Status of medicinal and aromatic plants in - Inia

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WORKING GROUP ON MEDICINAL AND AROMATIC PLANTS: FIRST MEETING
Medicinal and aromatic plant production in the United Kingdom
Rosemary Cole
National Herb Centre (NHC), Banbury, United Kingdom
Natural solutions are increasingly being sought to agrochemical, pharmaceutical and food
issues and the market for herb products is growing rapidly, putting an additional strain on
resources as many herb species are wild harvested. A report by Lange (1998) claimed that
70-90% of herbal products imported into Germany are wild harvested. Current production of
herbs in the UK occupies a relatively small area (ca. 4000 ha), mostly of culinary herbs. Herb
companies still import large quanitites of herbs which could be grown and there is
considerable potential for expansion to provide industrial raw materials. In order to realize this
potential and thus meet the UK government's policy aim of encouraging the development of
crops for industrial applications, a number of projects have been initiated. But evidence of
the biological activity of these materials, the feasibility and economics of UK production of
these crops needs to be obtained.
A number of factors have been shown to influence the yield and composition of essential
oils and bioactives from herb crops. These include genetics (origin, variation),
morphogenesis (leaf position and age, harvest, flowering), environment (temperature, day
length and light intensity) and finally agricultural practices (nutrition, irrigation,
propagation, harvesting and extraction). Selection of plant material and the optimization of
agricultural practices is vital for the production of high quality herbs, essential oils and
extracts. The need to know how the crop has been produced (traceability of raw materials) and
concern over the quality of imports (pesticides, heavy metals) suggests there is scope to supply
extracted natural products from herbs grown in the UK to provide high quality raw materials
for industry. There is potential to develop the UK herb industry, which encompasses a number
of small- and medium-sized companies, if they meet the stringent specifications, supply chain
and quality requirements. It is possible to capitalize on this opportunity with a better
knowledge of cultivar selection, how herbs can best be grown under UK conditions and by
developing new techniques which may lead to safer and more efficient extraction of natural
products.
Below are three projects in which the National Herb Centre is involved.
The Rapfi project (Rosemary antioxidants for the pharmaceutical and food industries) is part of
the Competitive Industrial Materials from Non Food Crops (CIMNFC) programme and is a
collaboration between the National Herb Centre (NHC), Department of Biology at the
University of Reading, Department of Sonochemistry at the University of Coventry,
J.K. Kings of Coggeshall (Seedsmen), Advanced Phytonics (Extraction), Langford Electronics
(Ultrasonic equipment) and Checkmate (Audit trail). The project objectives are to select
rosemary accessions for high antioxidant activity, enhance antioxidant activity through the
use of elicitors, produce a predictive model relating antioxidant activity to UV radiation, to
develop an affordable extraction process and produce an audit trail for the whole production
process.
Accessions of Rosmarinus officinalis were collected from throughout Europe. In total
80 accessions have been trialed and analyzed at the National Herb Centre. Results have
shown that antioxidant potential as measured by the free radical scavenging activity and
chain propagation correlated with carnosic acid (r=0.82 and 0.53 respectively). Rosemary
antioxidants also reduced production of "off flavours" such as hexanal. Rosemary accessions
were therefore selected for antioxidant activity by screening for carnosic acid concentration.
Field trials (30 accessions and 6 replicates) had been planted September 1999 in three