Let the dandelions grow

The green growing world is both medicine cabinet and grocery store, and it’s all around us. A lot of people spend good money every year to rid their perfect lawns of a weed—the dandelion—that could otherwise provide them with vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D and vitamin B complex, plus zinc, iron and potassium. Dandelion is also recommended as a liver tonic or a mild laxative, and dandelions have a long history of being used for their diuretic properties, to help counter all of the salt that had to be used in preserving meats before refrigeration existed.

The dandelion doesn’t quite have “a million and one uses,” but dandelion—roots, leaves, and flowers—is a most versatile plant, and it can be wild harvested. It grows, well, like a weed, so it doesn’t appear to be in any danger right now of being picked to extinction, much to the dismay of those who desire a dandelion-free green lawn.

From dandelion wine to the distinct aroma of ramps, a knife under the bed to cut a pregnant woman’s pain to sassafras tea—the origins of Appalachian herbal healing are in the melding of disparate cultures. Several hundred years ago, European settlers came to the mountains bringing their plant-lore, and plants, with them. In fact, dandelions—pernicious weed to some, delicious food to others—were brought to our shores on purpose.

{module Share this!|none}When those settlers arrived in the Appalachians, they found that the indigenous peoples had their own traditions, like sassafras tea as a spring tonic. It’s estimated that the Cherokee, for example, have identified around 600 medicinal plants, around 250 or so which have crossed into general knowledge. Those add to the 350 plants species like dandelions and plantain—also known as “Englishman’s foot” (because it grows everywhere that Englishmen have colonized)—that the Europeans brought with them.

It’s probably safe to say that as long as mankind has been eating plants, there have been herb doctors. Hippocrates (Greece, 460 BC – 370 BC) said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” but it’s something that could well have been said by Ila Hatter as she waxes eloquent about the internal spring cleaning provided by that pungent member of the leek family, ramps.

Hatter is a longtime Appalachian resident. She grew up learning natural remedies from her parents, and today, “The Lady of the Forest,” as she’s known, is passing that knowledge to others. She’s an instructor for the Smoky Mountain Field School at the University of Tennessee, a guest instructor for the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, and at the John C. Campbell Folk School, among others.

One might also know her as a granny woman. In years past, that title was synonymous with “midwife” but now has a broader meaning and refers to an older woman in the community who is skilled with herbal remedies. Hatter says that women have always preferred a woman to help with childbirth (unless in cases of a difficult delivery), and thus it was almost exclusively women who were the midwives. Granny women, men and women both can be herb doctors.

In hard economic times like these, Hatter sees an uptick in the number of students who are interested in her classes. And lately, the students are younger, too. They’re not only interested in learning about wild edible plants, they also want to know about the poultices and extracts that their grandparents would make and give them. So knowledge is being preserved both by people who are choosing to be frugal, as well as by people who have a growing interest in familial folklore.

As a skilled forager and wildcrafter, Hatter is a font of knowledge about local plants and the folklore surrounding them. She illuminates the tradition of eating “a mess o’ ramps” every spring: ramps are one of the first fresh greens to poke up through the late snows, and after a winter of eating mostly dried meats and vegetables, people would gladly harvest and cook fresh ramps. They tasted better than the alternative spring tonic, which was sulfur in molasses. Ramps are part of the allium family, like garlic, and herbalists say that the allium family is good for colds and congestion, as well as lowering blood pressure; garlic and ramps are often referred to as “plant penicillin.” While good to eat, ramps do leave behind a potent aroma, and stories abound of school children who reeked of ramps being sent home. It’s even said that some of the mountain ramp festivals got their start because the communities figured that it was best to have everyone eating their spring ramps and reeking all together. Otherwise, “You’ll reek of leeks for a week,” and you won’t be able to go out in public.

In England, a similar plant is called a rampion; when English settlers came to the Appalachians, they shortened the name, thus on our side of the Atlantic, we have “ramps” and not “rampions.” Ramps are also known as wild garlic, and one of our most famous US cities is named for them. The Native American word shikaakwa (from the Miami-Illinois tribes), means “place where wild garlic grows.” We know it as Chicago.

Much as it might be tempting to think of ramps as a common weed, they’re actually in danger of being over-harvested, thanks in part to the many ramp festivals that have appeared over the past decades. “If you take 100 percent of the patch of ramps, it takes 100 years for the patch to grow back to its original size,” Hatter said. Yes, they’re slow growers. It used to be legal to harvest ramps from the national forests, but people were pulling up whole patches. The good news for ramps fans is that the flavor is in the leaves, too. The leaves, instead of the bulbs, can be used fresh, or they can be dried and used as seasoning. That way, the bulbs stay in the ground, which helps the plants to come back year after year.

