Category — Medicinal plants

For many of us, it’s not the seeds of morning glory that are most important, or their twining vines.

For most of us, it’s the flowers. The flowers that bloom exuberantly, extravagantly, even in poor soil, with very little care. Flowers that cover trellises and mailboxes and broken fences. That beautiful touch of color that picks us up when we go out first thing in the morning (it even works for those of us who get up in later morning).

Even people who don’t know about flowers generally know what a morning glory is. Morning glories are the poor person’s beautifier. They cover less-than-perfect structures with beautiful flowers in late summer and fall. They feature as symbols of hope and renewal in literature, or sometimes a kind of open innocence.

We had a rare early-fall rain, so I got to see for myself that morning glories really do stay open all day when it’s cloudy or rainy. These closed at about dusk. You’ll also notice that there are some white sports in here, which look like the variety called Pearly Gates.

I don’t know if my seed just had a few Pearly Gates rogues in there, or if this is a replica of the sport that brought us Pearly Gates. But while I prefer Heavenly Blue the best, it’s nice to have these white ones sprinkled in for variety. And the dying purple blooms make it fully multicolored.

Morning glories start flowering late. In my case, really late: there were a few sprinkled blooms beforehand, but they didn’t really get going until September. Part of the reason, my neighbor illumined me, was because the deer were coming up to the fence and eating all the morning-glory vine they could reach. So the vines couldn’t flower until they got high enough to be out of the range of deer mouths. Note to self: morning glories are not deer-proof.

I did buy an entire ounce of seed, since I have many time come up morning-glory-less from one planting. Having read the usual propaganda that morning glories are easy from seed, I had an attack of gardener’s schadenfreude when  a friend of mine told me she nicked them, she soaked them in hot water, everything, but still no morning glories.

Mine took three plantings,

I also do the soaking in hot water, but it still took me three plantings of seeds before I got one that took. (If you really want to get elaborate about this, you can put the seeds into damp paper towels or cloth after soaking,  roll them up, and put them in another cloth, or an open plastic bag. This gets you a very high germination rate, but you do have to either rip paper towel or very carefully disengage new sprouts from cloth if these go further than you meant while you weren’t looking.)

We did have earwigs pretty badly early in the season. I’m not sure what the other problem was, besides sulking seeds. They don’t like cold soil at all (my memory is that they are originally from South America, but at the moment I can’t find anything to back that up. Anyone know?).

In any case, I’m glad I got a lot of seeds to try with, because the final results have really perked up the last six weeks. We did have a sort of almost-frost a week or two ago, and they died back some, but seem to be recovering. If they ripen, I will also have a lot of seed to try next year.

As Emboden points out, if anybody seriously wants a supply of seeds, all you have to do is plant the packet and wait a few months. Morning glories bloom heavily, and every flower brings a  pointy two-seeded pod. So it was pretty hopeless what the seed companies did many years ago, in an attempt to safeguard people like me and my friends: they coated the seed with foul orange poison.

The seed companies knew, because they’d read the same pamphlets we had, about how morning glory seeds have some of the same chemicals in them as LSD.  Devilish drugs and intoxication: that sounded very attractive to us as teenagers. We were looking for some way to connect ourselves to what seemed like an alien adult world; those good upright stalwart principles just weren’t working for us, newly-awakened to a world of war and cruelty. We needed to find the meaning of it all, but there was no coming-of-age ritual to help us. Turning to drugs was one way we tried to understand our world–and it often helped.

I’m not trying to downplay the harm that can be done by drugs–but I think the fact that some drugs can do harm doesn’t mean we should stop using them. And I think a lot of that harm stems from our culture’s puritanical notion that no one should really take them.

Unless they’re prescribed, of course, in which case we can feed them to our children for breakfast. And ourselves. We get very little education about pharmaceutical drugs, too, in fact: we’re just supposed to have faith in the doctors who prescribe them, never mind the side effects, which often mean we wind up taking more drugs, which also have side effects…many people die this way.

