This spring, as my sister finally winds down her work in New Jersey and contemplates where to live next, I have been trying to imagine living back in the place in which I grew up. I have been thinking about the acres and acres of woods and grassy patches where we turned the heifers out in June for their summer of freedom.
I remember the hot days of searching for them to count and make sure they all were still within the confines of 150 acres. And the times when the neighbor on that side of the hill would call to say that there were some strange youngstock in his pastures, and we would drive them back to the corner of our land and cut a hole in the fence to put them back in. Then my brother and I would go searching for the downed or broken barbed wire fence through which they escaped.
A brook cut through one corner of this "pasture" and once, as I climbed up a cowpath beside it, I found flowers which I recognized as trailing arbutus (thanks to Thornton W. Burgess' Flower Book for Children—his books of Old Mother West Wind and his bird book were ones I read over and over when I was young). Years later when I walked up the brook looking for that particular path again, I was never sure that I found it.
Another time, my brother and I were following a muddy cowpath and walked by yellow lady slippers, which I also never found again when I tried looking. But there were a lot of paths created by those heifers, and who knows if I even came close to finding the right one.
It's been more than ten years – actually closer to 20 -- since I've walked through those wilder sections of my brother's farm. And about ten years since he stopped farming and sold the few cows he had. I expect that the ravine which the cows crossed to get to and from the open pastures (and all the riparian damage which they caused) has hopefully recovered from their cutting hooves.
My brother would like to protect the land through a conservation easement, and I hope to help him work on it when I am back there in June for a long visit. I want to follow some of the old paths that I walked many years ago and explore the plant life in the woods (and get some of that new bug-proof clothing before I do, since it will be black fly season).
SIMPLE TIMES
simple times that seem like dreams
an hour between sundown and dark
when the world gathered for night
the air rich in hue
slowly, slowly fading from sight
the cow path through the woods
passing by yellow lady slippers
and trailing arbutus
never forgotten but never seen again
columbines that red and yellow
went clump by clump down to the brook
and brook that pooled and riffled
down the ravine
from one fence to the other
hard working times
when heat and sweat
and hay and juniper
and raking and stacking
and contrary cows
and rock picking was I
dream times
when the beautiful man
was in my head
and I the princess
came walking with the cows
July 1992
With a nationwide demand for alternative medicines and supplements based on herbs, it has become apparent that wild sources of many herbs are being destroyed to the point where they are endangered or threatened in many of their local habitats. Planting the Future is a compendium of the herbs which are most in danger, and it is a call for people to create herbal sanctuaries of any size in order to keep and enlarge a variation in the germ plasm of these plants. It is also a call to find more ways to sustainably "farm" herbs.
I've read several articles this past year on the decimation of herbal plants and mushrooms by plant poachers in our national forests, particularly in the southeast and northwest. The forests of the Cascades in Washington state and Oregon are being overrun by mushroom hunters and Oregon grape hunters (less for its herbal value than for its evergreen and long-lasting foliage). In the southern and mid-Appalachians in the east, plants such as goldenseal are being torn out by the roots (the part used for the familiar goldenseal herbal extracts). Roots by the tons have been extracted of plants which are difficult to cultivate and, once gone from their native habitat, are difficult to re-establish.
I have been feeling strongly that the addition of herbs such as echinacea, goldenseal, and other hard-to-propagate species to the various flavored drinks, cereals, and other foods is a markedly inefficient and uncalled-for use of these plants. It is impossible to know how much a person is ingesting of the actual herb from these products, and it feels unethical to use in such spurious ways plants which can't be cultivated/farmed fairly easily.
Rosemary Gladstar is one of the founders of an organization called the United Plant Savers (UpS, for short), and they have drawn up a list of herbs which are considered threatened and a list of those which are at risk. The threat comes from the heavy harvesting pressure built from the ever-increasing demand for alternative medicines and the addition of herbs to foods. Some plants grow in such a manner that the mother plant can be from 30 to 100 years old. To harvest roots from these would be as sacrilegious as sawing down 300+ year old trees.
Take Echinacea, which has become well-known and well-used: the variety angustifolia is difficult to propagate and the variety purpurea is easy. Conscientiously, we should be purchasing only those extracts drawn from the purpurea variety. Also, there are other varieties of Echinacea that grow in few areas, which are being harvested and thrown into the general Echinacea pot. They will become rarer and rarer. Another plant which I've been avoiding is goldenseal, ever since I read the article describing the rampant over-harvesting on public lands of these hard-to-grow plants.
Planting the Future also lists, with each description of the threatened herbs, other herbal plants which are more common and have similar healing qualities. Many of our common weeds have medicinal properties; we've just never been taught about them, and somehow, they usually don't have sexy names.
It is our individual actions of choosing herbs that are common and easily grown and educating ourselves about them, and calling on the local health food stores to have such information available and to procure from suppliers who are known for ethical harvesting, which will make a difference to these native plants.
I encourage you to visit the website of United Plant Savers to learn more about what plants are threatened and at risk and the efforts to create herb sanctuaries on big places and small. Also the website of the New England Wildflower Society has information about conservation of wildflower species.
Table of Contents
Letter to the Author: