University Place

Plants on the Frontier

I’m Carol Shirk with the Dodge County Master Garden Association. I just wanna welcome you to our meeting. In 1492, not only did Columbus come, but an exchange of plants between the Old World and the New World began. And what plants did the Native Americans and then later the Europeans use in a time before we had grocery stores and drug stores and hardware stores, and how did they know which ones were safe to eat and which ones were not? That’s what Kate Redmond is here to tell us tonight. Kate is an interpretive naturalist environmental educator. She’s excited about wetlands and prairies and writing and insects, especially dragonflies, carnivorous plants, native orchids, and photography. She served for 10 years as a founding member of the Fred, (sighs) Fred’s? (makes spitting noise) Friends of the Cedarburg Bog. She wrote the online field guide to the Mequon Nature Preserve, and as the bug lady, she’s written more than 350 essays about local insects and other invertebrates. So please join me in welcoming Kate Redmond.

(audience claps) – Thank you, and what has been said already about how did they know what was good to eat is what we call a teaching question, which I like to throw out right at the start of the program because while I’m showing all the pictures you can be thinking about how people knew about that. We’ll get to that at the end. I should confess that I am not a gardener at all, master or otherwise. I have a bunch of geraniums that I abuse all summer, and then I bring them inside and I abuse them all winter. It’s amazing how long they can go without water, but I do not garden, and I’m also not a browser, but I am a history geek. So what I’m gonna be talking about today is more in the history geek line. I would say that if you’re interested in using plants as food or medicine that you do your homework. You don’t say, “Well gee, back in, “but we’re still in September, back in September “that woman talked to us about such-and-such “and I seem to recall it looked like this, “and I think I’ll try it.” Not a good idea. So what we’re gonna do tonight is look at the landscape with a little different filter.

You and I might look at this prairie scene and say, wow, tall grass prairie. Isn’t that beautiful? But if you had lived here 200 or 300 or 5,000 years ago, you might look at that tall grass prairie and say if I have a headache, I can go to that plant. If I need fiber, I can go to that plant. If I need an aspirin, I can go to a different plant. So we’re gonna start to appreciate a little bit of how the people who preceded us here saw the landscape, and I’m gonna throw a huge number of facts at you. We’re not having a quiz. You won’t remember ’em all. I don’t even remember ’em all. I always spend my time going home by saying, “Ah, I forgot to tell ’em such-and-such.

“I forgot to tell ’em such-and-such.” So I don’t remember it all either, but what I hope that you will appreciate by the end of this is that if I gave you a plant list for any park or natural area or even wide open spaces in the area that you would find that probably 95% of the plants that occurred there were used in some way or another. And I might show you a picture of coreopsis, and I might tell you one or two things that they did with coreopsis, but there might be six or seven or ten different uses for coreopsis where we’d be sending out for pizza at midnight if we talked about it all. So… There are two groups of people who contributed plants that we are gonna be talking about. The first are the Native Americans. And there’s a lot of archeological interest in who came here, when they came here, how they came here. You and I probably learned that 10,000 years ago when the glacier melted, people walked over the Bering Land Bridge at the top of the world and came down into North America. And that’s certainly true, but it is certainly not the whole part of the story because, first of all, we’ll review the water cycle a little bit. The water cycle can be summed up in seven words: water comes down, water goes back up.

So the water that comes down, whether it’s in the form of snow or sleet or rain, whatever, falls on the land, falls on the water. Eventually, a lot of it evaporates back into the sky and gets attached to clouds and falls again. At the height of the last glacier, only half of that formula was working. Water was coming down, usually in the form of snow because it was cold during the glacier, but it was getting locked into the glaciers. And so, instead of going back up, it stayed there. So water continued to evaporate out of the oceans, and then it would come over the continent, it would land, and it would stay. As a result of that, at the height of the last glacier, the level of the oceans had fallen 250 to 300 feet, and that is why there was a Bering Land Bridge. That’s a stretch of land that is under water most of the time, but when the ocean level went down it got exposed, so people could walk from Asia to North America. They did not start out to discover a new continent.

And they were walking across that land bridge with some of the prehistoric land mammals that we’ve seen pictures of, the giant land sloths and the saber-tooth tigers and giant beavers, the size of a pick-up truck. They were all coming over the bridge at the same time. At the same time that that Bering Land Bridge was exposed, about two and a half million acres of land along the continental shelf was also exposed. So the easiest route was to walk along next to the continent. People walked along, took the trail next to the continent. They camped there. They lived there for years. They were not in any rush. They were having children and walking along and finding food.

It wasn’t a fast trip, but when the water level came back up again, that put all of these fossils under water. So it’s a little hard to track that, but that was a lot of dry land to walk on. The upper third, at least, of the United States was covered with ice. In some theories, they walked along the coast and they got to the edge of the ice and they turned left and headed for the interior of the country. That’s a wonderful theory except that Professor Overstreet has some digs down in the Kenosha area, and he has dated some of his fossils, his human inhabitant fossils, back 13,000 years. Professor Adovasio, who has a dig near Pittsburgh, also has 13,000-year-old fossils of cutting on mammoth bones, things like that. Apparently, they got here before they got here, but there are a number of really interesting theories. There’s a dig down in Monte Verde in Chile that also has 13,000-year-old human habitation. And underneath that hearth, there might be another hearth that is 33,000 years-old.