We don’t often get educated in how to use drugs in this culture, intoxicating or not. In fact, we rarely even discuss the subject. We either use them or we do not. Any ideas about intelligent use are passed on through subterranean folk culture (the best person to consult about avoiding hangovers is a person who has had plenty of hangovers). We rarely get educated in how to be sensitive to our own bodies, so we know if the drugs are doing us well or not.

Traditional cultures in Mexico, Central, and South America show their newly-adult children how to use local drugs in ways that benefit them.  Then the young adults decide if, when, and how often the use of any plant is called for. This even happens occasionally in North America. A friend of mine told me how, when she was sixteen, her parents started taking her around to cocktail parties, so she could learn how to drink and socialize. So much more sensible than the introductions to alcohol I saw, which generally include an inelegant and undignified purging ritual.

My discussion of morning glory has led to me spouting a lot of my opinions on what may seem to be diverse topics. But maybe that’s because of the way morning glory is itself. It’s a strong, multifaceted plant: it provokes strong reactions. Whether you think it’s beautiful, horrible, sacred, or terrible, it’s hard not to have some opinion about morning glories.

References:
William Emboden, Narcotic Plants, Collier Books/Macmillan, 1979, pg. 95-97

James Underwood Crockett, Annuals,  Time-Life Books,  1971

Louise Beebe Wilder says that, on cloudy days, four o’clock flowers open early and stay open all day.  Gerard says that if the air is temperate, the flowers stay open all day and close at night. I’ll have to take their word for it: by the time it’s late enough in the summer for four o’clocks to bloom here, both rain and temperate air are long gone.

They have a tendency to loll and flop, and are fairly thirsty plants. On the other hand, they’ll come back nicely from water neglect, as I can personally attest, and the floppiness isn’t altogether bad if you’re growing them closely with other plants. You can kind of lay the plant out of the growth path of the ones they’re interplanted with. They will continue to bloom, upright or sideways.

A Canadian garden book says they’re supposed to grow only one to two feet tall, but the first one I ever saw was a wide round bush of at least three feet, and one of my plants that is flopping and growing sideways is getting to about that length. My Sunset Western Garden Book agrees with me: they grow to 3 or 4 feet. The likelihood is that hotter weather gets them to come on faster. But don’t lose heart if you live in a cool-summer climate, since they are reputed to grow, and flower prodigiously, in Canada and England. Maybe you’ll get to see their flowers open all day, to make up for shorter plants.

I’ve planted one of my four o’clocks in a container by the door, so that each day I can witness the miracle of new parti-colored flowers just by walking out the door. And each evening the flowers open, release their slightly-sweet pale lemon scent, and stay open until shortly after the sun hits them the next morning.

Gerard describes the scent as being sweet like narcissus, but it isn’t to my nose. This could be because of a difference in our senses of smell, or because of a difference in varieties of Mirabilis jalapa. David Squire says its scent is “fruity and sweet”, which is more like my reading.

A sense of smell is an evanescent thing, and the interpretations and associations we give each odor are entirely personal, though there may be many people who share the same feelings about a single scent.

Mirabilis jalapa is not the herb called jalap, which comes from the root of Ipomoea jalapa, or High John the Conqueror root. Gerard claims that he heard from someone that the roots could be used as a purgative, but he doesn’t appear to have tested this claim. I’m thinking there’s a possibility he mixed up the two; jalap has long been known as a powerful purgative, and Gerard heard the purgative report from someone in Italy. It’s easy to get information scrambled when it comes a long distance, as anyone who has ever played the party game “Whisper Down the Lane” (sometimes known as “Telephone”) can testify.

Mirabilis jalapa caused quite a stir when it arrived in Europe (and what is now the UK) from the Americas. Gerard spends about three pages going on about it in his Herball (approximately 1636).  He says that the seed was brought from Peru to Spain, and thence to the rest of Europe, and England.  Parkinson, a bit later, is still excited about the diversity of the colors, but only enough to go on for two pages.

Among his observations on the habits of Mirabilis jalapa is,  “And I haue often also observed that one side of a plant will giue fairer varieties than another, which is most commonly the Easterne, as more temperate and shadowie side.”

This is strangely unlike my own experience with four o’clock, which mulishly refuses to bloom for me unless it gets a fair dose of sun throughout the day. Maybe morning sun was enough for the eastern side of Parkinson’s plants.

The name Mirabilis jalapa reflects an older name, Mirabilis Peruana, which translates into one of its modern common names: Marvel of Peru. Belle-de-nuit (“beauty of the night”) was common name for it in France, at least as late as the 1930s, and apparently it goes as “Beauty of the Night” (in English) in at least parts of North America. In older times, it was also called Marvell of the World (nursery-grower hype seems to be a tradition that has come down through the centuries). HachalI was, supposedly, the Peruvian name for it. Other European names were  Solanum Odoriferum; Jasminum Mexicanum; Carolus Clusius; Admirabilia Peruviana. All of which goes to show what Linnaeus had to deal with a little later, when he started standardizing plant names.

Educated people of the time used Latin as a common tongue, which is why all these names are in Latin, and why Linnaeus chose Latin for his binomials. Unlike the Latin-speakers above, he made the astounding move of relating plant the names to the family the plants were actually in, instead of just using names that plants reminded him of, or names of people he wished to honor (as in Carolus Clusius). We do, of course, keep to the European tradition of naming plants after people, but now we use cultivar or species names for that.

It’s an interesting cultural custom. In many cases, the plants named after European people were already well-known by non-European people in the plant’s country of origin. While I think the people who bring plants from one country to another, often at much peril, deserve credit, this makes me uneasy. European culture does seem to have a propensity for putting a stamp on things and calling them ours. I am not sure why we feel so compelled to do this. Fear, probably.

Gardens and plants make my mind wander down lengthy and little-used trails.  But it always comes back to the plants, the landscape, and our connections with them.

References:

John Gerard, Gerard’s Herball: The Essence therof distilled by Marcus Woodward, from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636, Crescent Books, 1985

John Lust, The Herb Book,  Benedict Lust Publications/Bantam, 1974/1979

Steven R. Smith, Wylundt’s Book of Incense, Samuel Weiser, 1989

Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada, Reader’s Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., 1979

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Company, 1967, 1973

Louise Beebe Wilder, The Fragrant Garden, MacMillan, 1932; Dover reprint 1974

David Squire (with Jane Newdick), The Scented Garden, Rodale, 1989

John Muir describes finding a manzanita whose trunk was four feet in diameter, but branched out at eighteen inches high. That was at 6,000 feet. The resulting tree-bush, as he describes it, formed a broad round head ten or twelve feet high. So obviously not all mountainous manzanita is petite.

I’m guessing that the manzanita he found was the taller, brighter-green manzanita that grows in the high mountains, Arctostaphylos patula. It doesn’t usually get as high as twelve feet, so the one Muir found was exceptional.

The ones I know go to about four or five feet.  I always find their bright green leaves a novelty, since the  manzanitas where I live are such a pale white-green. When the sun shines through the bright green leaves of mountainous manzanita, they are a stunning sight.

These manzanita leaves can be used in the same way as Arctostaphylos nevadensis. And there’s an additional use for them which isn’t needed in the high mountains: as a poison oak remedy. In my area, there are two commercial preparations for poison oak which involve manzanita-leaf tea. One is a spray; the other is a very effective clay concoction with manzanita tea in it.

Arctostaphylos patula bushes are also heavy bearers of berries. “Manzanita” translates to “little apple”; you can see why this name might have come to mind. This bush is loaded with berries which are the size of the berries on the taller manzanitas where I live. They’re food for a lot of wildlife. These lower bushes in the rocks are especially climbable for little critters without wings.

People eat manzanita berries, too. They aren’t juicy, the way you usually think of berries. When manzanita berries are ripe, they are dry, a bit powdery, and astringent-sweet. When you’re walking in the woods, sucking on a manzanita berry can quench your thirst. Make sure it’s really ripe, though, or you’ll get a lot more pucker than saliva. And don’t crunch through to the seed: they’re astringent enough to dry your mouth up again.

It’s most likely that this thirst remedy was passed down by the Native Americans in manzanita-growing areas. Manzanita was a major food crop in the areas where it grows, since it’s abundant and easy to harvest.  The lower-elevation manzanitas had many names, since it was an important crop. I haven’t found names for Arctostaphylos patula, but since many Native Americans summered in the high mountains (and left their grinding holes to prove it), it’s likely they made use of the high-mountain manzanitas as well as the ones in their winter homes down the hill.

