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Field Medicine for a Survival Situation

December 22, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

Rose

A reader e-mailed to ask if I could suggest some medicinal wild plants that could be used fresh in the field, without much preparation, in an emergency survival situation. Usually I write about plants that take some amount of time to turn into medicine, so I thought this was a good idea.

Here are seven plants at the top of my list:

Rose – Apply the petals as a bandage to inhibit bacterial growth on cuts.

Yarrow & critter (Photographer unknown)

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) – Apply the leaf topically to stop bleeding and act as an antiseptic to prevent infection, even in very deep wounds. It can also stop internal bleeding if the leaves are dried and ingested as a tea!

Plantain (Plantago major or minor) – Chop up the leaf and add spit or water to make a paste, then apply it topically to draw out splinters or soothe stings from insects or jellyfish (I do know someone who used it this way!).

Chickweed

Chickweed (Stellaria media) – Eat the leaves, flowers and stems to bring down a high fever.

Usnea lichen – Antimicrobial properties mean it works as gauze for a wound. You can also dry it and then brew a tea of it to tackle pneumonia or a similar respiratory infection.

Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) – Eat the leaves or dry and brew as a tea to kill parasites hitching a ride as intestinal worms. This plant could cause an miscarriage, so don’t take it if you’re pregnant and want to stay that way.

Blackberry (Rubus discolor) – Dig up the root or pick and dry the leaf from this thorny vine and then drink as a tea to cure diarrhea. Might sound like a minor issue, but if left untreated, it could cause fatal dehydration.

Blackberry/ Image by Oregon State University

It is in your interest to achieve mastery at identifying these plants ahead of time. You really wouldn’t want to be trying to match sketches in a field guide to plants you aren’t familiar with in a high-stress situation.

The links to the plants listed above will take you to my posts on identification and further use info.

Wild plants save lives. Share this post.

Posted in Eat Weeds, Urban Foraging, Wilderness Survival | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Kinnickinnick: How to Cure a UTI

December 11, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

IMG_1278
Kinnickinnick, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, also called Uva Ursi, Bear Berry, and Indian tobacco, is a common shrub planted ornamentally outside apartment complexes and homes and a common wild plant found in western and northern America.

Kinnickinnick is a diuretic and urinary antiseptic, which makes it an effective cure for acute urinary tract infections. To make the medicine, just strip the leaves off the stem, put ‘em in a jar and douse in extremely strong alcohol with a little water mixed in. As per the late herbalist Michael R.S. Moore, the recipe is one part herb to five parts liquid, and the liquid should be 50% alcohol. To achieve this you could take 195 proof Everclear and dilute it with water.

Sten Porse/Wikipedia

Let the mixture sit for 6 weeks in the dark before using. Be careful only to take this medicine short-term and for serious infections, as it will irritate the bladder and kidneys if used more than a few days. The dosage, according to Moore, is 30 to 60 drops in 8 ounces of water, three times per day.

Kinnickinnick contains tannins, so it has an astringent action that can also be useful as a tea to treat diarrhea. However, you would need to dry the leaves first and apply some hard alcohol to them to make the medicinal compounds extractable in hot water, according to herb author Gregory Tilford.

Some people smoke the leaves. I have tried this and did not like the flavor.

The red berries of kinnickinnick are edible, though not particularly worthwhile. They are very mealy.

Another use is for kinnickinnick is to soak in a bath of the leaves for, um, shrinking hemorrhoids. I hope you don’t need to, but if you do, maybe this will come in handy.

To identify this plant, look for smooth, spoon-shaped leaves that are darker in color on the top than on the bottom, and that are attached to the twigs in an alternate pattern. This means pairs of leaves alternate rather than appear directly across from each other.

There is a closely related upright version of this plant, a pretty shrub/tree with distinctive red bark, Arctostaphylos manzanita, known as Manzanita, which can be used similarly for medicinal purposes. It is common in California. Photo here.