I could go on. This is some really fascinating stuff. There might be a group that came over from Spain, 25,000 years ago, whatever it was, but it’s a fascinating subject, and if you thought they walked over the top of the world on the land bridge was the end of the story, it is not the end of the story. Stay tuned. It took 10,000 years to get from the top of the world down to the bottom of South America, excuse me, 10,000 miles to go from the top to the bottom, and it took about 7,000 years. Okay, let’s go and have the next one. Change the, oh, I got the… That’s right, we talked. The other group of people who contributed to our plants were the Europeans. Apparently, Christopher Columbus consulted a mathematician, who told him that there was a very good probability that if you sailed west you could find the east.

The other way to get to the east was to go across Europe and go across Asia. It was a route called the Silk Road or the Silk Route. There was a land route and a water route, and both of ’em were long and dangerous, and a lot people started out on that route that didn’t come back. Christopher Columbus decided that by sailing from Italy he could get out there and he could find China. He would’ve been right except for one thing and that’s called the New World. He bumped into the New World and found Native Americans, found a bunch of plants. He had told his subscribers that he was gonna bring back not only gold but spices. He did collect some plants, and he hauled ’em back to Europe, and they tasted terrible. He told his subscribers that maybe I just don’t know how to collect these things properly.

Give me some money for another trip and I’ll go back over and try again. At the time that Christopher Columbus bumped into America, there were about 300 different food crops that were being farmed here. None of them were any plant that the Europeans knew anything about. From what I’ve read, about three-fifths of today’s farm crops have their origin in the New World. I put Cracker Jacks on there because there’s a real excited author named Jack Weatherford who thinks that Cracker Jacks are one of the Native American contributions to our cuisine because, after all, they made popcorn and they made maple syrup, so who’s to say that they didn’t pour the maple syrup on top of the popcorn. There was this gigantic exchange of plants and animals between the Old World and the New. These are some New World plants that went over to Europe. Wild sunflowers were a plant that was used by Native Americans for their oil, and the Europeans recognized it as something that was good for not only getting oil but for feeding livestock. So they did the plant breeding that resulted in the super-duper sunflowers that we have today.

My children used to say that it was really no fun watching television with either me or my husband. He was big into birds, and so when you’re watching The Waltons, which happens in West Virginia and you hear a Scaled Quail, which is a bird that lives in the desert southwest, you know, you can “bogus.” But there’s a wonderful Garfield cartoon where Garfield goes back in time and makes lasagna for Emperor Nero. (laughter) So they were getting a “bogus” from their mother when that happened because tomatoes are a New World plant. Tomatoes did not land in Europe until about 1550. They had a lot of pasta at that time, but they did not have any tomato sauce until after 1550. Tomatoes were considered a really decorative plant. They were considered to be a poisonous plant. It took some young man who wanted to commit suicide by eating tomatoes. The crowd gathered and he ate the tomatoes, and nothing happened to him.

Then people started figuring it out. Thomas Jefferson used to cultivate tomatoes. Evening primrose on the top right is a New World plant. The root is edible. It takes a couple hours of cooking to make the thing tender. It’s a very woody root, but just the first-year root is edible, and that went over to Europe. They had never seen anything like a turkey before. I don’t know whether it’s this turkey or there’s a species in Central America called the ocellated turkey, which is even more strangely marked. Turkeys went over to the Old World.

Back in the day, turkey was kind of a code word for exotic. If you called something turkey or Turkish 500 years ago, it meant that it was like something nobody had ever seen before. There were also Old World plants and animals that came to this country. Honeybees were called white man’s flies by the Native Americans. There’re plenty of pollinators here, but there were no honeybees. Apples came over on the boat like my ancestors did. The Native Americans had no hoofed milk-giving herd animals. So, no cheese, no ice cream, no yogurt. It explains why about 75% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant because they did not have milk in their background growing up.

The hoofed milk-giving herd animals also brought with them to this country smallpox, because that was endemic in some of these herds. That’s why when Jenner made his vaccine against smallpox, the first person he tested on was a milkmaid because she was exposed to cows all the time. Google it. It’s a great story. That was one of the ways that smallpox got into this country. There is a professor that said, “Our children are growing up in a European landscape.” If you ask a kid to tell you six or eight wild flowers, they’re gonna tell you daisies and dandelions and chicories and all those roadside plants that are not native. Chicory on the upper-left. There were four different cultivars of chicory. Two of them were used for salad herbs. One of them was cultivated for its roots, and the other one was cultivated because it’s a livestock fodder.

They planted it in the field just the way we plant alfalfa. It’s something that’s starting to catch on today. You can make multiple cuttings just like you can with alfalfa. The root was used to make a coffee substitute. If you’re down in Louisiana you can buy Luzianne coffee, and that has a chicory additive. Too much chicory is not good for your eyes, and some people don’t like the taste. It’s a little bit bitter, and the other thing about chicory is that it’s kind of an un-coffee. If you’re a couch potato, coffee might get you up off the couch but chicory won’t, because it’s a little calmer than coffee is. Dandelions are one of my favorite wildflowers.

