The Heart behind Sussex Herbal

I am a Master Medicinal Herbalist and an Iridologist. I am also the creator of the Turton Method™.

I am Sarah Turton — a clinically trained herbalist working at the intersection of traditional plant medicine, constitutional assessment, and terrain-based care.

Sussex Herbal is one of three practices I run alongside Oxford Herbal and The Chelsea Herbalist. Each is rooted in the same framework, the same standard of care, and the same conviction: that the body has an innate capacity for coherence, and that medicine works best when it supports that capacity rather than overrides it.

Training and Qualifications

I hold a Licentiate in Master Herbalism from the Irish School of Herbal Medicine — now Core College Dublin — one of the most rigorous herbal medicine training programmes in these islands. The course spans four years and includes over 650 hours of supervised clinical practice before qualification. It is the standard required for membership of the Association of Master Herbalists, of which I am a full member.

I am also a qualified Iridologist, trained alongside my herbal studies, and I sit on the AMH education panel and contribute to the AMH journal. Teaching and developing the profession matters to me as much as clinical practice.

Before I became a herbalist, I spent fourteen years as a medical secretary at Oxford University Hospitals Trust, working across ENT, plastic surgery, and histopathology. That background gave me a fluency in conventional medical language and diagnostic thinking that shapes the way I read cases, communicate with GPs, and understand where herbal medicine sits in relation to — and in collaboration with — orthodox care.

I have been in clinical practice for six years. The Turton Method™ is the framework that has emerged from that practice — a structured, terrain-based approach to clinical reasoning that I use in every consultation across all three of my clinics.

The Turton Method™

The Turton Method is not a set of protocols. It is a way of reading a person — their constitution, their history, their nervous system state, their emotional terrain — and building a treatment plan that addresses the pattern beneath the symptoms, not just the symptoms themselves.

It moves through four stages of clinical assessment: observation, pattern recognition, iridological confirmation, and terrain synthesis. Treatment then follows a specific sequence — the Order of Coherence — that ensures the body is supported in the right way, at the right depth, at the right time.

You can read more about the Turton Method on its dedicated page.

My Approach

I trained at the Irish School of Herbal Medicine (now Core College Dublin), qualifying as a Master Medicinal Herbalist and Iridologist after four years of study. I have been in clinical practice for six years across three clinics — Oxford Herbal, Sussex Herbal, and The Chelsea Herbalist — and hold membership of the Association of Master Herbalists, on whose education panel and journal team I sit. The Turton Method™ is the clinical framework that governs all of my work.

I work with people over time — usually six months as a minimum, often longer. This is not because herbal medicine is slow. It is because terrain does not shift quickly, and the kind of change that lasts is the kind the body has been genuinely supported to make.

I keep formulas simple. I sequence treatment carefully. I take the emotional terrain as seriously as the physical one, because in clinical practice the two are never separate. And I use iridology as a constitutional map — not to diagnose disease, but to reveal the patterns of vitality, depletion, and inherited tendency that sit beneath whatever has brought someone to my door.

Most people who come to me have already tried a great deal. They have had the blood tests, tried the elimination diets, been told their results are normal. They are not imagining their symptoms. They have simply not yet had someone look at the whole picture.

That is the work I do.

Why Sussex

The Sussex landscape is not incidental to this practice. It is part of it.

The chalk hills of the South Downs, the coastal winds, the hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) hedgerows, the juniper (Juniperus communis) and sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) of the coastal margins, the mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) of the field edges — these are not backdrop. They are medicine. They shape the nervous system and emotional terrain of anyone who spends time in them, and they inform the way I think about plant intelligence and seasonal care.

Sussex Herbal grew from my relationship with this landscape and with Sacred Earth in Horam, East Sussex — a place of deep significance to my practice and teaching. The South Downs ask us to slow down, to notice, and to listen. That is exactly the quality of attention that good herbal medicine requires.

The Heart Behind the Practice

My journey into herbal medicine began with my sister Alexandra.

When she became very unwell, I stepped into consultations on her behalf — carrying her story when she could not carry it herself. We tried many healing paths. Some helped a little. Some not at all. But it was the herbs that made the greatest difference.

There was no cure left to find, and we both knew it. But the plants gave her something more precious than a cure: quality of life. Herbal medicine allowed her to be present with her daughters, to share laughter and love, to remain herself right up until the end. I watched that happen. It changed everything about the way I understand what medicine is for.

In the years that followed, I realised I too needed healing. Nature became my guide. Walking under trees, sitting by rivers, learning the language of plants — this was what restored me. The plants taught me that healing is not about quick fixes or dramatic interventions. It is about being held, nourished, and gently returned to your own direction.

This is why I became a herbalist. When I sit with a client, I bring the same quality of attention I once brought to Alexandra — the same willingness to hold someone's story carefully, and the same trust in what plants can do when they are given the right conditions and enough time.

Sussex Herbal is born from that story. It is a place where people, plants, and landscape come together, and where healing is allowed to unfold at its own pace.

Who I Work With

People come to Sussex Herbal when they are ready for a different kind of conversation about their health. They may be navigating chronic symptoms, burnout, hormonal transition, digestive complexity, skin conditions, fatigue, or inflammatory patterns that have not responded to standard approaches. Often they carry more than one of these, woven together in a picture that has never quite been seen whole.

My work is gentle but not superficial. It is structured but not rigid. It asks something of the people I work with — a willingness to look at the whole picture, to be patient with the pace of genuine change, and to trust that the body's own direction of healing is worth following.

If that sounds like the kind of support you are looking for, I would be glad to hear from you.

Begin with a conversation

The first step is a free fifteen-minute call. No obligation, no pressure — just a conversation to see whether this is the right kind of support for where you are.

Book through the contact page.