Thanks for reading. Tell your friends how to use free medicine. Share this post!

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Five Surprising Uses for Mullein

December 7, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

Mullein on the Springwater Corridor

Mullein, Verbascum thapsus, is that common sidewalk weed you’ve no doubt seen around in disturbed places like vacant lots and overgrown yards. It grows in direct sunlight — or perhaps I should say, this being a Portland winter, direct cloudlight. The leaves are pale green and adorably fuzzy. Its first-year shape is a rosette, and then in its second year it sends up a tall flowering stalk with yellow blossoms. And by tall I mean really tall — eight feet tall! (See photo below).

I was just over 100 pages into Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, when I was surprised to find the characters using mullein for fishing. They put mullein in the water to stun the fish and send them floating to the surface, making it easy to net their catch en masse.

This works in real life. The seeds and flowers of mullein contain compounds called saponins. Saponins are soap-like and are highly toxic to insects and cold-blooded aquatic creatures. (They are harmless to people when cooked). If you find yourself in a survival situation and need to eat? Mullein saves the day.

You may have seen mullein in a health food store as an herbal tea for respiratory irritation. It is antimicrobial and antispasmodic for coughs.

Or you may have seen mullein flower oil sold as a remedy for ear infections. Here’s a great how to video on identifying mullein and making the flower oil yourself. The season for flower harvesting is summer, but you can pick the leaves and dry them for tea any time. I prefer the leaves from the first-year plants.

Here are two lesser-known uses for mullein:

* As a primitive candle: Drip the flower stalk in something flammable — such as wax or fat from a roadkill animal — and use it as a torch. I have seen this done, and it is awesome.

* As a smoking herb: Mullein is a respiratory medicine and so smoking the dried leaves is one way to bring that medicine directly into the lungs. You could also more recreationally use it as a soft, cooling, airy base for herbal smoking mixtures. It is very mildly sedating. I like to combine it with lemon balm and Russian sage, as I have written about before, but it’s great in many combinations.

Click here to learn more about historical Native American uses for mullein.

Second-year mullein

Warning: Be careful not to confuse mullein with the toxic plant known as foxglove, Digitalis sp., which has a similar structure (a basal rosette and a stalk) and also has a slightly fuzzy texture, though less fuzzy than mullein. Please have a look at foxglove here and you will see that foxglove has darker leaves and a different leaf surface. In flower confusion will not be an issue because foxglove flowers are shaped like little trumpets, which will make it more distinctive.

Also please be careful not to confuse mullein with the plant called lamb’s ear, Stachys byzantina. Lamb’s ear has a more similar color to mullein than foxglove but has a much silkier texture. Mullein is fuzzy, not silky. See a pic of lamb’s ear here.

Share the knowledge: Share this post!

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Thoughts on Thanksgiving

November 25, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

As I enjoyed a huge dinner filled with Tofurkey and cranberry sauce today and the warm company of dear friends, my thoughts shifted to the controversial nature of the holiday. There’s much to appreciate about an occasion that celebrates gratitude, kindness and generosity. But as my friends talked about their Cherokee and Nez Perce heritages, and the ways of other first peoples in North America, I found my thoughts drifting to the tragic result of European colonization of this continent: broken treaties and biological warfare, genocide and treachery, destruction of the land, air and water, and the subjugation and forced relocation of indigenous people to tiny reservations. Some estimate that over 90 percent of the native population of North America died in post-contact epidemics and wars. That’s not the narrative we see in pop culture. Google “Thanksgiving” and you get photos of pumpkins and cartoon turkeys. In the lighthearted commercials and television episodes about Thanksgiving, we rarely if ever see any acknowledgment of these nasty aspects of American history.

The truth is, colonial history is shameful. If we are to tell the story about how Squanto helped suffering European settlers hundreds of years ago, then we need to say what happened next: Squanto’s relatives were eventually murdered as his people, and others like them were driven off their land. We also need to honor the original people of North America by listening to their stories and informing ourselves about who they are now as well as the ways their ancestors once lived in the world.

