Since time immemorial, plants have been of critical benefit to human existence. These range from food for energy, body-building, and health maintenance, as furniture sources, to medicine for managing diseases, including hypertension (Idu et al., 2014). Despite the enormous medicinal benefits of plants to man, the lack of adequate records and scientific bases associated with traditional medical practice has limited proper and efficient derivation and utilisation of these critical benefits. These challenges also negatively affect the development of herbal medicine. However, ethnomedicinal exploration has proven to be the most viable tool for identifying and establishing new medicinal plants and revisiting the previously identified medicinal plants for specific objectives (Idu et al., 2014).

Additionally, improper identification of plant samples and their phytoconstituents, be it phytochemicals or nutraceuticals, have also thrown enormous challenges in deriving deserved usefulness from plants as sources of medicine and disease-preventive agents. It is, however, imperative that proper and comprehensive physicochemical determination and quality control are conducted on a potential medicinal plant candidate to enable man to benefit effectively, safely, and adequately. Many pharmaceutical drugs used for disease-curing purposes today have compounds that are either partially or wholly synthesised from materials obtained from medicinal plants via revelation from ethnobotany or ethnomedicine (Oksman-Caldentey and Inze, 2004).

In many African societies, plant-based traditional medicine is the first point of call by patients (Opara and Osayi, 2016). African nations have been urged to coordinate, regulate, advance, and integrate traditional medicine into their healthcare system (WHO, 2008). For economic and cultural reasons, the plant is the primary focal source of cure in African traditional medicine (Diaz et al., 2013, Birhan et al., 2011). Some wild medicinal plants are also known to be curative against the various diseases of animals (Abebe, 2019, Sankoh, 2017). To date, there are limited data on the use of medicinal plants in most African nations (Jonathan et al., 2022).

Consequently, some plants in the North Central States of Nigeria have been explored for their ethnobotanical uses in nutritional and medicinal purposes, but several others currently in existence have not been explored. Against this background, this study was initiated to identify and document the medicinal plants used to manage hypertension otherwise commonly referred to as high blood pressure in Nigeria's North Central region. Hypertension is established when systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure, which in a normal adult human being is 120 and 80 mmHg, respectively, rise up to 140 and 90 mmHg, respectively, in a sustainable manner (WHO, 2008) (Fig. 1).