Plenty of vitamin A and D in the leaves. We all know that the flowers make a nice wine. The scientific name of dandelion is taraxacum officinale, which means the official cure for everything. It was used medicinally for a lot of different purposes. Teasil in the middle on the top was brought over on purpose by people who were in the milling industry because they would make fabric and they would use the really needley teasil heads to comb the material so that you would bring up a nap-like flannel. In the bottom left, we have bouncing-bet, which is the Old English name for the washerwoman. If you take the stem of that and the roots and you pound them with water, you’ve got soapy water. That was a soap in a plant, and of course, in the bottom right-hand side we have broadleaf plantain, which has all kinds of antiseptic properties. I gave this program one time, and a farmer came up afterwards and said, “When I was a kid, “if I got a cut, my father used to take a plantain leaf “and put it between my skin and the bandage when he bandaged it up.” He said, “I never had an infection, and I never had a scar.” Also, if you pound the clean leaves, you can use it on itchy things like mosquito bites and poison ivy.

– [Woman] What else? – What? – Bee bites. – Bee stings? – Mm hm. – And it’s related to Metamucil. If you do any sort of invasive control, you know these two plants, Queen Anne’s lace on the left. Back in 1609, the French developed the root of Queen Anne’s lace, which is Daucus carota, into the carrot that we know today. It became a really, really popular plant for people. The colonists, when they came over, planted it in their kitchen gardens. The other one is wild parsnip. Wild parsnip should have a big beware sign on it because there’s a mathematical formula, sap plus sweat, plus sunshine, equals scar.

So if you go to do any control of wild parsnip, you should always wear long sleeves and long pants. Sap plus sweat plus sunshine is… At any rate, this is plant that was brought over in 1609 to Virginia. Within 50 years, it was up in Massachusetts, and 150 years after that, the Native Americans had adopted it, and the soldiers, who were going through Massachusetts trying to eliminate the Indians were burning caches with baskets and baskets of wild parsnip root in them. The root, again, is edible if you use the first-year root. It’s a two-year plant. Apparently, this is a topic that’s interested people for a very long time. Mullein can really take over the landscape. It’s a pretty plant.

The seeds were used as a fish poison. So if you wanna go fishing and you’re a little lazy to do a little casting of your line, you throw the seeds in the water, and the fish float to the surface. But there’s a whole bunch of other uses, medicinal uses for mullein, both for man and beast, a lot of treatments of bronchial diseases. I love common names, and when I see the common names of this on the right-hand side, candlewick, because the midvein of the leaf was used in oil lamps as a wick. Flannel-leaf, if you’ve ever touched mullein you know that it’s got a very fuzzy leaf. Lungwort because it treated lung diseases. Torchwort because Roman soldiers used to use the dried old stalk of the mullein. They’d tip it in tallow, and they’d use it for torches. Hag’s taper because it was associated with witches, and it was also associated with spells against witches.

Quaker rouge, my favorite one. The Quaker woman were not supposed to wear makeup. So before their sweetie came over, they would take some mullein leaf and they would just rub their cheeks a little bit. The problem is that mullein often causes a little dermatitis. So you would get this little irritation red, but it looked like rouge, and they looked lovely for their sweeties. Some wildflower books will tell you that yarrow, top left, and lamb’s quarters, the other top, and self-heal on the bottom left– I have trouble with left and right, I do north and south really easily– and nettle are alien, but that’s a real good question. My oldest daughter is an archeologist, and the lamb’s quarters, the top right plant, she was looking at plant material that was included in digs from 1,000 and 2,000 years ago, and they had lamb’s quarters in there. So if it is an alien plant, it did not come over after Columbus. Maybe it across the top of the world with the people who came across the top of the world.

Maybe it’s a circumpolar plant and it was here anyhow. It’s related to quinoa, and it’s easy to grow, and it has seeds that don’t have to be treated at all before they’re used. Nettle, in the bottom right corner, has a fiber. There are medicinal and edible properties to nettle but it has a fiber in it. Native American women would walk around with dried nettle stems, which they would rub against their thighs to release the fiber from the rest of the stem. The fiber could be woven into a material that was almost like linen. When you see a picture of those Conestoga wagons going across the West, almost all of those tops of the Conestoga wagons were made out of nettle fiber. It was also used to make tents and some other things. So, really, really important plant.

The moral of the story, as I said, is not how well you remember tonight’s jumble of information, but do your own homework. The top plant in the middle there is water hemlock. It’s the most poisonous plant in the hemisphere. If you eat any of it, you have got 30 minutes to live. So, get your affairs in order. (audience laughs) But it is in the same family as Queen Anne’s lace and caraway and fennel and anise, and when you look at the seed heads, it looks like caraway and fennel and anise. So if you’re browsing, know what you’re putting in your mouth before you put it in your mouth. The purple nightshade, which is the other plant, is another good example of plants that are in a family that has some really edible stuff in it and some really poisonous stuff in it. Purple nightshade is not good for you but tomatoes and potatoes are in the same family, and they are.

We’re gonna cruise through some of the major plant communities around here and see what was growing in them and how they were used. The people who came over here, the first settlers, the first pilgrims and Puritans, were by and large city people. They were not farmers, which made it twice as hard for them to make a living once they got here. They had never seen anything like the forests that they saw as soon as they landed in New England or in the mid-Atlantic. They were terrified by these forests. Often they would find some of the berry crops. We all love to come across wild strawberries or wild blueberries or something like that. They would say, oh, this is my lucky day. I found a big bunch of blueberries.