 A few years ago, galax was almost harvested to extinction for another culinary purpose. It had become fashionable for gourmet chefs in the northeastern U.S. to use it because it stays fresh and green for so long after it’s picked. They wanted it to use in sushi, in canapé trays, and more. Its evergreen properties also make it a favorite in floral arrangements. Two counties in NC were nearly stripped bare of galax by migrant workers who heard about the good money they could get for it, Hatter said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that 99 percent of the galax harvested in the U.S. comes out of the N.C. mountains. The Forest Service notes that ninety percent of galax harvesters are now migrant workers, and an experienced harvester can pull approximately 5,000 leaves a day. While not officially listed as endangered, there are some minimal restrictions in place; it can’t be collected from May 1-June 15, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Meanwhile, the Forest Service and the National Park Service are doing research now to determine sustainable harvesting levels of galax. Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation employees and State Park rangers joined local and federal authorities in cracking down on galax poaching this December. Poaching activity on Grandfather Mountain and on the Blue Ridge Parkway spikes in early winter as cold temperatures turn the galax leaves a crimson red and the market for the ornemental leaves booms with the holiday season. Workers sprayed a large portion of the galax population with non-harmful, orange arborist paint, so that leaves are no longer valuable. The area will be monitored very closely, warning signs have been posted and a bill has been introduced in the North Carolina state legislature to increase the penalty for individuals caught illegally harvesting the plant.

CoreyPine Shane is another practicing herbalist in the N.C. mountains; he is the director of the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine and is a Holistic Clinical Herbalist. He says that when he first got involved in herbal healing in the late ‘80s, it seemed that Western herbalism was very symptom oriented, simply replacing drugs with herbs: for this disease, take this herb instead of that drug. “I felt like there was more to medicine than this, so I searched and found Chinese medicine and integrated that medical philosophy with the use of local plants,” Shane said. Of these local plants, he too worries that ginseng will become extinct in the wild in our lifetime, due to overharvesting. Logging, deforestation, industrial society, and overpopulation are putting a greater strain on our resources than wild harvesting is, but it’s still crucial for people to harvest sustainably—ethical wildcrafters take only what they need. Hatter says that ginseng (or ‘sang for short) also is endangered due to the high prices it can fetch from the overseas market—$200-300 per pound of dried root, according to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer services. It’s illegal to collect wild ginseng from April 1 to September 1, but some ignore the law and try to harvest and sell it whenever they need the money. Around 75 percent of all medicinal plants that grow in the U.S. can be found in the Appalachian mountains.

“Even plants like black cohosh, which is abundant in many places, could become threatened as we ship thousands of tons a year to Europe for herbal products there,” Shane said. “People all over the world use the plants that grow around here for medicine.”

Medicinal herbs are may seem a mysterious lot. One should never assume that a plant’s name has a direct relation to what it’s good for. “The National Park caught four Laotians with a huge quantity of what turned out to be rattlesnake plantain,” Hatter said. “Though they said it was for ‘seasoning food,’ I told the law enforcement ranger that it had no such use and for whatever reason they wanted it, someone had paid them to collect it for sale. It was never determined who paid them or exactly what it to be used for. But a couple of years later I learned from a wild orchid expert—rattlesnake plantain is actually an orchid with folklore that says it is good for snakebite—that Laotians are snake charmers! They must have believed that this was a magic “cure” from the Great Smoky Mountains.”

Don’t try to mend a broken bone with boneset; you’ll be disappointed. This member of the daisy family gets its name because it was used to treat “break-bone fever,” so named for the bone and joint pain it causes. Appalachian residents might also recognize boneset by its other common name, Indian sage, and while it has plenty of medicinal uses—treating fevers, coughs and colds, for example—setting broken bones isn’t one of them. Boneset is one of the herbs that CoreyPine uses to treat flus with muscle aches, while pointing out that a holistic herbalist treats the entire person, not just the particular symptom.

Shrub yellowroot, while not a “weed,” is a common ground cover and landscaping plant, but it’s unlikely that most landscapers are familiar with its medicinal properties. It’s native to the Blue Ridge mountains and has antibiotic properties, plus is recommended for illnesses of the stomach, kidneys, bladder, and liver. One may have it growing in the yard right now, perhaps walking past it every day and not knowing it as anything other than that plant in the decorative lawn border.

In cultures like the Cherokee that don’t generally have a strong written language, there is a real danger of information loss. “In some Cherokee families that we know, the elders say ‘the young people don’t want to know the old ways,’ and so their knowledge will be lost,” Hatter said. “However, there are others who have asked me to tell them the plant names in English so that they can pass on what they learned as children, to their children.” One fortunate discovery was the 1950s manuscript of William Banks’ student thesis. Banks spent months with fourteen elders who still knew and used herbal medicine. By using the herbarium at the University of Tennessee he was able to positively identify species, and tried to give the name in Cherokee. There had been no study of Cherokee plant medicine since the famous ethnographer James Mooney’s in 1900. “The public copy of the manuscript disappeared from the University of Tennessee library,” Hatter said. “Then a copy of Plants of the Cherokee turned up in the attic of one of my students who had been a typist in the Botany Department in the ‘50s. We took it to the Great Smoky Mountains Association and they eagerly published it. It became a popular book for a second and third generation of Cherokee who now did want to know ‘what grandpa/grandma knew’.”

