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The little girl, scrambling around in bushes, has grown up into a ‘wild Irish woman’, she jokes, turning her childhood escapism into a business, creating a range of skin products with magical healing properties, made from indigenous Irish flowers that have been celebrated for centuries in Gaelic folklore. From the glorious-sounding bog myrtle (Myrica gale), a wildflower found in the 10,000-year-old bogs of the west of Ireland, which has anti-ageing properties, to the regenerative powers of the delicate purple wild pansies (Viola tricolor) that grow in sandy cracks and crevices, as a trained herbal scientist, Ryan sees the transformative beauty in plants that look like weeds to the untrained eye.
I meet her in her brightly-lit lab in Cork, where the smell of botanicals hits you as soon as you step in: ‘I’m so used to it, I can’t smell them anymore,’ she laughs. She has huge, expressive hazel eyes
Ryan, 40, has long been a maker. From her childhood explorations in potions, to her love of cooking and even wine making, she started a whole home-spun production line when she had her first son, Feidhlim, now nine. ‘I had all the zeal of a first-time mother,’ she says, smiling. ‘I was really cautious about putting anything that wasn’t organic on his skin, so I’d make nappy rash creams, ointments, bath soap, cough syrup and laundry liquid at home, using herbs and plants.’
At the time she was also studying for a four year herbal medicine degree at the Cork Institute of Technology, having already studied organic horticulture, and working for a spell as an organic vegetable grower. ‘My favourite part of
It’s a seductive subject, deeply woven into Irish history and landscape, back to its myths and legends. The first herbalists practised among the Tuatha Dé Danann, the mythological ‘Tribe of the Gods’, and for centuries after, healers called the Liaig were revered members of tribal villages serving the chieftains. ‘To be a herbalist was an important position in Gaelic society and they would be given their own lands,’ Ryan explains. ‘But then we had colonialism and the Penal Laws, and after that herbalists were forbidden to practise in Ireland, so that knowledge went underground and was passed down through families for generations.’
There has, she says, been a new reverence in the old knowledge. ‘What I do is look back at traditional ingredients from Ireland, but then look to research
Ryan has something of a Liaig about her: remedies and cures spill out of her as she speaks, from ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolate) that can be wrapped over a wound as a rudimentary plaster, to the hawthorn (crataegus) tincture she made for her youngest son, Milo, now three, when he had to have heart surgery at three months old.
So, it was a natural step for her to set up her own product line in 2011, which she called Bia (the Irish word for food, because all her creams are made up of ingredients that are safe enough to eat). One of her first products was her ‘skin superfood’, which she developed by blending five herbs, including her beloved Viola tricolor and helichrysums, as a handcream to ease her own dermatitis that worsened after a heavy gardening session, but that others have used as a rich night cream, after sun or eczema remedy. It developed a loyal army of fans, including the American scientist and serial entrepreneur Dr Barbara Paldus, who discovered the brand at the airport while searching for something for her son, who is allergic to non-natural formulations. She was so impressed with the brand – and Ryan – that she wanted to buy the business and put it centre stage of her new venture, Codex Beauty, a collective of independent, natural and sustainable brands from around the world. She named Ryan master formulator for Bia, and managing director for Codex Beauty Ireland.
Paldus is the fairy godmother Ryan needed. ‘Because Barb is used to operating in Silicon Valley, there’s no such thing as “no”,’ Ryan grins. Paldus, who has a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering and has multiple research and academic awards as well as fi ling 36 patents for her various companies, has not only enabled Ryan to start
Codex launched in June with the tagline: ‘discovered in nature, perfected by science’. So, while Ryan had always wanted to send her products for clinical trials ‘to prove what I knew was true’, at upwards of €60,000, it was unaffordable. With the scientific backing of Codex, she has sent all Bia products off for tests, and says that the results have been ‘jaw dropping’. Her skin superfood complex, for example, found that after four days, 100 per cent of people had 52 per cent increased hydration levels in their skin.