There are a whole bunch of berry crops that need to have open sunlight. They don’t grow underneath the trees, and the Native Americans worked hard, either with fire or with girdling trees to keep those patches of blueberries and strawberries and raspberries open. Not only are they good to eat, but a lot of these had medicinal uses too. Strawberry was used to assist in childbirth, and it also has a chemical in it which is good for dissolving tartar. So if you want to help keep your teeth healthy, eat a lot of strawberries. Blueberries in almost every journal that I look at, blueberries are credited with helping to control diabetes. They talk about blueberry tea but also the blueberries themselves. A lot of these fruits were eaten fresh but a lot of them were also dried and turned into loaves, concentrated loaves of fruit, which were kind of equivalent to tomato paste when it comes to boiling something down. A lot of them were pounded into pemmican, which was a combination of fruit and meat and dried meat and fats.

But with the blueberries and diabetes, whether it was blueberry tea made from the leaves, and it’s kinda dangerous to just grab any member of the blueberry family and make tea from the leaves because some of them are not good for you. When we have blueberry tea these days, we expect it to taste like blueberries, and I’m not sure that the blueberry leaf tea that they used 400 years ago did. Whether it was the fruit or the leaf tea or both, but all these books say that it was good for diabetes. Some more forest plants. Up in the top left we have Mandrake or mayapple, what the kids call umbrella plants. It has to have two leaves coming out the top before it’s mature enough to have a flower and a fruit. The fruit is in the middle, and the fruit, it was called citrine fruit sometimes because it’s a very mildly lemony flavor. Medicinally, it was used for a gynecological medicine, and it is still the source of that gynecological medicine today. One of my favorite stories that I found out when I had been researching this stuff is when DeWitt Clinton, who you all remember from high school, is the guy who was the Governor of New York when the Erie Canal was built.

When he was pitching the Erie Canal to his investors, increased commerce in mayapple was one of the things that he put in the plus column for building the Erie Canal. Apparently, it was a very popular fruit on the frontier. People used to make pies and tarts with it. It’s, as I say, it’s kinda tasteless. It’s a little bit lemony. But the plant itself was also used as it says underneath the picture there. The potato is a New World plant. The potato traveled to the Old World, and then it traveled back to New England where mayapple was used as a pesticide to keep the pests off of the potatoes. It was called the Irish potato by then.

Top-right corner is bloodroot, which has a red juice inside of it, which also causes dermatitis. The Menominee word for bloodroot is to make the gourd red. So it was used as a dye for baskets and gourds. One of the answers to the questions, the teaching question, that was posed at the start is the doctrine of signature, as you can in the bottom left-hand side. That plant is liverwort. According to the doctrine of signature, which is an idea that is not just American, it’s an idea that is around the world, if a plant looks like your liver, then it’s good for your liver. If it looks like your heart, then it’s good for your heart. If it’s got a succulent stem, then it’s good for your skin, et cetera, et cetera. Maidenhair fern was used as a treatment for scalp and hair disorders because it has that long black midrib in the fern leaflet.

So, doctrine of signature, back in 1880 this thing reached its peak because obviously hepatica, which is one of our spring ephemerals, was used as a treatment for liver diseases. Everybody agreed that it wasn’t a very effective treatment, but it continued to be used as a liver treatment. I think that it was close to a half million pounds of hepatica leaves were harvested in 1880 alone to treat, ineffectually, liver diseases, and it’s something that was driven by the then equivalent of Big Pharma. The guys in the medicine wagon said this is good for you, so, man, they kept doing it. So that’s one of your answers already. The bottom one is wild ginger, bottom right. Wild ginger smells a little bit gingery. It’s the culinary ginger though, but it has some antibiotic properties. A lot of Native Americans would throw it into the pot whenever they were cooking any meat that was a little bit iffy.

They would also take it on the war trail with them to protect against sorcery. I suspect getting a bad case of food poisoning on the war trail was a good definition of sorcery. It kind of incapacitated you for a while, so they just were proactive about that. Bedstraw, top right, is in the same family as coffee and was used as a coffee substitute, but it was also used as a freckle remover and a diuretic. Daisy fleabane on the bottom right-hand side. The dried flowers of daisy fleabane were taken as a snuff. If you had a really, really thick head cold then you used the daisy fleabane snuff, and that helped you sneeze out some of the stuff that was in your sinuses. The wild columbine in the bottom middle, interesting plant. It had some medicinal uses, but I’m more interested in the fact that it had some magical uses too.

Young men used to take the seeds of it and rub the seeds on their hands, and then they would go up and shake hands with a young woman that they wanted to woo. It was supposed to persuade her about his virtues. As a result, a lot of young women stayed away from a lot of young men during certain seasons of the year when they were wooing their young women. Another one was if you took the seeds of wild columbine and you put them in the pipes that were smoked at ceremonies, it was very persuasive and you could turn somebody around to your point of view if you used those seeds. We laugh. What do we know? We got lucky things too. You know, athletes who wear the same underwear for six games in a row, whatever it is. (audience laughs) We have, yeah. (laughs) Okay, put down I didn’t say that. (audience laughs) Okay, so, some of the trees in the forest. Elm bark was used medicinally but also there’s an elm called slippery elm or red elm, and some people call it “piss elm.” Some people say it smells like licorice, and some people say it doesn’t.

