- I'm Carol Shirk 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)