Manzanita berry powder was made into a sort of cider, or ground and cooked in hot ashes like mush. Some people ate the powder in cakes, or stirred up with dry powdered salmon–an early energy food.  There seems to have been a lot of celebration with the manzanita harvest. Manzanita berries are not only abundant, they’re sweet, and a craving for sweetness is not just a modern trait.

Sweetness is certainly what’s attracted me. Besides eating the berries straight, I’ve also had the pleasure of manzanita-berry lemonade, which is basically a tea of the powder soaked in cold water.

If you want to try the easy modern way, you can use a blender, as a friend of mine does. After you’ve blended them, though, you still have to find some way to sift or sieve the fine powder from the substantial seeds. Or you can just leave the seeds in and strain out the tea. The taste is a little less sweet, but doubtless there are useful nutrients in the seeds.

I had never thought of growing manzanita before I read up on it for this article. Manzanita is just there. But if you want to try it,  Chatfield recommends getting starts at a nursery. Like many wild plants, manzanita is hard to start or transplant, and like many shrubs, it’s slow-growing.  He says that, while they tolerate drought, watering them will make them grow faster, and bear more flowers and berries.  He also says they grow in sun and shade.

This may well be true. Since I haven’t grown them, I can only say what I’ve observed about seeing them grow: the few I’ve seen in shade look straggly and small and rarely bear anything. This Arctostaphylos patula is growing in the high part-shade of red firs (the little bush in front of it is a chinquapin). Obviously it does get some sun, but you can see it’s much skimpier than the ones in the sun; it’s got a lot of its elegant red-brown skeleton next to it. And there are no berries.

There are many varieties of manzanita, so it might make sense to look for one that lives in the climate closest to yours. And while watering may help them thrive, especially in the first couple of years,  I’ve never seen or heard of any manzanitas growing in any area except a dry-summer one.  And they tend to grow either on slopes or crushed granite or both, so: drainage drainage drainage.

Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy manzanitas in the wild. The ones in my area are long since over (they bloom in about February; the fruit’s ripe in early summer). But, in the moutains, Arctostaphylos patula is just getting to harvest season. The berries will turn dull red when they ripen.

They haven’t got long. You can get snow in September in the high mountains. Six weeks to two months after this picture was taken, things will start freezing up.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

I’m always intrigued at the way different locations mutate plants into different shapes.

I, of course, am pleased to call them mutations, because I’m used to their other forms. So to me, the different forms are unusual. Intriguing. It’s like looking at a friend who just got plastic surgery or peacock blue hair.

In the high mountains (between 6,000 and 10,000 feet), many of these variations seem to make a plant lower to the ground, smaller.

Where there is snow eight or nine months out of the year, low to the ground is a smart choice for a spreading plant. If it doesn’t stay low, six or seven or up to twenty feet of snow load will put it there.  Smaller size may also have something to do with short growing season and soil fertility. Rock is close to the surface in high mountains.

Where I live, manzanitas are tall, shrubby plants-the mature ones are well over my head–with twisty mahogany-colored branches. When the moon or headlights shine on them, their pale green leaves turn white.

I delight in this little pinemat manzanita (Arctostaphylos nevadensis), which is a miniature version of the type that grows where I live.  In the mountains, it’s still a shrub, but it comes only to my ankles. To me, this shrubby groundcover looks like gorgeous landscaping. But it also serves some practical purposes.

Manzanitas are great soil-preservers, because they can grow and hold soil on slopes and in soils with very little nourishment. In my area, they cover sunny, dense clay hillsides.  In the high mountains, they thrive on a diet of granite and crushed granite, where very few plants can survive.

Pinemat manzanita berries are somewhat smaller than the tall manzanitas that grow in my area, but they are large in proportion to Arctostaphylos nevadensis’s tiny height. There weren’t too many berries evident this year, but they may have already disappeared down the gullets of the grouse, chipmunks, and squirrels and other wildlife who would find these berries at a handy height for eating.