An alternative when you’re making maple syrup to cooking and cooking and cooking and cooking the maple syrup, which was very difficult for the Native Americans to do before the Europeans got here with metal pots. If you were here before that, you were using birch bark pots, and you were heating up stones and you were putting the sap in these birch bark pots, and you were dumping a hot stone in there, and that would heat up the sap. Doing that over and over and over and over and over again, you know when you’re cooking sap into syrup it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So that’s a lot of hot rocks in birch bark vessels. So they were really happy to see those metal pots get here. They also made, using slippery elm, they also made these gigantic vats for maple syrup. They would collect it in smaller buckets made out of elm bark, but they would put the sap into these 200-gallon big flat vats. If you have this big flat vat of maple sap and you let it sit overnight and it freezes, you take off the ice in the morning. Then the next day it freezes again, or the next night, and you take off the ice again.

You’re doing the same thing as you would be doing with boiling it. You had to keep the kids and the dogs and the flies and things like that out of it, but it gets better. So that was one use for the elm. Leatherwood is the plant in the middle top and bottom. That’s a little shrub that grows in nice rich woodlands. Dermatitis again. It has a really nice strong bark, and they used to have contests to see if the strong men could pull the bark at each end and actually pull it apart, and mostly they could not, but it was also used to weave baskets. Again, some people get dermatitis from the sap. Basswood on the right top and bottom.

Almost all the twine on the frontier was made out of the soft inner bark of basswood, and it also had medicinal and edible properties, including sort of tranquilizer properties. The bottom left-hand plant is Amelanchier or shadbush or juneberry. Serviceberry is another name for it. That was a really, really, really important plant on the frontier, and a major ingredient of pemmican. I’ll tell you really quickly why it’s called serviceberry. Back in the day when there were circuit riding preachers, who went from settlement to settlement, during the winter time, they couldn’t get back into the settlements. About the time that this plant is in bloom was the time that the ice was breaking up, and the preachers were able to get back into some of the mountain settlements to marry people or bury people or do whatever services needed to be done. The blooming of the plant was associated with the arrival of the preacher. More trees.

Oak trees on the left top and bottom. The red oak, black oak bunch you can always tell because the ends of the lobes are pointed, and the white oak group you can tell because the ends of the lobes are rounded. They both have acorns. The acorns were used for food. If you are looking for something you can use right away, then you use the white oak. The black oak and red oak acorns were kind of bitter and they had to be boiled in a little bit of lye. Ashes were put in there to kind of calm them down a little bit. Hickory also was used as a food plant, and, amazingly, shagbark hickory makes a pretty nice syrup. I was reading a Wisconsin magazine not long ago, and they were talking about cooking the twigs, I think it was, but the one I read about talked about tapping the actual tree.

Those were very, very, very important plants in construction. We have beech on the top right, and that was a very important food plant, both for man and wildlife, really high in protein nut. Ash trees in the middle on the bottom, it’s amazing to me that, again, there was a superstition about ash trees. It wasn’t just in this country. It was for a long time, and it was in other parts of the world. Scottish women had the cradles made with ash runners so snakes wouldn’t crawl up the cradle and get into the baby’s cradle. I’m not even sure what the snake situation is in Scotland. I know that there’s nothing poisonous there. Apparently, back in the days of Pliny, back a couple thousand years ago and beyond, the belief was that ash could protect you from snakes.

This is a tree that was sacred to a number of different Native American tribes. I always figure when I’m doing a PowerPoint that you’re intelligent enough to read it yourself. (audience laughs) Okay? It’s like the bison. We had bison here in Wisconsin. Bison ranged all the way to the Atlantic, and when they killed a bison they used everything from the hooves to horns to the tail, everything. The Indians were the ones who figured out how to turn maple sap into map syrup and beyond into maple sugar, and not only was it a sweet treat on a landscape that didn’t have a lot of sweets on it, but it was a really good trade item. I live near Newburg, and there was a big sugar bush not far away from where I live. Highway 33 was actually a very important trading route for the Menominee and the other tribes that were in this area. I read one old journal that said that the people who settled here were happy to have the maple syrup and the maple sugar, but they wished that the Indians would not use the same pots that they boiled the fish in.

(audience laughs) – Ew. – Yeah. So, now we’re gonna head for the wetlands. Wars were fought about wetlands, and this is why. On the far left we have spatterdock lily, bullhead lily, yellow water-lily, and underneath that is the root or rhizome of it. I want you to picture this, women. At this time of year, if you were a Native American and you lived near a wetland, you would be walking through a wetland in the water with bare feet using your toes to find the roots of these yellow water-lilies, and when you found one underwater with your toes, you would wiggle it out with your toes, and you would throw it into a special canoe that you were trailing behind you. It had low sides and you have a little rope over your shoulder, and these roots are as big as your arm. They used them for all of the things that we use potatoes for.

I read one account where someone was traveling in the Ohio River Valley and observing the Miami Indians, and said that they put it in a pit fire underground, and they cooked it for four days and it tasted like mutton, which I’m not sure is a good thing or not. (audience laughs) As far as cattails are concerned, there is something edible on the cattail root twelve months out of the year. There is the cattail leaves themselves, which were used for weaving sides for summer dwellings and floors and all kinds other things, baskets. Then when the Europeans got here, they were used for caning chairs. I went to school at Cornell, and at the north end of Cornell is Montezuma Wildlife Refuge, and it’s a big wetland, and that was a really big chair caning area. Besides that, the flowers of the cattail, the male flower and the female flower are on the same stock. The pollen, the male pollen, is very yellow, and it’s used as a flour substitute. It’s got a lot of protein in it. It makes a really good pancake. I’ve had it half and half with regular flour.

