Category — Plant uses

Despite the snow, hail, and rain so copious it forms little sheets and streams of water in the yard, there’s one native plant that’s coming up, unstoppable. Soaproot.

Soaproot was one of the first plants I got to know, many years ago, when I moved to this area. I was camping out by the river, near what turned out to be a seasonal stream, and there was a good colony of soaproot there.

Soaproot loves to colonize

Later on, I found out that soaproot really likes moist soil, and seems to prefer dirt so wet it’s underwater part of the year. But I’ve also seen it on hilltops near no obvious source of water whatever. It might have been a high-water-table indicator: there were madrone trees all around them (soaproot likes shade), and although madrones will take drought, they love water. The trouble is, I know the well on that property was a very piddly one. Did they just drill in the wrong place? Or are madrones and soaproot less thirsty than I thought? Just another mystery.

...in fact, they love colonizing so much that the storm-damaged leaves crash together sculpturally

Soaproot, as you might have guessed by the name, has a bulbous root that can be used as soap; it lathers when you mix it with water.

Trouble is, that root is about 2 feet down, and the heavy clay soil makes tough digging. Camped out there by the river, I decided to dig up my soaproot in the original style: I used a stick.

That method took me two days and a good share of my patience. You can’t pull the root up; the stem breaks off, as I repeatedly found. So, I kept digging.

I dug only a couple of hours a day. Digging through clay with a stick is a little like serving up sugar with a needle: if you’re diligent, it works, but it’s slow. Probably the Maidu of the area had more patience than I. And maybe better digging skills.

When I did get down to the hairy, bulbous root (the outside has fibrous covering) I found it difficult to deal with. It has many layers, like an onion, only more slippery.

This soaproot is almost at full height; the plants in the pot aren't even up yet

The reason I was digging up soaproot was that I had heard it was a remedy for poison oak, and which I had a case of. (Poison oak is not at all picky about where it grows: shade, sun; wet, dry: it’s all good.) I did manage to get the root to lather, and it did help with the itching, but I’m forced to say that Fels-Naptha laundry soap did a better job, and was less sticky. (This was before I heard about the torture by testing animals get, or at least got, at the Fels-Naptha labs. I stopped buying their soap. It seems to me that there are a lot better and more interesting ways to test soap.)

I did not use the hairy outer covering of the soaproot as a brush, or try roasting and eating the bulb, as Indians who live in soaproot’s range used to do. I’ve eaten a lot of bitter, acrid, and acidic wild foods (at least once), but the idea of roasting one of those slippery, soapy roots is not appealing. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re like onions, and get sweet when you roast them.

Although I am unlikely to dig up any soaproot with a stick this year, I enjoy its cheerful, persistent, burgeoning presence, and look forward to the stems of delicate white flowers– sometimes only a couple of feet tall, sometimes towering to four feet, glinting white in the shade.

In the center of the rosette, the stalk is just beginning

P.S. To any regular readers: this is why my comments and posts have been scarce recently: sometimes I get to do what I want, and sometimes my health has the last word. I’m looking forward to getting back in your gardens as soon as I can.

This is the time of year when juniper berries are thick on the stem. These are the berries that gave gin its name (ginèvre is French for juniper) – and its peculiar flavor. So next time you hoist a classic gin cocktail, think of its origins, and salute the juniper.

Junipers can be diminuitive bushes no higher than your ankle or shin, like our native Juniperus communis montana which (as the name implies) can be found in the mountains. Las Pilitas points out that this is a very adaptable plant: rock outcroppings are its native habitat, but it also thrives given garden soil, water, and plenty of sun.

As you can see, rock outcroppings are the natural habitat of larger junipers, too. Our native Juniperus californica sets its roots right in rock, and is probably partly responsible for helping to break up some of this high Sierra granite (this tree was growing at about 6,000 feet). (For more about how trees help create soil, check this post.)

California junipers can be shrubs or trees, depending on where they grow.  Severe mountain winds and climates make them into Moore-like sculptures.

 The “fur” on their bark isn’t particularly soft; it’s more like bark having a fibrous bad-hair day. But it does make intriguing patterns and textures. For the California Indians the fiber was more than an aesthetic experience: it was valuable for diapers, clothing, and mattresses.

Probably because of the pungent essential oils in its wood, both kinds of native juniper have been prized for fenceposts. “A juniper post will outlast two post holes.”

The oils in juniper were valuable to California Indians in different ways. They were used as smudges and teas for coughs, colds, flus and fever, and they were probably effective, because juniper oil is antiseptic, cleans the digestives system, and promotes detoxification generally. High blood pressure, constipation, and hiccups were also treated with juniper (juniper oil increases circulation).

