Anatomy of a Skunk Cabbage

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One of our first and weirdest wildflowers to emerge in springtime is the eery purple hooded bog dweller, Skunk Cabbage—Symplocarpus foetidus, in the Arum family: Araceae. These dark, ground growing blooms rise out early in damp places along creek beds, around ponds, in low wooded areas where water sits and in wetlands. They are truly one of our first herbaceous plants to return, sometimes even melting through the last layer of snow. Many view them as the true harbinger of spring here in the northeast. Skunk cabbages have a unique ability to generate heat, a rare feat in a plant, which allows it to get ahead of the rest of the spring wildflowers and be the first to bloom. And also how you’ll see it emerging through late-lasting ice and snow!

Botanically skunk cabbages are pretty unique, distinguished by their “spathe” and “spadix” structure, much like the plant’s close relative Jack-in-the-Pulpit, another regional Arum plant. These are the most conspicuous features of the plant, which don’t make it look a whole lot like a flower to most of us.

The spathe is a specialized bract—a type of leaf associated with flowers—that forms the thick smooth shiny hood-like fold we know so well. It grows in a range of colors from vibrant yellowish-green to mottled magenta to rich royal purple. The patterning on the spathe is incredibly beautiful and I really enjoy hunting down and taking photos of really beautiful ones I discover.

The spadix sits inside the spathe, a round bundle of many small flowers (an inflorescence) all joined together on a common receptacle. It looks like a fleshy pink ball, with many little segments. There are about 50-100 little flowers that make up the spadix—those are the segments. These flowers are bisexual, meaning they have both male—pollen-producing—and female—seed-producing—parts. The single pistil (female) emerges first from each flower, like a tiny stem, and then the stamen, which produce the bright yellow dusty pollen that sometimes gathers in the base of the spathe. The flowers don’t look explicitly like flowers with the typical ring of petals, and actually collectively look a bit like a microscopic virus than a blossom, but don’t be fooled—they are flowers and to many insects they are very attractive!

The smell of Skunk Cabbage is very distinct and part of how it gets both its common and botanical name. When crushed or broken the plant has a skunky, rotten smell to it and this, plus their warmth-producing quality, makes it a perfect place for pollinators to find solace and food in the brisk days of early spring. The species name, “foetidus,” refers to this smell as well—the “fetid” rotting animal smell that so distinguishes an early spring walk through the wetland, crushing a few leaf-hidden skunk cabbages underfoot along the way. The genus name, “Symplocarpus” basically means many fruits, which is what forms after the flowers have been pollinated—a many fruited bundle, much like that of Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

The leaves of skunk cabbage unfold after the flower, starting out as a little conical protuberance, then opening up like an umbrella into huge tropical-looking bright green leaves, more round than long. The leaves have some of that skunky smell to them too and really fill out the wetlands where they grow. Though the flowers disappear after spring, the leaves stick around through the summer, seemingly getting larger and larger!

The above images depict as best as possible all these funny little facets of this totally strange and alluring plant—one of my personal favourites and the true harbinger of spring around these parts. There is a different skunk cabbage out west, the western skunk cabbage, sometimes called the swamp lantern (a name I absolutely love!), but it is a bit different and actually in a totally different genus, yet still the Arum plant family. Calla lilies are another well-known spadix-spathe flower, along with Jack-in-the-pulpit, Dutchman’s pipe, and Calamus.

Now (March-early May) is certainly the time to go out and admire these wonky freak flowers, a treasured pastime after winter’s lack of exciting plant-life. See how many variations in colour you can find!

Identifying Plants in Winter

Typically, in northern climates, we don’t think of winter as this incredible time to do botany or engage with plants, or even interact much with nature on the whole. Most of the plants are dormant, maybe even buried in inches of snow, the landscape can be pretty bleak. Every once in a while there’s a glorious pop of green moss or the discovery of a beautifully striated mushroom heartily hanging on. Otherwise, it’s hard to find much to look at. But! I am here to tell you that it can be done, plant identification can happen in winter and, though difficult, can be really very fun to push yourself to explore and can shift the way you engage with the land during this slower, quieter season. So, I want to give you a few good tips and tricks for getting out there and giving it a whirl! Many of these principles are useful no matter the time of year, so it’s nice to get familiar with using them. This guide will not enable you to walk out and identify perfectly whatever you find, but it will give you a baseline for what to look for and how, so that you can use those sometimes very confusing botany guides more easily. 


WOODY PLANTS

Let’s start with woody plants. Woody plants are trees, bushes and shrubs, and vines. Caning plants like blackberry and raspberry would also fall into the woody plant category. These are plants that you will most likely be able to find really easily and visibly during winter. Still mostly dormant, these plants don’t fully die back in the fall, rather they mostly just lose their leaves and direct all their life energy downward to their roots. Soon here they’ll be reawakening, getting their inner juices flowing up and down through their very structured circulatory pathway system below the outer bark, all of which will eventually reinvigorate the green growth. For now, however, here are a few things to examine to help identify them in their current winter state. 

I always tell people to start out with the 3 B’s of winter tree ID: branches, bark, and buds. 

Branches

Branching pattern is an important plant indicator, no matter the season, but especially in winter. There are 3 types of branching patterns: 

Opposite—the branches grow off the trunk opposite one another, the twigs grow off the branch opposite one another, and the leaves (or in winter, the buds) grow off the twig opposite one another. This gives the plant a more structured appearance!

Alternate—the branches, twigs, and leaves don’t grow oppositely, they alternate how they grow off the plant, giving a more random appearance.

Whorled—this is the more rare of the three, but indicates a plant where the branches/twigs/leaves grow in a radiating formation, spinning around the plant like a twirling skirt with all of their origins coming from the same linear place. This often gives plants a cylindrical or conical shape rather than a branching and spreading appearance. A great example of a well-known whirled woody plant is the pine tree!


The most common of the three branching patterns is alternate—most plants have alternating plant parts. In the world of woody plants there is a fun little acronym for remembering what plants have opposite branches and leaves: MAD CAP HORSE

M - Maples

A - Ashes

D - Dogwood

CAP - Caprifoliaceae: this is a plant family that includes all of the honeysuckles (vining and bush) and Viburnums in our region (technically, the Viburnums have been moved into a new family, the Adoxaceae, but they used to be in Caprifoliaceae and are included in this opposite branching classification)

HORSE - stands for horse chestnut and any of the buckeye trees or trees in the Hippocastanaceae family

And that’s it! Those are the only woody plants with opposite branching patterns. 

 
The whorled branches of the white pine.

The whorled branches of the white pine.

 

With trees, having access to look really closely at all the various parts can sometimes be difficult due to their size. Folded into the branch category, I often tell people to look up at a tree’s silhouette and try to observe the nuances and distinctions between them from their shape and structure. When you do this, you’ll often be able to garner the branching pattern just by following the train of the trunk to branch to twig. Or you might observe that more conical shape typical of many of our evergreen trees. It might not fully help you identify the tree solely looking at silhouette, but once you know what the tree species is, it may contribute to your identification tools generally so you’re quicker on your toes and more firm in your identification. 


Bark 

The outer bark is an important distinguishing feature of our woody plants, again especially in winter. To the unaccustomed eye, all tree barks might look the same, a sea of grey and brown. But as you look more closely and more comparatively, each tree has a very unique bark appearance and structure. The wild black cherry, for instance, has very dark bark that splits into small flakes, giving it the appearance of being covered in “burnt potato chips.” The American beech tree has extremely smooth light grey bark, like elephant skin. Black locusts have yellowish-brown bark that is very textured, almost ropey. The hop hornbeam looks like its light bark has been shredded by a cat scratching at it. All the species of birches have very distinct lines running horizontally on their bark, made up of small dots called “lenticels,” breathing pathways for the the tree. These are just a few helpful descriptors I use to remember them, but mostly this bark familiarity comes over time, from observing and cross-comparing after using the other ID techniques to fully confirm. Never be afraid to take pictures and quiz yourself later, like flashcards!

Black cherry bark: looks like “burnt potato chips”

Black cherry bark: looks like “burnt potato chips”

The smooth silvery-grey bark of a young black birch. Those light horizontal lines are called lenticels, breathing pathways for the bark, and are a distinct feature.

The smooth silvery-grey bark of a young black birch. Those light horizontal lines are called lenticels, breathing pathways for the bark, and are a distinct feature.

Black locust has almost yellowish, thick rough bark that looks to me like rope

Black locust has almost yellowish, thick rough bark that looks to me like rope

The shagbark hickory bark peels off on the top and bottom of long smooth strips, so it looks like it’s curling and shaggy. Bats and critters sometimes nest underneath those curls.

The shagbark hickory bark peels off on the top and bottom of long smooth strips, so it looks like it’s curling and shaggy. Bats and critters sometimes nest underneath those curls.

Buds

Perhaps the most crucial ID tool in winter, buds are next year’s fresh growth and leaves and flowers, encapsulated in distinct little pockets throughout the winter before erupting open in spring. Every tree and woody plant has a really unique bud. Some are hairy and large, some are smooth, some are small and scaled, some are bright pink or bright yellow. When using an identification guide or key, remember to look in the index in the back for descriptions of the many, many botany terms that will be used to describe buds, but trust yourself—if it looks fuzzy, fuzzy is what it is. There are just often fancier words used in botany for that.

Right around the buds of next year’s growth is usually a scar left behind from last year’s after the leaf fell off. This is called the leaf scar or bud scar. These are often uniquely shaped as well, with distinct formations of small dots inside it where nutrients passed between branch and leaf. This is another characteristic to observe closely, which can tell you what plant you are holding between your fingers!

The bright pinkish red bud of the basswood—take note of its distinct belly or bulge on one side.

The bright pinkish red bud of the basswood—take note of its distinct belly or bulge on one side.

The lighter coloured bit here is the bud scar from last year’s leaf—this is an ash tree. The vascular bundle scars leave behind a distinct C shape, or a smile.

The lighter coloured bit here is the bud scar from last year’s leaf—this is an ash tree. The vascular bundle scars leave behind a distinct C shape, or a smile.

The golden bud of the bitternut hickory.

The golden bud of the bitternut hickory.

Walnuts, both black and white, have the quintessential “monkey face” bud scar. White walnuts or butternuts also have little fuzzy eyebrows on theirs and a generally fuzzier bud appearance.

Walnuts, both black and white, have the quintessential “monkey face” bud scar. White walnuts or butternuts also have little fuzzy eyebrows on theirs and a generally fuzzier bud appearance.

Some other considerations:

Leaves

There are a few trees that gloriously keep their leaves all throughout the year—the evergreens. If you’re looking for green vibrancy in these grey times, find yourself an evergreen to admire and smell and learn to identify intimately. Most of the evergreens are conifers, meaning they produce naked seeds rather than fleshy ones, inside cone structures. A few common evergreens you might find:

Fir - Fir leaves are needle-like although short, blunt and flat. They typically grow around the twig, but give the appearance of growing in two flat, straight lines along it. Fir cones sit upright on the branch, egg-shaped.

Spruce - Spruce needles are much spikier than firs and come off the twig every which way, making clasping it much sharper an experience. Some spruces have a very droopy look the them, as if their branches were like waterfalls, pouring over and downward. Spruce cones are large, long and thin and hang down off of the branches. 

Juniper - the most common juniper around where I live in New York is also called eastern red cedar. Its leaves are much more scale-like, flat and spreading and their seeds are wrapped up like small misty blue berries that birds, namely cedar waxwings, love to eat. 

Pine - Pines have longer thinner needles than most other evergreens, but distinct based on the species of pine. White pine, the most common, has needles that are about 3 inches long and bundled together in groups of five. The number of needles in a bunch or “fascicle” will often lead you to what species you are interacting with (as will your location!)

Hemlock - Hemlocks have similar needles to those of the fir tree, just shorter. The cones of Hemlock are very small and dangle down at the end of branches like little bells. 

Cedar - the only cedar that grows around here is the northern white cedar, which has very flat, scaly leaves.

 
The bright evergreen branches of balsam fir

The bright evergreen branches of balsam fir

 

Hangers-on and Hangers-around

Some other identifying plant features for woody plants are the bits and pieces that hang on or hang around  through winter. These are things like nuts and berries, even last year’s leaves. Some you will find still clinging to the tree, some you might hunt for around the base. It’s not always exact to know what nut fell from which tree, but if you find a cache of hickory nut shells on the ground, you do know there must be a hickory tree or two somewhere close by. 

Certain berries will hang on through the winter, like these multiflora rosehips

Certain berries will hang on through the winter, like these multiflora rosehips

Some deciduous trees hold onto their leaves, like the American beech seen here. Note its long golden and very shingled or “imbricate” buds

Some deciduous trees hold onto their leaves, like the American beech seen here. Note its long golden and very shingled or “imbricate” buds

Always look for nuts and old nut shells around the base of trees for ID clues, like these black walnuts.

Always look for nuts and old nut shells around the base of trees for ID clues, like these black walnuts.

The teeny tiny bell-shaped cones of the hemlock tree—a sure-fire way to distinguish the hemlock from the fir.

The teeny tiny bell-shaped cones of the hemlock tree—a sure-fire way to distinguish the hemlock from the fir.


HERBACEOUS PLANTS

Leaves

Depending on where you live, some herbaceous plants (non-woody) persist through the colder months and can be observed growing in the garden path or when you push aside some of the leaf duff. Wintergreen, for instance, Pipsissewa, and Hepatica are a couple woodland-dwellers whose leaves you might come across. Motherwort, Garlic mustard, and Ground Ivy are some open space plants who often keep a few green leaves at their base, even through the coldest times. 

Pyrola americana, one of a few different plants called “Wintergreen,” keeps its leaves through the winter

Pyrola americana, one of a few different plants called “Wintergreen,” keeps its leaves through the winter

Another wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens, is also a hearty herbaceous plant!

Another wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens, is also a hearty herbaceous plant!

Sometimes Motherwort basal leaves can be found hanging around through winter if the weather is milder.

Sometimes Motherwort basal leaves can be found hanging around through winter if the weather is milder.

And another plant called Wintergreen or Pipsissewa, Chimaphila maculata.

And another plant called Wintergreen or Pipsissewa, Chimaphila maculata.

Seed stalks

For the herbaceous plants that don’t stick around, in areas that are not mowed you can often find last year’s flower stalk and old seed head still hanging around. These can often reveal certain identifying features of the dormant plant like flower structure and leaf arrangement—herbaceous plant leaf arrangement is also very important for identification. Some common ones here in our fields are Goldenrod, wild Bee Balm, and Milkweed.  

 
The old seed heads of wild bee balm by the creek

The old seed heads of wild bee balm by the creek

 


WINTED IDENTIFICATION GUIDES

Winter Tree Finder by Tom and May Watts

Winter Botany by William Trelease

Winter Weed Finder by Dorcas Miller

Woody Plants of the Northern Forest by Jerry Jenkins- I really like this book for its very realistic, close up photographs of buds. With most ID books, the images are not great, either line drawings or bad photos. This book uses some kind of advanced photo technology and they look very realistic! You can also get these pamphlet versions instead of the big book, much easier to carry around in your pocket in the woods! 

Bark: A Field Guide to the Trees of the Northeast  by Michael Wojtech

A Guide to Wildflowers in Winter by Carol Levine

Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessells- this is a great book, not so much about plant ID, but about how to look at the land around you and figure out what has been happening there, how old the forest is, what species might likely grow there, what aspects of the land impacts them. Great for opening your eyes to the dynamics of all the species together in the ecosystem. 

