Category — Medicinal plants

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

I don’t know the name of this burgundy hollyhock, and neither does the friend whose garden I found it in. But I sure like it. It’s very similar to A. rosea nigra, but has just that little difference in color that makes it wine red instead of eggplant black. If anyone can give me a cultivar name for this, I’d be grateful.

It’s fitting that this post should start with a mysterious hollyhock. There’s a lot of mystery to the story of how hollyhocks became a part of European and British gardens.

Clearly, hollyhocks came to the Middle East early on. Several sources quote this area as the native home of the hollyhock. But since I’m working on the theory that they originate from China, my guess is that they got to the Middle East via the many ancient trade routes between the Middle East and China. (Besides the overland Silk Road, there were probably routes by sea as well.) The hundreds of years of the Caliphates and the Ottoman Empire were a huge influence in plant breeding and gardening; those of us of European heritage use many of their garden designs today.

Walled gardens, irrigation, fountains, and formal ideas about garden design originated in Arab culture. Even the idea of paradise as a garden did (remember Eden?). The very word “paradise” derives from an Arabic word for garden. And these garden ideas spread: the Caliphates and the later Ottoman Empire were vast enterprises which in their heyday spread as far as present-day Russia, Austria, Southern France, most of Spain, and pretty much the entire Mediterranean perimeter.

The sultans of the Ottoman Empire were so interested in plants that they had traders on the Silk Road collect promising bulbs for breeding, starting off the beginning of the modern tulip (you knew I’d work tulips in here somehow). So it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to imagine that they also asked their traders to come back with desirable plant seeds. One of those might have been the hollyhock.

The first mention of hollyhocks in English literature is in the John Gardiner’s poem “Feate of Gardenini”, copied into a 1440 manuscript. Since manuscripts were a lot rarer then than they are today, probabilities are good that this was an already-known poem already in circulation through the oral tradition. This means it might have been composed generations earlier.

Which fits in well with the accepted theory that the Crusaders brought back hollyhock seeds with them. Hoc is Anglo-Saxon for mallow (hollyhocks are closely related to mallows, and, until recently, they were in the same genus). Holy has the same meaning it has today: the whole name signifies “a mallow from the holy lands”.

The Crusaders weren’t happy with Arab rule of Europe, and their goal was a lot more expansionist than holy. In many areas of Europe, Moslems coexisted peacefully with Christians, and introduced many of the arts we now think of as European. But sadly, as so often, religion became the battle flag for cultural and political differences.  The Crusaders were looking for lebensraum, and they thought they knew how to get it: invade the Arab lands, as theirs had been invaded hundreds of years ago. They called it a war of Christianity with Islam.

Like many other wars, it became more complicated as it went on, because by this time Arab and European cultures had been entwined for hundreds of years. When you spend time in a country (and slow travel meant the Crusaders spend a lot of time in lands that were Arab-dominated, including their own), you begin to adopt its rhythms, learn its language, maybe even want to settle there. For some, it might have been a little like the influx of former colonists to the UK: the ruling culture becomes the culture of reference, and the colonized people are drawn to its center.

While it is true that the Crusaders committed many atrocities in their holy land-grab operations, it’s also true that some of the Europeans stayed, intermarried, and became traders in the Middle East. It was the start of a commerce that brought us many of the spices that are now considered common in European cooking. Pepper, for instance, was a great and expensive rarity in the 13th century. Maybe hollyhock seeds were another trade commodity.

Or maybe some of those Arab rulers of Europe longed for the hollyhocks of the Middle East, and sent for seeds. As with so many other plants, the gardeners of the wealthy take cuttings and seeds, and within a generation or two, exotic rarities become cottage-garden commoners.

However they got into European gardens, hollyhocks were originally grown there not as an ornamental, but as a food.

And if you look at the way they grow, this makes a lot of sense. They are easy to grow and have large leaves which come up in early spring, when food is in short supply. The taste of the leaves is actually quite good, and though the slight hairiness is a bit off-putting to modern palates, the basic texture is nice, also. I steamed some hollyhock leaves with fish to try them out. They were really pretty tasty. If you put hollyhock leaves in a soup or ratatouille, I think the hairy factor would fade, and the good flavor and nutrition would be left.

Chinese tradition says that hollyhocks should be cooked in the seventh month, which is equivalent to August, so I felt free to try their leaves in late summer. It does seem to me, though, that they would be tenderer and better earlier on. There’s also a reference to the flowers being prized in Chinese cookery, but no information on how.

Food wasn’t the only value to hollyhocks, though, in China or Europe. They were also medicinal. Being so closely related to the mallow, they were (and probably still are) used for many of the same illnesses: respiratory complaints and inflammation. John Gerard, who lived from 1545 to 1612, put them in his herbal. “The roots, leaves, and seeds serve for all those things for which the wilde mallows doe…”

But Gerard also was one of the many to note how pretty and easy to grow hollyhocks were. “Hollihocks with purple floures hath great broad leaves, confusedly indented about the edges, and likewise toothed like a saw…The floures are double, and of a bright purple coulour…The second yeere after they are sowne they bring forth their floures in July and August, when the seed is ripe the stalke withereth, the root remaineth, and sendeth forth new stalkes, leaves and floures, many yeares after.” So hollyhocks were a short-lived perennial in England, too.

It’s interesting to see that double hollyhocks were around this early. It seems that there was a huge variety of colors and shapes of hollyhocks available even in the 1600s. Parkinson, who wrote one of the early English gardening treatises , describes hollyhocks “both single and double, of many and sundry coulours, yeeld ouat their flowers like Roses on their tall branches, like Trees, to sute you with flowers when almost you have no other, to grace out your Garden.”

He even mentions one “of a darke red like blacke bloud”, which could be that very hollyhock that grows in my friend’s garden.

Next post: big fluffy hollyhocks, plus more hollyhock history

References:

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971

Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1956, 1968

Mrs. C. F. Leyel, Officier de l’Academie Francaise, Fellow of the Royal Institute, Elixirs of Life, first pub. 1948 faber and faber London. pb reprint 1987

Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Great Confrontation: Europe and Islam Through the Centuries, Ivan R. Dee, 2003

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