The female flower was cooked like corn on the cob. Also, some of the Midwestern tribes here, when a baby was born in the winter time, they would take the fluff and put it into a basket, and they would put the new baby into the basket because it was a nice warm place to lay a baby. The eupatoriums are really, really, really important. There’s a eupatorium which is poisonous. It’s called white snakeroot. If you’ve heard of Abraham Lincoln’s mother, she died of something called milk sickness, and milk sickness was a sickness that the cows got when they grazed on white snakeroot, which is one of the eupatoriums. The calves get the tremors when they nurse, and it kills people sometimes. But these two were really, really, really important medicines on the Frontier. Unfortunately, the Joe-Pye weed on the right was used as a spring tonic, and apparently it tastes just awful.

Strong men used to run away when their wives came at ’em with a spoonful of this good spring tonic. But both of them were used for some of the really serious problems. There was no malaria in this country until the English brought it over. It treated the symptoms of malaria, the agues, the shaking fevers. They used it to treat yellow fever and typhus and typhoid. It was just a really, really important plant. Interestingly enough, when my mother was with dad, who was stationed in Miami during World War II, she got sick and the doctor said, “Gee, if we hadn’t eradicated dengue fever “I would say that you had dengue fever.” But dengue fever may have been eradicated but with climate change, the mosquitoes that carry it are able to survive farther north, and dengue fever is going to probably make a comeback. Boneset, which is the plant on the left, was called boneset because it treated the symptoms of breakbone fever. It’s a fever that’s so bad you just feel like your bones are breaking.

But that was dengue fever, and so remember that plant. More wetland plants, jewelweed on the top left and middle. That has a really succulent stem, and the succulent stem has got some anti-fungal qualities to it and can be used for athlete’s foot or other things like that, mosquito bites, poison ivy. There’s an old saying, “God put the cure where she put the disease.” So if you’re out in the bog and getting bitten by mosquitoes, you can use the juice from a jewelweed plant. The middle picture shows a young fruit of that plant. When the fruits get bigger, you can see the seeds are brown inside. Touch-me-not is another name for jewelweed, and it’s called touch-me-not ’cause when you pinch the bottom of that fruit, it explodes and sends the seeds away from the plant, but if you can catch the brown seeds and eat them, they’re really nut-like in flavor. Yellow lady slipper, that blows me away. It was used to treat a large variety of what they call nervous disorders, insomnia, epilepsy, nerves of various kinds, and apparently it was a medicine that didn’t have any side effects.

The other thing it was used for was the powdered root was used to treat toothaches. Apparently, some of the roots of these lady slipper orchids were so strong that they practically extracted the tooth during the treatment, but it really numbed up the area. The top plant on the right is great lobelia, likes to have its feet kinda moist. Its scientific name is lobelia siphilitica. The first case of syphilis was recorded in Europe in 1493. If that suggests something to you, you’re right. Apparently, a low-grade syphilis was endemic in some of the populations of Native Americans here, and when the Europeans came over, they picked it up. It was kind of like revenge for smallpox. When it got over to Europe, it absolutely raged through Europe.

It reached China in ten years. The crowned heads of Europe were being wiped out by the disease. Great lobelia is one of the plants that the Native Americans used to treat the very mild symptoms that they experienced here. They didn’t know anything about systemic medicine, but they treated symptoms. It was brought over to the Old World and did nothing for syphilis, as it was being experienced over there. The bottom right is swamp milkweed. Again, milkweed is an important fiber plant, but this was also the Meskwaki or Fox Indians that lived in this area used this plant. It was guaranteed to get rid of all of your internal parasites in one hour. Wild rose used for hay fever, mainly for eye problems, especially for the runny eyes you get with hay fever, and a number of other medicinal uses, but the rose hips are, if you take three wild rose hips, they have as much vitamin C in them as an orange.

You have to be really careful ’cause the rose hips are bristly, and you do not want to consume the bristles because they will irritate your intestinal tract. So if you’re ever gonna try one of these things, be sure to rub all the bristles off, and if you buy them commercially, just kind of check that. Arrowhead, on the right-hand side, has a very edible tuber, which was also called duck-potato, was an important food. Goldthread was another eye treatment. It’s just a little plant. It’s only a few inches tall. The reason for that quote is if you were gonna collect goldthread to sell it, it actually has gold roots, but you’re sitting in a wetland with mosquitoes all around on a hot day, and I can’t imagine how many goldthread roots would take to make a pound, many, many, many, many, many. We’re out in the bog now. Sundew on the top left was another freckle remover, and it was also used like bedstraw was used, as a thickener for curdling milk into cheese.

It’s a vegetarian milk curdler. The normal milk curdler is made out of a beef product. So, freckles, yes. In the middle we have pitcher plant, the flower on top and the pitcher is underneath. Pitcher plants’ genus is Sarracenia. It was named after Dr. Sarrazin in Montreal, who used the plant to treat people who had smallpox. He swore that people had a shorter disease and fewer smallpox scars when they used pitcher plants. It was also used to collect berries.