CoreyPine is afraid that too much lore has already been lost. “Too often I meet people who tell me about their aunt or grandmother who used to give them herbs when they were young, and now that generation has passed on,” he says. “I do think there is more openness to herbal medicine in the Appalachians because we have a recent memory of that tradition.”

One of the newer waves of immigrants to our shores is coming up from the south, from the countries in Central and South America, and they are slowly infusing Appalachian culture with their native herbal traditions.

Hatter’s first mother-in-law was Cuban, and the two women nearly came to blows over the traditional American Thanksgiving meal. The mother-in-law had requested a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, including stuffing, and also offered to go out and do the shopping, if only Hatter would provide a shopping list. She did, and she added sage to the list because one doesn’t make stuffing without sage. The mother-in-law was confused, then angry, then flat-out refused to purchase sage. For her part, Hatter was adamant that she wasn’t making stuffing without putting sage in it. Finally, the husband had to intervene to clear up the disagreement. In Cuban culture, sage isn’t food; it’s medicine. Specifically, it’s headache medicine. The leaves are either steeped as a tea and the person with the headache drinks sage tea, or the leaves are made into a poultice which is applied to the forehead. Hatter’s mother-in-law didn’t realize that sage was also a spice to cook with, and Hatter didn’t realize that sage was an herbal remedy for headaches.

Herbal healing also is familial heritage, as information is transmitted from one generation to the next, wrapped in stories of Great Aunt Martha’s famous onion plasters, or in Hatter’s case, of a great-great-grandfather who not only famously said, “Remember the Alamo,” but also, “I think the chickens got there first.”

When there were no commercially-available deodorants or anti-perspirants, young women would roll, mostly naked, in beds of mint leaves to cover up the smell of sweat. Hatter’s recalls a story about her great-grandfather Billingsley who was at a large community gathering in Tennessee—a common means back then as a way for young people to meet each other and often a picnic or barbecue during the day, then a break, with dancing in the evening. At such gatherings, young women would discreetly head for the mint patch for a refresher once it got dark out. As Hatter tells it, her great-grandfather Billingsley was dancing with the girl he was courting and the young lady asked if he noticed that she’d been in the mint. He said that he did notice. Then he added, slyly, “But I think the chickens got there first…”

One doesn’t have to have any background in herbs, or gardening, or an interest in folk medicine, in order to start effectively making use of plants. First consider allowing the dandelions to spread and grow, and—with the help of a guide who can differentiate between edible and poisonous species—explore the world of flavors from the wild, like spice bush and elderberry, that can’t be bought in a store.

Hatter suggests that beginners head to their local bookstore or library and check out Peterson’s Field Guides, The Reader’s Digest Magic and Medicine of Plants (the full-color pictures of the herbs make identification a bit easier), and for making remedies, see Penelope Ody’s The Complete Medicinal Herbal. Hatter also has videos on her website, www.wildcrafting.org, most notably “Wild Edibles & Medicinals of Southern Appalachia.”

Don’t neglect one’s own elders, either. At the next family gathering, make a note to ask family members if anyone remembers using plant remedies. If not, ask parents’ or grandparents’ friends—find the folks in one’s community who do remember some herb-lore, and make the effort to talk with them. Either write down your conversations or record them. There are several native plant societies across the region; take a class, or go on a nature walk. Learn about the plants growing in your own back yard.

Shane thanks Asheville’s herbal schools for bringing a lot of herbalists to the area. “Find one and have them take you for a walk in the woods or around your house—the healing plants are really everywhere, not just deep in the woods,” he said. Several schools also offer either stand-alone day classes or programs to begin learning.

Learning about the world of edibles and medicinals is a way to appreciate the wild on a more intimate level and to share that knowledge across the generations so that it is not lost forever. “If you know the name of something, it’s a friend,” Hatter said. “We only conserve what we love, and we love what we know. Plus, we have a responsibility to show the next generation that they are part of the world around them.”

Resources

• Ila Hatter: www.wildcrafting.com

• CoreyPine Shane, Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine: blueridgeschool.org

• Ramp festivals in N.C.: kingofstink.com/NC.html

• N.C. Department of Agriculture website on growing and harvesting ginseng: ncagr.gov/plantindustry/plant/plantconserve/sangno.htm

Recommended reading

• Cavendar, Anthony. Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2003.

• Crellin, John K. and Jane Philpott, Trying to Give Ease: Tommie Bass and the Story of Herbal Medicine. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997.