There are many good books out there about first peoples of the Pacific Northwest, including “Peoples of the Northwest Coast: Their Archeology and Prehistory,” by Kenneth Ames; “Nch’i-Wana, ‘The Big River’: Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land,” by Eugene Hunn; and “Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America” by Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner. All of the above are scholarly works.

I recently purchased one of the newer books on this subject, called “The People of Cascadia,” a grant-funded, self-published volume by Heidi Bohan, who is an artist and educator with a great deal of experience living off-the-grid and deep relationships with Haida people. The book is a well-researched and accessible primer with many illustrations, and is suitable for readers of all ages. However, I have to mention that this book is also unfortunately riddled with errors in punctuation and grammar.

If you buy it, though, you do get to learn lots of fun facts. For instance, I was excited to read that native people of the 1700s shaved their faces, plucked their eyebrows, and bathed daily, perfuming themselves with plants, and that they regarded the European settlers they met as filthy because they bathed only once a week. I totally concur — all those modern-day Earth biscuits who think they are being “wild” when they sport unruly beards and stinky bodies are rather misguided.

Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. Please share this post, and go wild – wash up.

Posted in Eat Weeds, Urban Foraging, Wilderness Survival | 9 Comments »

Wild Candy in the Honey Locust Tree

November 1, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

They taste a lot better than they look.

When I was visiting my grandfather in Queens, NY, recently, I was excited to see flat black seed pods on the sidewalk outside his brick apartment building, because they were in front of a tree that had formidable thorns sticking out of its trunk (see below) and compound leaves on its branches. These features are characteristic of the Honey Locust, Gleditsia triacanthos, a tree with edible fruit.

The pods have a gooey pulp between the exterior casing and the seeds that tastes like the sugary insides of a Fig Newton(tm) type cookie. You can only squeeze out a wee bit from each pod, so it’s not a meal or anything, but it’s quite a nice sidewalk score when you get it.
Plants for a Future reports that the seeds themselves are also edible, but I didn’t know that at the time so I didn’t eat them. (If you have, would you leave a comment on this post and tell me what they taste like?)

Historic medicinal ethnobotanical uses for the honey locust tree include a tea of the bark to treat upset stomach, whooping cough, measles and smallpox. Delaware people reportedly combine it with the bark of sassafras, prickly ash and wild cherry trees to treat coughs and as a blood purifier.

Image by South Carolina Forestry Commission

Honey locust trees are native to eastern North America, though the USDA reports they have spread out across the U.S. everywhere but Oregon and Washington.

Back home in Portland, I have seen what I believe to be black locust trees instead. The black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia, looks similar but doesn’t have those distinctive thorns coming out of the bark. Its seed pods are reported to be toxic. However, black locust trees do have edible blossoms in the spring or summer. The tricky thing is, there are cultivated varieties of honey locust bred without thorns, so there is some shred of possibility that what I have seen planted as ornamental landscaping in the parking lot of a certain local organic grocery store might actually be modified honey locust.

Bottom line: If there are massive thorns, you’ve got the right tree. If there are not, it’s a gamble.

See the thorns?


Share this post and teach your east coast friends about free sidewalk candy!

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Portland Plant Medicine Gathering

October 30, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

The third annual Portland Plant Medicine Gathering will be held Dec. 2 through Dec. 4 at the National College of Natural Medicine and promises two days and three nights of herbal medicine workshops with some of the most respected teachers in the Pacific Northwest, including Ryan Drum, Howie Brounstein of the Columbines School, Scott Kloos of the School of Traditional Western Herbalism, Erico Schleicher of the Elderberry School, Missy Rohs and Gradey Proctor of the Arctos School, Cascade Anderson Geller, and many others. I’m honored to announce I’ll be teaching a class on wild edible and medicinal plants of the city there at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 3.

