About Vervain
A small team,
a big mission
Our origin
Plants,
beehives
and knowledge.
The Vervain project began in January 2026 in Eastern Canada, led by a small team passionate about medicinal plants, beekeeping, food self-sufficiency, and the transmission of traditional knowledge. Around June of the same year, the app began taking shape on the App Store and Google Play.
Our belief is simple: some of the knowledge surrounding medicinal plants is being passed down less and less from one generation to the next.
For centuries, recognizing plants, knowing their traditional uses, or preparing an infusion, poultice, or salve formed part of a living heritage. Today, this knowledge is often scattered across specialized books, family traditions, folklore, and herbal practices.
With Vervain, we want to help preserve and share this heritage in a form adapted to our time.
A living approach
Learning
differently
Our goal is not simply to create an encyclopedia of medicinal plants.
We want to build a new way to learn herbalism, based on short lessons, quizzes, gradual discoveries, recipes, history, and folklore.
We draw inspiration from gamification principles used by apps such as Duolingo for languages and Brilliant for science. Research on gamified learning suggests that an interactive, progressive experience with regular feedback can support engagement and learning compared with an approach based only on reading and memorization.
Instead of trying to memorize dozens of plants at once, Vervain encourages people to learn a little each day, test their knowledge, and progress gradually.
- 01
Identify a plant
- 02
Discover its history
- 03
Understand an herbalism term
- 04
Learn a traditional preparation
- 05
Return to strengthen your knowledge
Botanical culture
Preserving the stories behind the plants
Herbalism is more than a list of properties.
Behind every plant are traditions, historical figures, popular practices, and sometimes centuries of folklore.
Vervain gives this cultural dimension an important place: understanding how people have used, cultivated, and told stories about plants over time, while distinguishing traditional uses from modern scientific knowledge.
Our mission is educational: to share botanical culture and inspire a new generation to reconnect with the plants around them.
Growing from here
Building something with roots
Today, Vervain is still a very small team.
The project was founded by Ulysse Borris, from the Montreal region, with a background in systems development and a passion for beekeeping.
But our ambition goes beyond creating an application.
As Vervain grows, we hope to create jobs and develop a team capable of bringing together knowledge from different parts of the world. Herbalism does not have a single tradition: it developed differently according to cultures, climates, and locally available plants.
We would like to collaborate with herbalists, botany enthusiasts, and specialists whose knowledge comes from traditions as varied as those of Latin America, particularly Mexico, Germany and Central Europe, the Nordic countries, East Asia, and many other regions.
Our ambition is for Vervain to gradually become a project where these traditions can meet, complement one another, and be shared respectfully, while creating professional opportunities for herbalists, creators, illustrators, and developers who want to build a livelihood from their passion.
Vervain is still at the beginning of its story.
Our goal is to gradually bring technology, botany, history, and traditions together in a tool that makes people want to learn — and that helps keep this knowledge alive.