minor muscular and joint pain and minor circulatory complaints, applied to the skin, and states that this status rests exclusively on long-standing use rather than on clinical trials. That distinction is worth holding onto as we turn to the claims now circulating online.

The Diaspora Kitchen

For Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian families in Paris, Montreal, Brooklyn, or the Bronx, rosemary is one of the easiest ancestral plants to find. It sits in every grocery store, sold in plastic clamshells beside the parsley. That convenience can hide the story. The sprig that goes into a Sunday roast or a pot of winter tea may have been cut by a woman in the Rif or the Tunisian northwest, distilled in a field still, and shipped through three middlemen before it reached the shelf.

Diaspora cooking is where many people first meet their grandmothers’ pharmacy: the decoction for a heavy stomach, the handful thrown over meat, the smell of a kitchen that means home. Keeping those habits alive is its own kind of medicine. So is asking where the plant came from, who harvested it, and whether they were paid fairly for the harvest of their mountain.

What the Science Says About Memory

Rosemary’s long association with memory has attracted real research, most famously from psychologist Mark Moss and colleagues at Northumbria University in England. In a 2012 study, Moss and Lorraine Oliver seated 20 healthy young volunteers in a cubicle scented with rosemary essential oil for four to ten minutes, then gave them mental arithmetic and visual-processing tasks and took a blood sample. Higher blood levels of 1,8-cineole, a major aroma compound in rosemary, were associated with faster and more accurate performance on most tasks.

The finding is intriguing, and it suggests the aroma compounds are absorbed into the bloodstream rather than acting only through smell. But its limits are real. Twenty participants is a small sample, and every participant was exposed to rosemary; the study measured a correlation between blood levels and scores, not a comparison against people who smelled nothing. The authors themselves urged caution with small samples. It is a promising thread, not proof that sniffing rosemary will sharpen anyone’s memory in daily life.

The Hair-Growth Claim, Read Carefully

The claim that rosemary oil regrows hair rests largely on one trial. In 2015, Yunes Panahi and colleagues in Iran randomly assigned 100 people with androgenetic alopecia (pattern hair loss) to rosemary oil or 2 percent minoxidil for six months. Neither group showed a significant change at three months; both showed increased hair counts at six months, with no significant difference between them. Scalp itching was more common with minoxidil.

That result has been repeated endlessly online as “rosemary works as well as minoxidil.” A review published in Skin Appendage Disorders by dermatologist Aditya K. Gupta and colleagues shows why that reading goes too far. Rosemary oil rested on a single randomized trial, in which hair counts rose from about 123 to 130 over six months, and the authors noted that the size and location of the scalp area being counted were never reported. The comparison was against minoxidil, not a placebo, and failing to find a difference between two treatments is not the same as proving they are equal. The reviewers concluded that none of the non-prescription products they examined had been shown to be more effective than topical minoxidil or oral finasteride, that long-term safety data beyond a year are missing, and that larger, high-quality trials are needed. They also noted that contact dermatitis, an allergic skin reaction, may uncommonly occur. The fair conclusion is that rosemary oil is an interesting candidate that deserves a better trial, not a proven substitute for established treatment.

Holding Rosemary Safely

As a food and a cup of tea, rosemary has been part of daily life around the Mediterranean for generations. Concentrated forms are different. The European Medicines Agency monograph states that because safety during pregnancy and lactation has not been established, medicinal use of rosemary oil in those periods is not recommended. It also advises against use in children and adolescents under 18, says the oil should not be applied to broken or irritated skin or near the eyes and mucous membranes, and lists allergic contact dermatitis and asthma among reported reactions, with frequency unknown. The agency’s recommended strength for skin preparations is 6 to 10 percent, a reminder that even traditional topical use means a diluted oil, not a neat one.

The practical line is simple: cooking with rosemary and drinking a gentle infusion are very different from swallowing essential oil or applying it undiluted. People who are pregnant or breastfeeding, living with asthma or a chronic condition, or taking regular medication should talk with a clinician before using rosemary medicinally.

Questions People Ask About Rosemary

Who Keeps the Knowledge Alive

The story of rosemary in North African medicine is often told backward, starting with the laboratory and ending with a nod to “folk tradition.” Told the right way around, it begins with Amazigh and Maghrebi communities who named the plant, learned its uses over many generations, and taught one another which hillside, which season, and which dose. Science is now catching up to some of what they knew, describing the antioxidant chemistry, testing the memory link, and still falling short on the hair claims.

The harder question is economic. When the value of a plant rises in global markets while the incomes of the women who cut it fall, something in the chain is broken. Honoring ancestral plant knowledge has to include the living people who hold it: fair prices, secure access to land, protection of wild stands, and a real voice in how their plants are sold. That principle guides Ubuntu Village’s own work alongside communities in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, where plant knowledge and community livelihoods are bound together in the same way.

If rosemary grows in your family’s memory, as azir, klil, or a Sunday sprig, share this story with someone who carries it too.

Sources

• Bensaid, Y. (2024). Moroccan rosemary supply hit by drought. HortiDaily.
• European Medicines Agency, Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products (2024). European Union herbal monograph on Rosmarinus officinalis L., aetheroleum (Final, Revision 1). EMA/HMPC/513893/2021.
• Gupta, A. K., Wang, H., Wang, T., & Talukder, M. (2025). Do Non-Prescription Products Help in Managing Androgenic Alopecia? Skin Appendage Disorders, 11(3), 270–281.
• Jamli, A. / AFP (2024). Tunisia women herb harvesters struggle with drought and heat. Al-Monitor.
• Kachmar, M. R., et al. (2021). Traditional Knowledge of Medicinal Plants Used in the Northeastern Part of Morocco. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
• Moss, M., & Oliver, L. (2012). Plasma 1,8-cineole correlates with cognitive performance following exposure to rosemary essential oil aroma. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology.
• Najem, M., Nassiri, L., & Ibijbijen, J. (2021). Vernacular names of plants between diversity and potential risks of confusion: Case of toxic plants used in medication in the central Middle Atlas, Morocco. Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmacognosy Research.
• Panahi, Y., Taghizadeh, M., Marzony, E. T., & Sahebkar, A. (2015). Rosemary oil vs minoxidil 2% for the treatment of androgenetic alopecia: a randomized comparative trial. SKINmed (PubMed).

Related Reading

• Our Grandmothers’ Pharmacy: Herbal Medicine as Ancestral Knowledge
• The Medicine Our Ancestors Already Knew: 10 Healing Spices in the Ancestral Kitchen
• What Our Grandmothers Knew: African Herbalism, Thyme, and the Sacred Science of Plant Medicine
• Before Adaptogens Had a Marketing Budget: The Ancestral Plants Wellness Culture Just Discovered

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