The Berber botany experts aren’t professionals: they’re students at this ground-breaking girls’ secondary school about 7km west of Tnine. Through their school science program, the girls compiled an encyclopaedia of indigenous herbs with University of Marrakesh ethnobotanists. Now they’re completing their second book on Berber oral histories of medical uses for mountain herbs.
‘Dar Taliba students come from remote High Atlas villages, and didn’t have the option of school before’, explains Rachida Mouch, advisor to the school’s botany club and director for the Association for Ourika Basin Well-being and Development, the local NGO running the school. ‘But there’s so much we can learn from these mountains. The closer you look at them, the more it broadens your horizons.’
Guests are greeted with refreshing tisanes of eight wild herbs successfully propagated on-site: verbena, mint, rosemary, marjoram, geranium, sage, thyme and absinthe. BBC’s Ground Forces helped the girls expand their school gardens in 2004, and visits to the thriving garden can be arranged with a few days’ notice and a sliding-scale donation of Dh250 to Dh500, which allows the school to provide breakfast or lunch to 84 students from impoverished backgrounds. Visiting is possible from 3pm to 5pm Monday to Thursday and Saturday.
