What ails you? This garden in Kensington mixes a traditional Puerto Rican alcoholado cure

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Among old rowhomes, new construction, vacant lots and industrial sites of the part of Kensington near Norris Square are six little slices of Puerto Rico. Those in the know can come to the gardens to get alcoholado, a traditional folk medicine of various herbs steeped in rubbing alcohol.

Operated by the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, each slice a theme: Las Parcelas, evoking Puerto Rico’s traditional jibaro farmers; El Batey, reflecting the indigenous Taíno foodways; Villa Africána Colobó, modeled on the island’s African diaspora; Jardín de Paz, or “garden of peace”; Raíces, geared to help children connect with their Puerto Rican ancestry; and the serene Butterfly Garden.

Iris Brown is one of a group of women, Grupo Motivos, who founded this network of community gardens four decades ago. She says people come to her with ear aches, stomach pain, muscle pain, skin irritations and more and ask for tinctures.

“Technically, I don’t have any knowledge — I didn’t study this — but we didn’t go to the doctor growing up in Puerto Rico. My grandmother was one of these women that knew what to do,” Brown said. “In poor neighborhoods there are a lot of women and men that know what to do.”

The herb garden at Villa Africána Colobó includes herbs you can’t otherwise find in Philadelphia, or at least not easily. Oregano brujo, or Cuban oregano, is a much larger version of the familiar oregano you see packaged in grocery stores. Its broad leaves are thick and crisp, they seem succulent.

“We call it brujo, which means witch,” Brown said. “This is big because witches made it grow.”

Nearby, more witchcraft. Hoja de Bruja, or Kalanchoe pinnata, is also known as cathedral bells or the love bush. Brown said if you heat its leaves over a stove you can squeeze its green excretion directly into your ear, relieving an earache.

All parts of the castor bean plant, from which castor oil is derived, are poisonous in their raw forms. The leaf stems are hollow. Brown breaks them into small straws and strings them together as a necklace.

“When you have pain in your shoulders, you keep it on for, I don’t know, two hours or so,” she said. “That will help you.”

The folk remedies of the Kensington garden make an appearance downtown in an art exhibition by Pepón Osorio at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. In his “Convalescence” installation, dense with objects reflecting the health care experiences of people of color, are dozens of vintage bottles arranged on their floor. They represent alcoholado, an alternative to institutional health care practices.

Osorio included his own personal bottle alcoholado that he has kept for years to treat minor ailments.

“Our grandmothers’ recipes and voices have been taken over by doctors,” said Osorio, who based “Convalescence” in part on his own recent cancer treatment. “The way that I remember preventing myself from going to a doctor was my grandmother. She’ll come and it’s, like, ‘You don’t need to go there. Just take this.’ You’ll take that and then heal overnight. Somehow, some way, that power has been taken away from them. Now we go to doctors and we forget that we have our healers in our home.”

“Obviously not for everything, things are getting more complicated,” he said. “But for prevention.”

Brown can customize alcoholado, often in reused salad dressing bottles, to address specific ailments, but most mixtures are based on essential plants — like rue, which is believed to fend off everything from rheumatism to insects to, in Sephardic Jewish tradition, ward off an evil eye. She also adds the leaves of the malagueta, a large tree native to Puerto Rico that cannot grow in Philadelphia.

“Without this you cannot make alcoholado,” she said while crumbling a dried malagueta leaf in her hand. “I have a cousin. She works in San Juan and it happens that there is a tree right there where she works. So, it’s a phone call away. She sends it through the mail.”

Alcoholado might have appeared in your abuela’s medicine cabinet next to Vicks VapoRub, another cure-all in the Puerto Rican folk tradition.

“It’s a joke about how we use Vicks for everything,” Brown said. “We do use it for practically everything. It’s part of our culture. You just don’t know how many jokes they have about Puerto Ricans using Vicks.”

Little blue jars of VapoRub are based on its namesake the Vicks plant, or succulent coleus, which Brown also grows in the garden.

Cesali Morales, the Neighborhood Project’s development director, said these kinds of home remedies, handed down generationally, are getting lost.

“Not that long ago my grandmother passed and I went down to Florida to help my family clean her house. One of the first things I found was her alcoholado in her bathroom,” she said. “I just remember it being such a central part of my childhood.”

Morales took her grandmother’s little perfume bottle filled with alcoholado and brought it back to Philadelphia. She now administers it to her own daughter.

“It stays in my daughter’s room. Now when she’s sick, she asks for it,” she said. “It feels like this recovered tradition, this recovered way of connecting to my family that I had lost.”

Brown said many neighbors in Kensington are removed from their Puerto Rican families and at risk of losing their heritage. Giving away alcoholado from the garden is one way to stay connected to that community.

“Just to come and to see each other to greet each other. ‘How is your family? How have you been?’ Ask me about my children. To have conversations,” Brown said. “If they tell me that they have pain, I say, ‘Well, would you like some herbs?’ The beauty is they bring me cuttings of herbs that I don’t have. They bring me seeds from Puerto Rico that I don’t have. Then we have more to share.”