French hospitals, which use much more aromatherapy than ours, used a rosemary/juniper smudge as a disinfectant until fairly recently. (They would have used the European junipers near them, but different kinds of juniper have similar uses.)

In Native American saunas, berries were thrown on hot rocks, probably giving the same disinfectant effects, as well as feelings of health, love, and peace, which are associated with juniper. I have yet to try this, but it sounds as if it might be as intoxicating as gin, without the bad aftereffects. (I’ve always found that gin is a sneaky, somewhat crazy high, coming up behind me softly with a very big mallet.)

The berries were also used for cold medicine and stopgap food when supplies ran short in winter. If you’ve ever tasted juniper berries, you’ll know they’re very pungent and strong-tasting, a lot like biting into a succulent pine needle. They taste very medicinal, but they’d be a tough thing to make into a meal. Their medicinal qualities might have helped stave off illness in times of weakness, though.

I was surprised to find that juniper berries can be found in our own food. Besides flavoring your gin, juniper berries may be in your prepared meats, fish, and sauerkraut (this really makes me want to read my sauerkraut labels more often).

But amazing and versatile and beautiful as their berries are, there’s something about junipers I like even better. Like redwoods, junipers can keep going even when they’re mostly dead; trees that do this are often associated with death and resurrection in myths and stories. It’s a beautiful thing to see the clean, almost bonelike dead wood striped with living, furry bark. A reminder to us all that it takes only a little spark of life to keep on.

   Sources:   Las Pilitas- great California native site with lots of information on plant habitats, uses, propagation, and more

.Mojave Desert  http://mojavedesert.net/plants/shrubs/juniper.html – Desert-oriented native plant site

arboretum.ucsc.edu/pdfs/ethnobotany_webversion.pdf -  an excellent .pdf on California native plant uses, from the University of Southern California arboretum

Essential Oils Desk Reference, Third Edition, Essential Science Publishing

Here’s a story about a plant that’s conservative in the best sense of the word: it protected the life of a civilization, it grows in the desert, and it’s been able to hold on to its own life force for 2,000 years.

In the 1970s, archaeologists excavated Herod the Great’s palace on Masada, in Israel. One of the things they discovered was an ancient jar which proved to hold Judean date palm seeds, Phoenix dactylifera, still dry and well-preserved. When they were radiocarbon-tested, they were found to be about 2,000 years old. One theory is that they are the pits spit out by soldiers, caught in the compound during a Roman siege. Rather than surrender, they committed mass suicide. But they left their date pits behind.

Those soldiers are long gone, but the seeds are moving on to a new life. Thirty years after their discovery, on the Jewish new year of trees (Tu Bishvat), Dr. Elaine Solowey soaked three Judean date palm seeds in a solution of fertilizers and hormones. Then she planted  them at a desert kibbutz. Six weeks later, one had come up and started forming fronds; by June 2008, depending on whose report you read, it was four feet (1.4 meters) or five feet (1.5 meters) high, with nearly a dozen fronds.

“Methuselah” (the tree is named after the oldest person in the Bible) broke a previous record of old-seed-sprouting: a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus seed. The Judean date palm may be younger than some ancient grain seeds that have been sprouted, though. Nobody knows yet whether Methuselah will bear fruit;  as with many ancient plants, date trees are dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate trees. You can see it pictured in its smaller stages here.

Judean date palms were an important part of ancient Judean culture – so important that they became a symbol of Judea itself. When the Romans invaded, they found forests of 80-foot date palms, part of a fruit-export business, and a source of shade and shelter as well as food for the residents.

Any sweet-fruit-bearing tree is important, not only for the candy rush but for the things you can make from fermenting and processing their sugars: vinegar (for disinfection and food preservation) and alcohol (no need to describe its uses, I think). The rest of the tree was used to make furniture, rope, fuel, and packing material.

Probably because of their generous gifts to the people who grew them, Judean date palms  are were a symbol of grace and elegance in ancient Jewish culture; the name “Tamar” is derived from the date palm’s ancient Hebrew name. Judean date palms were also used medicinally, for anything from a hot sex life to tumors, heart problems to constipation. But by about 70 CE, when the Romans invaded for the second time, the date palm was on the decline; the fruit-export business had stopped. By 500 CE, the Judean date palm had disappeared.

Until now. Genetic tests show that its DNA is most closely related to an old Egyptian variety, Hayany. It may contribute endurance and disease resistance if it’s crossbred with other dates. (It seems as if it would certainly contribute to longevity.) Modern Israeli date palms are a strain originally from Iraq, which arrived in Israel via California. As far as anyone knows, they don’t have the medicinal qualities of the ancient Judean date palm.

In ancient Egypt, date seeds were placed in pharoahs’ tombs, symbolizing immortal life. Whether this refers to date’s medicinal powers, or just the everyday miracle of a plant’s ability to renew its own life, that practice gives resonance to the Judean date palm’s botanical name, Phoenix dactylifera. The fabulous Phoenix was able to burn itself at the end of its life – and then fly up, resurrected.

 JUNE: A MONTH TO HONOR WATER

In a way, my whole blog is about low-water gardening; that’s the reason I got involved with tulips, and I already loved natives and Mediterranean herbs. During June, my posts will all be about conserving water in the garden. This gives me scope to cover everything from containers to cityscapes, soil to site to sprays, and of course portraits of more of those stellar plants that spread their glories with little or no watering. (Hint: the “Wild Plants” category will give you quite a few more; so will the “Bulbs” category.)

Manzanita may be common; it may be shrubby; it may even be a fire hazard. But it’s beautifully useful all year long, and throughout its hardy, persistent life. I’ve written here about other, high-mountain manzanitas; everything I wrote there about uses of the leaves and berries applies to our local foothills white-leaf or ghost manzanita, perhaps even more, since our manzanita is a bigger shrub. (While you’re looking, don’t forget to check out Steve’s useful comment on cultivating manzanitas below the “berries” link).
Since it’s native to our clay-and-granite, no-summer-water climate, it’s obvious that manzanita is one tough customer. They’re called “ghost manzanitas” because of one of three water-saving tactics of the foliage: the tough, leathery leaves keep evaporation to a minimum, and their vertical posture, with the thin edge toward the sun, reduces it even more. The light-grey-green color reflects sunlight that would steal moisture by transpiration. (Other manzanitas have brilliant green leaves.) Ghost manzanita leaves caught in the headlights, or by a full moon, shine like silvery phosphorescence.

My first introduction to manzanita was as the firewood that burns even when it’s wet. Since I’d ignorantly been trying to burn wet punky pine and other non-starters to keep warm, this was a revelation. Manzanita not only burns wet, it burns so hot it can warp your stove and make the wall behind it smolder. In a campfire, violet and electric blue streak up in the flames along with the more ordinary yellows and oranges.

Manzanita is colorful even when you don’t burn it. Some get big enough to look very like their sisters, the madrones.The bark is a smooth deep mahogany purple-red, and plum-violet and rosy-rust streaks can be found inside most splits of firewood. (I knew a man who carved them into beautiful spoons.) It’s not always easy to find manzanita big enough to split; it’s a shrubby tree, whose trunks often split up and get no bigger around than my arm at the very very bottom.

This photo also shows another characteristic of manzanitas: living and dead wood cohabit. Manzanitas are what I call death-and-resurrection trees. You can find dead and live wood on the same branch, and you can find many dead branches on a healthy living manzanita. Live branches and saplings are tough, long,  and flexible; I used them to build a wickiup when I first came here, and it seems likely to me that the Maidu might have used them for their own dome-like structures, built partly underground for insulation.

Our large masses of manzanitas  were a major food crop for the local Indians, and they must have been an important one, since the tasty acidic dry berries ripen starting in late spring and stay on the bushes well into the beginning of winter. My friend who’s learning Maidu says that she thinks the name for manzanita is “epuh”; the Maidu word for apple is “eppoli”, and this is a diminuitive. (She’s not absolutely sure about this; I’ll confirm it in a comment on this post when I check with her teacher in a few weeks.) It’s the same in Spanish; “manzanita” means “little apple”. All you have to do is take a look at the fruit to know why.

Manzanita berries are still a major food crop for bears and coyotes, who exhibit the evidence in their scat. If you want to experiment with manzanita berries, and don’t have acres of manzanitas out your back door, Steve (his comment is on the bottom of the page this link takes you to) says that watering them will give you bigger crops of berries.

Since we have huge tangled colonies of manzanita here, it’s hard work to clear out the dead parts; manzanita branches start within a few inches of the ground. You have to crawl on your belly with branches snaring your hair, clothes, and tender body parts to get through manzanita settlements, and sometimes it’s impenetrable no matter which way you turn through the maze.

Eventually, the whole thing dies, and you get brushpiles like this, which are a considerable fire hazard. I once made a privacy fence by crudely interweaving these dead branches; it was a great rustic climbing fence for vines, and easy to take down when it was time to move. Dead manzanita branches are also prime kindling, but since we have so much of manzanita everywhere, they are often bulldozed up and disposed of in burn piles.

While it’s certainly faster, easier, and cheaper to do a wholesale clearing on large acreage, you don’t have to raze manzanita to make it safer for fires. Some prefer to clear by hand, leaving selected trees which are limbed up, so they make sculptural shapes which don’t allow potential fires to jump from crown to blazing crown. It also allows the trees full scope to shape themselves as  specimen plants, unhindered by close-growing others.

It was spring when  I was first introduced to manzanita, the time when the pale-pink flowers dangle from the jade-green leaves like  earrings. Manzanita flowers are our first sign of spring – they bloom in February through April, depending on the year and location – and scent the air with a high, light sweetness on sunny days. Hummingbirds and bees buzz out of the woodwork to sip the blooms, and it isn’t just the birds and the bees doing it. I knew an herbalist, when I first came up here, who showed me how to extract a single drop of nectar from the newly-opened flowers. “Put it in a little vial, and share it with someone you love,” he said. The sweet nectar has an astringent aftertaste, not only a reflection of the tannic acid in the leaves, but possibly a commentary on other kinds of sweetness,  on the need for contrasts.

As a flower essence (a homeopathic remedy that addresses emotional conditions, different from an essential oil), manzanita encourages groundedness and an appreciation of the delights of being in a body. Maybe that herbalist was on to something.

Like the high-mountain manzanitas, ghost manzanita is related to heather, uva-ursi, wintergreen, and madrone, all of which share the same kind of flower. It’s typically called urn-shaped, although I’d say that’s for lack of any better description. Whatever the best name for the shape, it’s designed to keep the sexual parts of the flower protected from wind and weather, and give insects protection while they pollinate.

Manzanita provides food, medicine, construction material, fine carving material, firewood, beauty, and an impetus for love. One of our most generous and versatile plants,  it holds up our hard clay foothills from erosion and gives us one of our first hopes of spring.

Most people know that foxglove is used in medicine. But here’s something less well known: foxglove heals plants as well as people. An old name for digitalis is “Doctor Foxglove”, because garden plants near it grow stronger and resist disease. “Apart from keeping plants healthier, they will improve the storage qualities of such things as potatoes, tomatoes, and apples grown near them,” report Maureen and Bridget Boland in Old Wives Lore for Gardeners.

Old names for plants often point to valuable clues about their uses, personalities, and associations.  A plant with a lot of names is a plant with a lot of clout.

Here are some of the older names for foxglove:
Witch’s Glove, Dead Men’s Bells, Fairy’s Glove, Gloves of Our Lady, Bloody Fingers,  Virgin’s Glove, Fairy Caps, Folk’s Glove, Fairy Thimbles, Lion’s Mouth, Fairy Fingers, King Elwand, Foxbell, Floppy dock, Flowster-Docker,  Fingerhut (German: means “thimble”), Revbielde (Norwegian).

Some of these names are a warning that foxglove can kill you, and others refer to the way the plant looks. The “glove” aspect of  many of the common names (including “foxglove”) is easy enough to see: can there be anybody who hasn’t surreptitiously slipped a finger into the hairy finger-shaped mouths of these flowers? “Digitalis”, the Latin name, makes the same connection: digitalis means “finger”.

But other names have even more evocative connections.

I’ve already mentioned the “glove” aspect of the name foxglove. The “fox” part is said to be derived from “Folk’s”,  referring to the fairy folk, who may have been plant spirits or the small dark Picts that the Celts and Anglo-Saxons overcame. The Picts were thought to have supernatural healing and magical powers, and they were pagans through and through, which accorded ill with the Romans and Christian regimes. The Picts may have been some of the original carriers of the knowledge of foxglove’s healing powers, or that knowledge may go even further back.

Some of foxglove’s other names hint of ancient powers. Foxglove is associated with the planet Venus; the names for foxglove that refer to the Virgin Mary are also likely a whitewashed or  in-code version of the older connections of foxglove with Venus.  Mary often did service in place of older, earlier goddesses, with more pagan fertility leanings. In some forms of Italian magic, foxglove is opens the user to strong sexual love, appropriate for a plant of Venus. But while romantic love is probably the best-known association with Venus, she also rules arts, beauty, and fairies, who live in earthly realms of enchantment. (I’m not sure who King Elwand is, but he has a very Oberon-like sound to him. Perhaps the overall shape of the flowering plant suggested this name.)