Bioregionalism, Reciprocity, & Building a Relationship to Place

It’s cold here in New York and I’ve been burrowing deep into my books and my apothecary while the temperatures drop outside, the fierce wind gusts about, and while I plan the year ahead and slowly grow a life inside my womb, a little human that arrives this April, just in time for the spring blooms. All of this has had me giving some spacious thought time to a few important matters that have been whirling around in my brain these past many months, particularly about our relationship to land and place. 

If anything this past year has done, has been to show us even more clearly that we live in a pretty broken culture. Racism abounds, politics are dirty, inequality reigns, and many of us feel somewhat at a loss for how to usher our culture as a whole into a new era, especially when we don’t all agree on what the definition of “progress” is. One of the recurrent themes I see underlying these issues here in the United States is a deep disconnection: a brokenness in our ancestral lines, an amnesia of familial and cultural history, a nature deficit, a confusion as to how and where we belong.

As an herbalist, bioregionalism is a fundamental philosophy that underscores my work. This is a place-based perspective about my medicine-making practice and how I use plants, a commitment to growing and using plants here in my bioregion, rather than ones grown and shipped from afar. But it’s also a philosophy about how I want to live, about connecting more intimately to land and place and being in right relationship with life. As a white person, descendant of settlers to North America (i.e. a settler myself) and someone who also grew up moving constantly, daughter of corporate business parents, this rooting down is both unfamiliar to me and essential. And yet I face a quandary in my attempts to build a sense of belonging and home, to build a plant-focused business on stolen north American land, and attempt to rebuild those lost ancestral connections in a place where the bones of my kin are not buried and the threads of their stories, medicine practices, and lifeways are not woven into the tapestry of the place I find myself. I’ve been contemplating this quandary a lot. 

It’s my deepest belief that reconnecting people to the land is essential for our future, our future as a culture, our future as a planet. But this reconnection that I think so many of us crave is riddled with complexities, especially for Americans—many of us are not from here originally, we’re not indigenous to these lands, but we also are distant enough from our ancestral homes that we aren’t considered from there either. Do we then not connect to land and plants, do we not seek this sense of belonging in the place we are? Are only the people who still live in their ancestral homelands granted access to this kind of deep connection? And if not, how do we cultivate it? How do we claim our own indigenous heritage and relationship to place? We are all, after all, indigenous to somewhere, some land. How do we live close to the land and use plants and how do we do all of this without appropriating or oppressing or dislocating others?

Indigenous is a complicated word that I don’t want to throw around too lightly. Yes, we are indigenous to somewhere, perhaps our ancestors came here to escape oppression or genocide or poverty, but that doesn’t mean we get to simply claim all that and wash our hands of the impact of our relocation on the peoples who lived in this place we relocated too. That has been done too many times. But I also think that remembering to look at ourselves as both descendants of settlers and of peoples who have also been colonized, whatever our skin colour, is essential to shift us into a better way of living and interacting with the land. 

I come from high alpine German mountain people, Jewish Dutch folk, and oceanside dwellers of southern Ireland. These are the places and cultures to which I can trace both my blood and my paternal and maternal family trees. My parents were born, respectively, in Michigan and New York, my father 2nd generation American, my mother 4th. I come from a hearty line of Irish-Catholic Adirondack farmers on my mother’s side (a few nuns & priests in there too), Dutch blacksmiths and German mountaineers on my father’s, but I was born in Connecticut and my parents worked for UPS and Pepsi while I was growing up. As a child, we moved and travelled a lot—I lived in England, Belgium, and Switzerland—and I had pretty much zero relationship to the earth. We did not garden. We did not hike or camp. This is my story and an integral link in the ancestral chain I am participating in building just by being alive, whether I like it or not. There are good things there in this story, there are certainly bad, and I think rebuilding right relationship to place at this point includes fully claiming all of it, the complex history of my/our European turned American heritage in its entirety. There can be no sweeping the tough stuff under the rug, nor attempting to over-glorify whatever small pieces of ourselves are something exotic that makes us feel better about the white guilt, nor simply spending our mind-space wishing we were something exotic or born native to where we are—none of that will help us figure out, truly, how to re-indigenize ourselves, how to belong to land and place. And I do think, slowly, that can be done.