But manzanita has even more to it than beauty and bounty. Manzanita is in the same family as heaths, heathers, and madrone. It’s also related to uva-ursi (bearberry or kinnickinnick), which is easy to see when you look at this creeping variety.

It’s so closely related to uva-ursi that it has almost the same chemical profile in its leaves. Both have arbutin, a natural antibiotic and diuretic. It can kill and wash away bacteria from the urinary tract. Uva-ursi is traditionally used for bladder and kidney problems, so you could use manzanita in the same way.

You’d need to be careful about the dose, though. Many people make the mistake of vaguely believing that plant drugs are safe because they’re “natural”. Digitalis and scopolamine are also natural, but how you take them means the difference between improving your life and meeting your death. It’s important to be respectful of plants and know what you’re doing.

If you take them in very large quantities, uva-ursi and manzanita can both cause collapse and death. The proper dosage is one teaspoon of leaves steeped in sixteen ounces of water, taken two or three times a day. This tea has a not-unpleasant astringent taste, a bit like the tannin in black tea (actually, manzanita has tannins in it, also). Don’t drink it if you’re pregnant, though; in some women, it can cause uterine contractions.

Historically, the Shoshone drank this tea as a remedy for venereal disease (one of the gifts of Europe to the Americas). If you look at the chemical constituency, it seems like a good thing to try. Chances are it was a lot more effective than whatever European remedy was being offered at the time (mercury, a toxin, was used on its own earlier on; it’s still included in many drugs).

Arbutin has been synthesized as a drug. You may be surprised to learn that taking manzanita or uva ursi tea is actually more effective than taking the drug. Arbutin breaks down so quickly in the body that it often destablilizes before doing its work. Uva ursi has substances in its leaves which preserve the arbutin on its travels through your body. It also has other ingredients which may work synergistically with the others, including quercetin, which is good for your respiratory system, and allantoin, the famous nerve- and tissue-healing ingredient in comfrey.

Over the years, I’ve learned over and over about herbs whose effects were better than their so-called active ingredient. We have a lot to learn about plant chemistry. When drugs are isolated from plants, they often cause side effects that are not present when the whole plant is taken. Or, like manzanita and uva-ursi, the constituents of the plant work as a team to make its action more effective.

Coincidence? I think not.

Next post: more uses for yet another kind of manzanita.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

They say that datura’s intoxicating.

Well yes, it is. Is that bad?

Well, it is bad if you’re taking datura leaves internally. Or even if you make a paste and spread them on your skin. You can have respiratory failure, which in plain English means you stop breathing.

In the U.S. Pharmacopoeia of the 1800s, smoking datura leaves (a less drastic way of introducing the alkaloids to your body) was prescribed for asthma. So if you get it just right, instead of stopping breathing, you can stop from breathing fast and spasmodically. I wouldn’t recommend trying this at home, though. Remember, “intoxication” comes from the same root as “toxin”.

Eating datura, or rubbing a paste or salve on your skin, can have multitude of effects. You can hallucinate most unpleasantly, and be very sick to your stomach, for a very long time. Daturas can be used by experts to good effect-some tradtional healers have different kinds of datura or brugmansias growing in their yard. Each variety is good for divining a particular problem or illness in the village. Datura is said to be an herb used by European witches (who were, generally, shamans who were demonized by the Church) to travel to other realms and learn wisdom. In India, daturas are also regarded as sacred.

In fact, wherever it appears, datura is regarded as a holy plant. But holy means powerful. I have known datura to drive a person in a delicately balanced state over the edge, so there was no better solution than an institution. Treat daturas with respect. If you don’t know what you’re doing, back off.

But not too far.

Datura flowers can send me into an altered state even when they’re dead, as in the photo at the top of this post. And it’s a very pleasant sensation.

The slow bursting from velvety buds, the tight scroll unfurling in the evening, is a spectacular show.

And when the huge flower fully opens, you can bury your face deep within it. To me, it’s like a combination of fresh line-dried laundry, a hint of lemon, a whisper of sweet orange blossom, and a touch of something else.

Whatever it is, inhale it while you can, because by late morning, the flowers will be done.

Fortunately, there are more to come.

Next post: I go on about this datura