Category — Medicinal plants

(In the last post, a man was dying of heart and kidney conditions. This happened in the late 1700s, so the cliffhanger aspect of this segue is a little dimmed.)

After leaving his care for a time, Dr. Withering’s patient came back, not only alive, but improved. He showed Withering a bag of herbs a healing woman in Shropshire had given him.  Curious to know what could have wrought this change, Withering searched the bag, and identified one of the herbs as foxglove. For ten years, he conducted studies on digitalis, experimenting on his patients. (If this sounds barbaric, just thoroughly check the side effects of any cardiovascular medication today. Also their success rates. Then contemplate how far medicine and politics have got us.) One of the things Dr. Withering discovered was something folk healers had known for a long time: the wrong dose of digitalis means that the patient dies.

Despite the errors and their attendant embarrassments, Withering forged on with his scientific studies,  and in 1785 published a paper which established foxglove as a heart medicine in the world of the lettered. It has continued to be an important heart medicine to the current day: digitalin is one of the few drugs which can’t be simulated in the lab. Pharmaceutical companies must get it from plantations of foxgloves.

Maude Grieve, in the early nineteenth century, was a professional foxglove grower and supplier. She also grew other medicinal herbs, and did tremendous amounts of research and observation on the active ingredients of the plants that she grew. She had to: her suppliers wanted a superior product. Grieve also knew enormous amounts about the particular cultivation requirements of every plant, and how to use them medicinally.

In the 1930s, she put all this down in her Modern Herbal, still an industry standard. After antibiotics came in in the 1940s, the herbal materia medicas became obsolete, and herb growers were relegated to the fanatic fringe. Herbs had lost clout: instead, plant drugs were isolated and synthesized into pills, which were more modern, and could have standardized dosages. Educated people (with possibly a little backing from the pharmaceutical companies) excommunicated herbs from their medical practices, and even made laws against people who used them.

So the 1930s, when Grieve was writing, was a pinnacle of Western European scientific knowledge about herbs. In the last few decades, Germany and the U.K. have undertaken scientific research on medicinal herbs, but there is still great, unmined value in the hands-on and historical knowledge that Grieve wrote down.

Grieve says that Welsh healers were using foxglove in ointments in the thirteenth century, and that digitalis was little-known, but included as a heart remedy in the London Pharmacopoeia of 1650. This (or a later edition) may have been where Dr. Withering looked it up, in his search to find the medicine in the healer woman’s bag of herbs. So he wasn’t the first lettered man to know what foxglove did, but he was the one who worked it out according to science, and spread the news to his world.

After describing its historical uses, Grieve goes into detail about how foxglove was used at the time she was writing.  Firstly, she explains that the active constituents of foxglove are stronger in the stem leaves than in the bottom ones of the rosette.

Then she describes foxglove’s uses for heart and kidney conditions, as well as internal hemorrhages, inflammatory disease, delirium tremens, epiliepsy, acute mania, and other diseases. It’s clear that medical practice had gotten much more precise with the use of foxglove, because she outlines all the cautions taken in using it. ” The action of Digitalis in all the forms in which it is administered should be carefully watched, and when given over a prolonged periodit should be employed with caution, as it is liable to accumulate in the system and to manifest its presence all at once by its poisonous action, indicated by the pulse becoming irregular, the blood-pressure low, and gastro-intestinal irritations setting in.”

One of the stranger symptoms of overdose is seeing everything in shades of blue. But this can be remedied, Grieve says, by administering aconite (monkshood) , just as foxglove is an antidote for aconite poisoning.  Aconite’s name is derived from either a kind of dart, a rocky cliff, or its place of origin. Maybe there’s a reason that the plant of the witches and healers balances the actions of a plant named after hooded Christian monks, homeland, and hard, sharp things. And vice versa.

Next post: Digitalis purpurea in the garden and vase: plus, the secret names and associations of foxglove

Digitalis purpurea is the digitalis species with the most venerable medical history, at least in English-speaking cultures. It’s been in gardens since 1440, when it is mentioned in Feate of Gardening (by the well-named John Gardener). In 1636 Gerard mentions it in his Herbal as a medicinal plant.

I would guess that foxglove was in many gardens, and used medicinally, long before.

In 1636,  the educated world didn’t know that foxgloves had medicinal powers. Gerard said they had “…a certaine kinde of clensing qualitie joyned therewith; yet are they of no use, neither have they any place amongst medicines, according to the Antients.”

Among the unlettered holders of knowledge, though, foxglove was probably already in place as a heart remedy. In the hundred years before Gerard, there had been a wholesale murdering of healers and herbalists by the Church. They were called witches and heretics, and were burned at the stake, tortured, drowned. In this way, the Church acquired the accused witches’ property, plus sovereignty over the healing arts, a domain they awarded to the academically trained doctors. The era that we call the Renaisance had its evil side; progress often seems to involve wholesale slaughter. At least in Western European civilization.

Witch-killing still wasn’t over by  1636, so it’s likely that anyone who knew how to use foxglove kept pretty quiet, especially around lettered men, educated in church-run schools. Foxglove was used in ointments or poultices for swellings, old sores, and scrofulous swellings: that use was known.  Though it might not have worked for everybody: some people are sensitive to the touch of foxglove leaves on bare skin, and come up with rashes, headaches, and nausea.