The cost to attend is $65 if you sign up by Oct. 31 (tomorrow), $80 if you sign up by Dec. 1, or $100 at the door. That’s less than half what most similar conferences cost across the country, and it’s a great way to explore different teachers if you’re thinking about signing up for a full-year program at one of the local herb schools. More info on single-day rates and the full schedule is available here.

In other news, I tasted that Mountain Ash berry infused brandy I made (as seen above), and it turned out fantastic. I put in more chopped apples than berries (approx. 2 to 3 parts apples to 1 part berries), and I added about 4 seconds worth of maple syrup to each jar. The key is to think of the berries as a splash of sour that you add to the apples and maple syrup, and then to think affectionately of the warm apple cider you’ll be enjoying it in later.

Tell your friends about the plant medicine gathering. Hope to see you there.

Posted in Eat Weeds, Urban Foraging, Wilderness Survival | 6 Comments »

In Which ‘Wild Girl’ Meets ‘Wildman’

October 27, 2011 by Rebecca Lerner

Brill, steve and violet species, with sassafras

I first heard of “Wildman” Steve Brill four years ago when I was studying wilderness survival in upstate New York. My classmates told me he was the expert on wild edible plants. Steve’s been teaching in Central Park since the ’80s, has penned two vegetarian wild food cookbooks, a wild food iPhone app, a couple field guides, and has probably been in the media more than any other forager.

Goutweed

The press adores him for being both quirky and quotable — in June he told a reporter that wineberries are “very dangerous, because when you eat them you die of happiness,” — and he regularly uses his platform to advocate for foragers and guerilla gardeners under attack. He was outspoken this summer, for instance, when New York officials threatened to enforce a foraging ban. In short, Steve is an important and highly respected figure in the scene.

So when I found out I’d be heading to New York in mid-October on literary business, I was excited to go on his 4-hour foraging tour of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. His 7-year-old daughter, the adorable Violet, served as co-teacher for the class. There were 37 people signed up. One made my day by introducing himself to me as a fan of this blog (Hi there, Christian!).

Lady's thumb

The Brills covered common weeds like curly dock (which Steve told us not to confuse with Larry Dock or Mo Dock), burdock, wood sorrel, chickweed, dandelion and pokeweed, and also taught us many delectable wild foods I haven’t seen in the Pacific Northwest, including Kentucky coffee tree (Gymnocladus dioica), field garlic (Allium vineale), lady’s thumb (Polygonum persicaria), goutweed (Aegopodium podograria) and sassafras, among others. During the lunch break, they fed us homemade vegan truffles and identified blewit mushrooms. I learned a great deal and I wholeheartedly encourage you to go if you are ever in New York. The tour is not only kid friendly, but dog friendly. Yes, dogs are allowed.

Technically Steve’s tours are illegal, but no park rangers have bothered him about it in more than two decades. It’s not a secret; he talks about this in the local papers frequently.

While there, I ended up buying Steve’s field guide, and it is quickly becoming a favorite. I like that it’s a giant paperback illustrated with drawings instead of photographs. Drawings can be even more helpful than photos because they offer clearer outlines. I also appreciate the friendly, conversational tone of the writing and the years of first-person experience that come through in the plant descriptions. (These are qualities I admire in Sam Thayer’s books, too). Of the unpalatable common plantain, Steve writes, “You’ll love eating them…if you’re a rabbit or gosling.”

Field Garlic

There are fun quips sprinkled throughout, such as, “Nothing that smells like onions or garlic is poisonous, unless you’re a vampire.” You get a really good introduction to important botanical terms, recipes, a primer on herbal medicine, and most importantly, a thorough treatise on hundreds of wild plants from coast to coast, many of which are urban. (The back cover says there are 500!). I highly recommend adding this book to your library.

Thanks for reading. Please share this post.

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