The little pitcher was used to collect berries. There was some charms for it, too. Cranberry, on the upper right, that is the basis of our whole commercial cranberry crop is that little wild cranberry. The bottom right is sphagnum moss. Sphagnum moss, when it’s dry, can absorb 20 times its weight in liquid. So it was Pampers. They used to put it into the cradle boards when they packed the babies in there, and it was also feminine hygiene products. It’s antibacterial, so that helped with the cradle boards. It helped with the diaper rash.

Poison sumac, the guy on the upper right. Counterirritant as far as I can see means that it’s something that takes your mind off your original condition. (laughs) So, you know, like if your toe hurts, poke yourself in the arm and you won’t feel your toe. At any rate, the idea of rubbing poison sumac sap on somebody who was paralyzed and thinking that it was curing them somehow because they were twitching. This is Victorian medicine. Glad I’m not there. It also interestingly made a permanent black ink, and it was also used as a boot black in shoe factories, except that the people who worked with it were always coming down with poison sumac because like 85% of the population gets it. If you get poison ivy, you’ll get poison sumac, and even a little bit more so, it’s the same oil. On the top left, we have tamarack, medicinal and edible uses but it was also used– The rootlets were used for sewing. You’ve heard the expression it takes a village.

Well, it takes a village to make a canoe because the outer covering of it was usually bark, sometimes elm. The outer covering was birch. The skeleton of it was cedar, which is the next one down. The thread that was used to sew everything together was tamarack rootlets, and the caulk to make sure it didn’t leak was spruce tar. So that’s four trees to make a single product there. Cedar, again, cedar had some edible and medicinal properties. One of the more interesting ones, the cedar charcoal was used in a tattoo, and Native Americans used tattoos as sort of a charm. If you have arthritis in your elbow, you get a little tattoo there, and not only is it supposed to relieve the symptoms, but it also is supposed to keep the arthritis from returning. Does it work? I don’t know. Maybe so.

Maybe we’re missing out on a good bet here. Willow down at the bottom right-hand side is aspirin on the hoof. For millennia, people have been harvesting willows and making pain relievers and fever reducers out of the bark. It was believed that the more bitter the willow the better medicine it was, except you got to what my father would call the point of diminishing returns where it tasted so bad that you couldn’t get it in your mouth. So then they had to find some of the sweeter willows to cut it with. And out on the prairie. Milkweed. Milkweed was, again, a fiber plant. I keep reading this.

The milkweed flower, when it has dew in the morning, people would take that and they would squeeze it into a pot, and they would cook that down, and it made like a brown sugar substance. It was really hard for me to understand how many milkweeds you’d have to squeeze in order to get something that you would actually be able to cook down. The pods were eaten. They were thrown in bison stews. It says there, what? Nine pounds of fluff equals one mattress. I also can’t picture what nine pounds of milkweed fluff looks like. Does it fill half this room? (laughs) But back in World War II, it was discovered that the milkweed fluff made a good insulator. So a lot of the flight suits in World War II were insulated with milkweed fluff, and kids were given burlap bags and told to go out and pick milkweed pods, and they were given a quarter or 50 cents for a bag full of milkweed. Not only was it a good insulator, and those B-52s were not exactly what you’d call climate-controlled unless you mean the inside was the same temperature as the outside.

But they were not only warmer in their milkweed fluff flight suits, but they were also more floatable in their milkweed fluff flight suits. The big orange strip on the bottom there is one of the milkweeds. Pleurisy root is one name for it, which tells you what it was used for medicinally. It’s the only milkweed that does not have a milky sap, and what’s its real name? – [Woman] Butterfly weed. – Butterfly weed, and it really is butterfly weed. The plant in the upper right is a relative of the milkweeds. It’s called Indian hemp, and it’s one of the dogbanes. That is a really important fiber plant. The mints over on the left-hand side.

In the middle we have wild bergamot. On the far left we have lemon horsemint, and the bottom one is mountain mint, Virginia mountain mint. The mints traditionally have been used as medications for indigestion and stomach problems. When you’re feeling a little out of it, you’ll have some mint tea, and that really fixes you up. They’re also used for various colds and coughs, bronchial symptoms. They were also harvested for oils, and the strongest oil comes from the lemon horsemint. Apparently, that can raise a blister on people, the oil on that is so strong. It was also used as a hair dressing by Native Americans. The one on the far right is called Queen of the Prairie.

Fantastic, looks like cotton candy. Doesn’t bloom for very long, but it just really dresses up a prairie. It likes moist prairies. That is the prairie source for aspirin, salicylic acid. And who’ve we got in the middle? We’ve got wild onion, and that was an important food plant. Goldenrod on the top left. There’s one species of goldenrod that was used by the Americans after the Boston Tea Party. The leaves were used as a tea substitute. We don’t have it growing here in the Midwest.

One of the native Midwestern tribes believed in bathing the babies in a milk, excuse me, a goldenrod bath to make sure that they would grow up with a sense of humor. (audience laughs) I say let’s have more of that. Thomas Edison believed that if we ever lost our sources of foreign rubber, if a war or anything shut down latex sources, that milk, or excuse me, goldenrod had enough latex in it to be viable as a commercial substitute. He actually did some hybridizing. Goldenrods like to hybridize anyhow, but he did some hybridizing and came up with twelve-foot tall goldenrods. At one point, Henry Ford gave him a Model T Ford that had tires on it that were made out of goldenrod rubber. Apparently, it is doable but maybe not in large quantities. People always ask me how Native Americans avoided getting bitten by mosquitoes, and I’m not sure that they did. White sage on the bottom left was thrown into fires and sort of smudged to help keep mosquitoes away.