Something I get really hyped up about and have strong interests/opinions in is the topic of “invasive species.” I put this term in quotes because I hate it and I don’t really believe in it. There are native plants and non-native plants, and many of the native plants are disappearing, this is all true. But it’s the vilification of these non-native ones and the subsequent ideologies and practices for eliminating them that really irk me. It all feels very much rooted in the same ideas that birthed the concept of race and continues to uphold societal prejudices around what is and isn’t “right” on a human level. It feels very hypocritical to have a purist/nativist attitude around plants when for so long we have undervalued, exploited, and outright exterminated the native people and the land on which they all once lived (as well as the people the settlers enslaved and brought here to work it.) On top of that, the main tactic used to combat “invasives” is pouring billions of dollars worth of toxic chemicals on them and the native plants, which all ends up in our soils and waterways and bodies. At the very least, this dichotomous view of some plants as good and some as evil doesn’t take into account largely enough that it’s the human impact of species introduction and climate change that have made the way for these shifting ecosystems and plant dynamics. We caused the habitat loss for the native species, we caused the temperature and landscape changes—these plants are just doing what they have always done: adapting to change, filling an opening and a niche in the environment, healing the scars we leave behind. 

Mostly the connection I’m trying to draw between these two topics is that I feel like there’s a certain attitude about the current place we’re at that is linked. It’s a tragedy in the plant world to have decimated so many plant populations. It’s an atrocity how the native peoples of Turtle Island were extirpated horrifically and no reparations have truly been paid. But I do believe, in fact, that developing a more intimate relationship to land is a prescription to do a lot of this healing work. We can’t go back and undo what has happened here, surely most of us can’t go back and live in our native homelands (nor would it be the same). We can, however, claim it and our/our ancestor’s role in it all and we can work hard to make amends, but this is just what we’re working with. This is the new landscape. 

I think becoming indigenous to place again is a possibility. This could be a very controversial statement, or maybe just the language is controversial, but the idea is sound. What I don’t mean is that we can become native American or take on any sort of title as such, nor can we release the true story of our bloody histories and identities. But what I do mean is that we can build a deeper relationship to place, one founded in the indigenous principles of reciprocity, responsibility, and care, that connects us to the land in a way we aren’t currently as a culture. But this can only happen very, very, very slowly over time. And honestly, I don’t mean generally to land, like going on hikes and learning about plants from books, but rather connecting to a very particular place, a very particular piece of land (which of course is not always readily accessible—and that’s an added factor to the whole cultural-natural poverty), building a life on it, feeding yourself from it, and participating in the tending of it so that you feed it too. This is no easy feat after generations of capitalist, empire-driven mindsets that take and take and take and have deeply ingrained some pretty foul ways of living in all of us. We were not taught, on the whole, to listen to plants, to walk slowly, to know the birds’ songs, to dig roots for medicine, to collect and re-plant wild seeds, to know which way is north and south and which way the water runs or the direction the hawks migrate.

I think a lot about my child as I contemplate all of this and how to ensure that she grows up in a home, a life, a place of more connection than I did. There is no way she will be the end of the journey—I am the first one in my bloodline choosing to turn back, or not turn back but just turn things around and attempt a change, so with her we’ll still be doing the foundational legwork. But I hope to plant the seeds so that I and she and those after us are worthy ancestors, weaving our story and journeys into this new place with the stories of the people who lived here before. I feel like we owe them that, to not take it for granted and try to live more in line with the way they did. 