One version of Venus is the Tarot card “The Empress”, who sits enthroned (and often pregnant) in a garden of fruits and flowers, the ruler of earthly delights. That seems particularly appropriate for a plant that can improve the fertility of plants next to it, and even prolong the life of cut flowers.  If foxgloves are in an arrangement, all of the flowers in the bouquet will last longer. (As a cut flower, the best way to preserve foxglove is to cut the stem when only half the blossoms are open. Fill the hollow stem with water, then plug it and set in warm water. Although to be honest, I usually just whack off the stem and put into water in the same second; they still last for weeks if you keep them in a cool spot.) If you don’t have any foxgloves flowering, you can still take advantage of their life-enhancing properties: add foxglove tea to the water of other bouquets. You can make the tea by pouring boiling water on a handful of leaves and allowing them to steep overnight.

There are more literal associations with fertility goddesses, too: digitalis is extremely abundant in seeds (80,000 seeds per ounce, all high in protein, sugars, starches, and oils), and it propagates itself readily. Seeds are the usual way I get foxglove in my garden, though I do occasionally buy plants. In my zone-8 climate, the seeds germinate well if I plant them out in the winter and early spring rains. If I spring-planted digitalis, the sprouts would shrivel in early spring heat before they came to anything. If you have the room, the easiest way is to let foxgloves seed themselves; this way they naturally catch the cool raininess they like to sprout in. If you water where they’re planted, you may get a head start on next year. If you plant them where they’re happy, you’ll  have a steady parade of foxgloves.  Unfortunately for me, digitalis is from cool northern Europe and the UK; it has also naturalized in the Pacific Northwest, where I once saw it blooming thickly, purple and white backed up by giant firs, on the banks of Lake Crescent.

For a plant that prefers cool moisture, foxglove shows surprising adaptability when it gets old enough to have a root systsm. My garden notebook reminds me of at least two occasions where foxgloves did beautifully and bloomed for at least a month in 100-degree weather (38 C) and droughty conditions. One year,  I forgot some foxgloves in 4-inch (10.2 cm) plastic pots, hidden in the deep shade of a tree. I went off on a two-week vacation and left them unwatered (I never claimed to be a good gardener).  When I returned, they still looked fine, which was certainly no thanks to me.

Digitalis purpurea won’t stand complete drought forever, though: one year the water system failed in one of the foxglove beds, and I didn’t notice it. They did, though: they died.  In my mediterranean climate, rain in summer is so rare that we may not have it for years in a row. So when  a watering system dies, so do most of the plants

In my climate, foxgloves in the ground get plenty of high shade and plenty of mulch. In containers, I use moisture-retaining granules in the soil mix and give the foxgloves some form of bottom-watering, so they never suffer shock from going dry.

Tasha Tudor, the artist-gardener, grows towers of foxgloves that create the most romantic effect. But they are nurtured by a substance most consider most unromantic: manure tea. I have not yet tried manure tea on my foxgloves, but I intend to start this year; pictures of Tudor’s garden have raised foxglove-envy in my heart.

Another little-known use for foxgloves might contain a hint for gardeners: in Russia, prospectors looking for coal or iron deposits watch for foxglove stands from their helicopters. Since minerals and foxgloves have an affinity, mineral-rich fertilizer might be ideal for giant foxgloves.

Rumor has it that cutting back the stalks of foxgloves will give you a second flowering. This has never happened to me, despite a long growing season.  I was thinking that might be because it is just too hot here, but then I remembered I have seen foxgloves flowering in town in September. Maybe those gardeners have more water to spare, or maybe (much as I loathe admitting it) they’re just better gardeners.

There are a large number of garden variations on the Digitalis purpurea theme, some of which I’ve already mentioned in this series. I’ll be posting about a few more foxgloves that I’ve grown, then wind up with a wish list that includes unusual species as well as some garden cultivars which have only subtle differences from the wild foxglove.

Next post: Pink Foxgloves.  Sort of.

References for Digitalis purpurea:

Maureen and Bridget Boland, Old Wives Lore for Gardeners, Bodley Head 1976;  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977

Maude Grieve, A Modern Herbal, Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1931; Dover edition, 1971

Sybil Leek, Herbs, Medicine, and Mysticism, Henry Regnery Co., 1975, pg. 142-143

Richard Le Strange, A History of Herbal Plants, Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1977

Tovah Martin and Richard W. Brown, Tasha Tudor’s Garden, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994

Magic and Medicine of Plants, ed. Inge N. Dobelis, Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. 1986, pg. 188

Joseph E. Meyer, The Herbalist,  Meyerbooks, 1960, 1976, pg. 46

Marina Medici, Good Magic, Prentice Hall Press, 1988

Lee Sturdivant, Flowers for Sale, San Juan Naturals, 1992

Cynthia Van Hazinga and the editors of Old Farmer’s Alamanc, Flower Gardening Secrets, Yankee Publishing, 1997

Katherine Whiteside and Mick Hales, Antique Flowers,  Villard Books, 1989