The middle plant is coreopsis, beautiful, beautiful prairie plant. If you take that yellow flower and you, I’m trying to think if you boil it or not. I think you boil it. It turns the water red and makes a really nice beverage apparently from what I read, but also it was a beverage that you would drink if you were a pregnant woman and you wanted to ensure that you had a girl child. (audience laughs) All right. Compass plant. On the right, it’s called compass plant because the young groups of leaves, at any rate, orient themselves so that they face north and south. The pith in the upper third of the stem is a prairie chewing gum. There’s some interesting superstitions with this. There are some of the tribes out on the Plains that would never camp anywhere near compass plant because they believed it drew lightning to the site.

There are some tribes that made sure that they camped near compass plant because it repelled lightning. So take your choice. Cardinal flower likes wet or kinda moist prairies. This is another one that was used in tattoos to keep away illnesses. Echinacea in the middle is one of our T.V. drugs that they try to sell us. My older sister, whenever she feels a cold coming, she goes and gets her echinacea, and she believes firmly that it helps her immune system. So did the Plains tribes. It was one of the most important plants in the Great Plains. They used it for distemper in horses.

They used it to treat rattlesnake bites. They used it for a bunch of different pretty drastic cures. Interestingly enough, echinacea comes from the Greek word for hedgehog, which kind of explains what that seed head looks like, and that was used as a hairbrush. The liatris or gayfeather or blazing star has a root that tastes kinda carroty. Some of the Plains tribes would harvest it and then store it just like bananas. I like bananas when they’re just able to peel ’em and they’re really green. Most people like to wait until the sugars develop. When the root of the liatris ages for a while, the sugars develop, so it’s a little bit sweeter. We’ve seen a lot of edible and medicinal.

We’ve talked about, a little bit about construction materials. Just as our culture has plenty of lucky charms, the Native Americans did too. As I said, if you think of a plant list for any given place, a lot of it was useful in one way or another. We got a plant. It has roots. It has a stem. It has leaves. It may have twigs. It has bugs. It has flowers. It has seeds.

All those are potential food or medicine. Is the plant gonna be good for a food or a beverage, or is it gonna be a poison, or is it gonna be a medicine? If so, how do you use it? Do you harvest it at a certain time? The Europeans believed that there were certain plants that were medicinal that only could be harvested when the moon was full. Maybe there’s a special time to harvest it. Maybe it has to be a certain age when you harvest it. Maybe you have to dry it before you can eat it. Jack-in-the-pulpit had the nickname of memory plant because if you ever ate a jack-in-the-pulpit root raw, you remembered it. (audience laughs) So that’s a plant that had to be aged for five or six months before it could be used for food. So, there are all these different combinations, and there are all these different parts, and there’s all these different possible uses for them, and now I’m gonna ask you. Besides the doctrine of signature, which says if it’s shaped like my liver, it’s good for my liver, what would you guess for how they figured it out? – [Woman] Well, ’cause you didn’t die or not.

– So it’s let’s try it on Herb and see what happens? (audience laughs) Okay, so trial and error. That would be one. – [Woman] Watching the animals? – Okay, watching the animals is really good, especially if you’re in an area that has apes, because apes are really good at eating things that we can also eat. Okay, so trial and error, watching the animals. – [Woman] Effectiveness. – Effective? Well, you gotta try it first. – [Woman] Communications, other groups. – Okay, communication with other groups. Should we go to the Cliff’s Notes version of this now? Okay, so we have doctrine of signature.

Letting animals try it is a lovely name. I like to tell kids that that’s gonna be on their next spelling test, zoopharmacognosy. Okay, trial and error. Related plants. These people came over the top of the world, at least some of them did, and they found plants in the New World that reminded them of plants that they had left behind in the Old World. So maybe they were already familiar with a relative of that plant. Acclimatization, as I said, they were not moving fast, 7,000 years to go 10,000 miles is not a real fast march. As they lived in an area for a while, they just kind of got used to the plants there and probably got more adventuresome about trying the plants. Then there’s the last one, and I have to tell you, my dad was an attorney, and the idea of having something like this in print under my name just gives me the heebeegeebees.

There’s a guy named Tom Brown who has a bunch of books about outdoor survival. In one of his books, he talks about edible plants and medicinal plants, and what he says is if you sit down next to the plant and you empty your mind of all the 20th century, 21st century garbage that is in there, the plant will inform you about whether it’s good or bad, and if it’s a good plant, he doesn’t use good and bad, if it’s a good plant, what is it good for. It is in print. I could show you the book. It sounds like lawsuit heaven to me, but on the other hand, I have a friend who’s a botanist who says that I’m an overeducated Cornell graduate who wouldn’t know a vibe if it came up and bit me. So there is that, but we’ll just put it on the list, vibes. It’s typical to end a program about nature with a sunset slide, so I gave you a lunar eclipse instead. Does anybody have any questions? As I say, monster amount of information and what I gave you was a small percentage of the information that you could collect if you started with the list of plants that you’ve just seen. So, any questions? (audience applauds)