Foxglove’s use internally, as a heart remedy, was for a long time a secret, partly because it was something that took a lot of skill. Foxglove’s active ingredients make the heart constrict and blood pressure rise rapidly. Getting the dose right is essential: if you don’t the patient dies. It’s also tricky: the strength of the active ingredients varies from plant to plant, some people have much higher tolerance to drugs than others, and a person’s individual response varies as fast as internal chemistry, which is to say, from mood to mood. Getting a dose right under such circumstances – and without scientific measuring technology – required skill and insight.

William Withering, an English doctor, seems to have been the first educated man to crack the secret of foxglove. and bring it to the world’s attention. In 1775, a patient of his was afflicted with dropsy (excess fluid retention), often associated with heart and kidney problems. The case had gone too far; Withering could do nothing: he expected his patient to die.

Next post: Miracle cure by foxglove – and a couple of problems along the way

I liked the idea of a perennial foxglove: I often forget to keep planting the biennial ones, so either I have to buy sometimes-anonymous plants at the drugstore, or go without. (I’m not sure why drugstores have become plant emporiums, or when it happened, but two chain drugstores in my area are some of the cheapest and easiest sources for common bedding plants. Maybe it’s a roundabout way of having herbalism come back: many of our common ornamental plants are actually medicinal.) Like other digitalis, D. laevigata also has cardiac stimulant and tonic qualities.
I had great hopes of Digitalis laevigata, also known as Grecian foxglove (although its origins are probably in SE Europe, there is a subspecies gracae with smaller flowers packed together) and smooth foxglove, a translation of its Latin species name. “Smooth” refers to the leaves, which have more in common with a large plantain than with Digitalis purpurea.  I rather liked the way the old leaves turned into a sort of textured mosaic of colors and patterns.

But, honestly, I planted D. laevigata for its perennial qualities, and to have a different flower color in a foxglove. I thought a yellow foxglove would be nice. Since I had no pictures available at the time I planted it (it’s not a comon foxglove, and I got the seeds from JL Hudson’s wonderful but photoless catalogue), I was free to fantasize to my heart’s content, and envisioned a sort of blurry D. purpurea, with small creamy yellow flowers.

As you can see from the photo at the top of this page,  D. laevigata flowers look a lot more like acanthus than foxglove. They also, as it turns out, look a lot like Digitalis ferruginea flowers. For a while I was worried I might have mixed my foxglove up with D. ferruginea, but a look at a picture of D. ferruginea relieved me of that worry; its flowers don’t have the characteristic white lip of D. laevigata. Given that I’m not overly thrilled with D. laevigata, that pretty much puts Digitalis ferruginea off my wish list, at least until I get my own personal botanic garden.

Digitalis laevigata is not a bad plant. And it’s certainly a plant that can take hard use: I grow it in a container with several other plants that crowd over it; and I’ve grown it in spots from quite shady to fairly sunny. But I have to say that this is a digitalis that didn’t really win my heart. It was interesting to see it grow, and I’ve kept it because it was so obliging, and because it’s hard for me to tear a plant out, especially one I have nurtured from a seed..

But I have no desire to propagate it. Maybe the best I can do for it is show its pictures here, in hopes that its particular temperament will appeal to others, if not to me: an indirect kind of propagation.

For more on Digitalis laevigata:

http://www.dianeseeds.com/digitalis-laevigata.html – has seeds and a more enticing-looking photo-taken from above the top of the plant, it looks more graceful

http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/cgi-bin/arr_html?Digitalis+laevigata&CAN=LATIND

Botanical, medical, and horticultural rundown on this plant.

Next post: White foxgloves. These I like.

*Points to those who get the very obscure joke in this title.

One year, I had a grow-the-most-varieties of digitalis contest with myself.

Actually, it was two years, since most of the varieties I tried from seed were cultivars and variants of Digitalis purpurea, a biennial. This year, I’m doing another round of digitalis varieties, and many of them are, once again, cultivars or subspecies of Digitalis purpurea, the common foxglove.

Of the purpureas I actually brought to flower, ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ is probably my favorite. I say “probably” because it’s hard for me to choose among several favorites, and in fact the plain old red-purple wild variety is pretty fetching itself, especially found in the wild – though they like cooler and moister places than my area.

Apparently, flower color is an indicator of medical constituents in this plant, because Maude Grieve, who grew herbs professionally for the medical market, cautions that only flowers of “pure, dull pink or magenta” are the true medicinal plants. So medicinal growers selected for the wild-foxglove color.

Meanwhile, other growers were selecting from the variety of colorings that Digitalis purpurea tends to sport into. ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ is one of them. There’s another apricot Digitalis purpurea (if you think of the meaning of these names, that sentence looks really stupid) called ‘Apricot Beauty’, and there may be more, for all I know. I don’t know if there’s any significant difference among them or not.

Once a sporter, always a sporter. When I saved seeds from my ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ (bought as a plant), I got a lot of dull purple and whitish-purple flowers in the next generation. True, my sampling was pretty small – well, my garden is small, so it had to be. But I’ve concluded that ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ may need several generations of selection before it comes anything like true to seed. Or maybe there are varieties and cultivars which have more stable seed.

While I’m generally in favor of saving my own seed and eschewing most seed-grown hybrids, I’ll let the seed companies do my work for me on ‘Sutton’s Apricot’. I want to be sure that I’ll have many of these strong plants glowing in the shadow of the trees (and in my vase) in two years.

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