It is the scientific proof she needed to back up her deeply held belief that while wonderful, exotic botanicals from distant shores might be the latest trend, actually, there is beauty and efficacy in the indigenous plants of Ireland. ‘Everybody knows the powers of arnica, but actually we can look closer to home: native plants like daisies have very similar properties, and they grow on the sides of the roads and in your gardens.’
To show off the beauty and efficacy of her natively sourced plants, Ryan takes me on a two-hour trip south to an organic farm set in the green hills of north Tipperary close to where she grew up. The air is heavy with imminent rain when we pull up to Shanbally Organic Farm, her largest supplier, and drive down the long single-track road through the estate that dates back to the 15th century. Across the 200-acre farm there are hay meadows, woodlands with sweet chestnuts and lime trees, long-established hedgerows filled with hawthorn, damson, slough and elder, and creeping dog roses and honeysuckles. But the star attraction is a beautiful, ancient walled garden where startlingly blue cornflowers and bright orange poppies nestle together, along with rows of rambling sweet peas and milk thistles. Ryan bends down to tenderly examine the baby elichrysums that will go into future batches of her superfood complex. There’s even beauty, when Ryan shows me, in a neat, orderly row of nettles. ‘I have nettles in my garden, too,’ Ryan says. ‘My mam can’t understand it, but weeds are just plants growing in a place you don’t want them to. There’s often a huge untapped power in them.’ Her sons have adopted her adoration: ‘The three-year-old is always bringing me in flowers
We wander past the dilapidated Georgian manor house, which is being lovingly restored and will be a centre of excellence and museum for herbal medicine, over to the farm’s dispensary, the only processing facility for herbal medicine tinctures in Ireland, where all the picked herbs and plants are transformed into hydrosols (flower water), essential oils or dried products, ready to be sent to Ryan, among others. Here to meet us is Ross Hennessy, a herbalist by trade who now runs the dispensary. Inside the converted outhouse it’s a surprise to see state-of-the-art gleaming copper vats, workers in hairnets and lab coats and giant industrial drums containing the hydrosols that need turning every day for two months. ‘It’s a long and slow process, but it’s the best way to do it,’ Hennessy explains, in his quiet, thoughtful way. Like Ryan, he is imbued with the knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants: as we pass shelves of tinctures, he explains their uses, from fireweed (Chamaenerion) that can be used to treat mild depression to Rhodiola rosea that is given to women after childbirth.
Inside the pressing room you appreciate the volumes of plants required for a jar of face cream: Ryan’s hero ingredient, bog myrtle, needs one tonne of flowers, harvested from three acres of bog, to make up …. 200ml of oil. ‘If you’re lucky,’ Hennessy grins. ‘Aye, but it’s so pure we don’t have to use that much,’ Ryan smiles back at him. She starts discussing her recent order for 270 kilos of linden blossom water from the farm’s tilia trees that will make up a new facial mist. You sense that Hennessy enjoys Ryan’s increasingly ‘mad requests’ for the weeds and wildflowers that no one else values. ‘Most people love the herbs like ginseng but forget about the stuff at the side of the road,’ he says. ‘But I think that together we can make the bog myrtle sexy again.’
Ryan’s own connection to nature permeates the whole business, from the way in which her ingredients are grown and harvested (she adheres to strict global certifications) to the packaging. Again, Paldus’s influence has been transformative: they have invested in innovative biopolyethylene packaging, made from sugar cane. ‘It has a carbon zero footprint,’ Ryan explains, ‘because as the sugar cane grows, it absorbs CO2 in the atmosphere.’
It may not be quite the way the ancients might have delivered their cures – patented medicines in hightech packages – but it’s all part of the next chapter in the history of herbalism. Ryan is on a mission to celebrate the plants that have been part of her country’s heritage for centuries and, for the first time, to send them out into a world that badly needs a cure.
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