With my herbal practice, I see all this very much as also teasing apart the murky history of herbal traditions, another place that has been very culturally extractive. Just because I live on this land now and am trying to build a good relationship with it doesn’t mean I can take what I please and use what I want and what was never mine. I am still very much making up for the “take with no return” attitude of my ancestors and even of my own in my lifetime and grappling with the privilege of living on spacious land while others do not. I am learning and appreciating the roots of my herbal knowledge and the herbal uses of the plants that surround me here that come from the native North American people, but I mostly try to practice herbalism from my own ancestry, learning about and predominantly using the plants of Europe and the incredible medicines of those abundant, opportunistic non-natives. I am forever attempting also to tune into and build an ecology-centred mind to constantly gauge my impact and try to tend the plants and improve the land in my wake. I grow in my garden as much as I can. My relationship to the native, less abundant plants of this region is mostly one of curiosity and awe, one of observation and waiting to learn the lessons they offer that just might not fully come until many generations down the line. I am still a visitor, a guest, a settler, from high alpine mountain people and salty-aired oceanside dwellers and my child will be too, though hopefully a little more a part of this place than me. 

Herbal Contraindications

Today I sent out a newsletter with a brief little synopsis on Motherwort in an effort to get folks excited about signing up for a class where I go more in depth into the medicinal uses of this plant. Someone very quickly replied with an expression of concern that I hadn’t mentioned some of its negative side effects, which I hadn’t and probably should have, despite the brief description, and this has gotten me thinking about “herbal contraindications” and how to integrate them better into the everyday language of herbalists and herb users.

Most herbalists do, I believe, consider contraindications. But we live in a world with SO MUCH quick and quippy herbal information going around on social media and newsletters, myself included in that. I sometimes share little generalized blurbs in those spaces on plants without always getting into the nitty gritty and complete details. I probably always should, it was a good reminder that people are looking to me for complete info, but I decided to write this little blog post as well to clarify and explain the importance of considering herbal contraindications and some places/resources to look them up.

A contraindication basically means an instance when someone shouldn’t take a medicine, when it isn’t indicated, in this case an herb. This can be because of the way that plant medicine interacts with a drug or supplement that person is taking or it could be that it aggravates and worsens a particular health issue or disease that person has. Whatever the case, most plant medicines have some contraindications, however common and however much they are generally assumed safe. Pregnancy is a great example of a very common contraindication; most herbalists suggest not using any herbs during pregnancy or at least during the first trimester and then making sure to only use proven safe ones throughout the rest of the term.

Talking directly with an herbalist well-versed in the more clinical side of things about which herbs to take and whether they are safe for you specifically is, truthfully, the ideal way to take plant medicine in a therapeutic format. There are folk herbalists and there is spirit medicine and energetic dosages and essences and many things like this where a deep medical insight doesn’t always come into play, especially in information sharing, and for this reason I would also suggest knowing some places to look up information yourself! Again, especially if you are taking pharmaceuticals or have a particular health condition. Herbalists will often share generalized information when selling herbs or writing a social media post. And plenty of burgeoning herbalists share information as they learn, and may not be the source of all. I know I can’t claim to know everything! It is not ideal, of course, but it is the case. However, for the most part, people in good health who take no drugs and are not pregnant are pretty fine operating with the generalized information on herbs.

So! These are a few favourite books for looking up herb-drug-supplement interactions:

Herbal Contraindications and Drug Interactions by Francis J. Brinker

A-Z Guide to Herb-Drug-Vitamin Interactions by Alan Gaby, and co.

Herb, Nutrient and Drug Interactions by Mitchell Bebel Stargrove

I also really like the Medscape website where you simply enter the drug name or herbal supplement and then hit search: https://reference.medscape.com/drug-interactionchecker

You have to have an account, but it is free. Medscape will list drugs that your plant medicine interacts with as well as other herbs, health issues, whether it’s safe in pregnancy, any other warnings, and will list scientifically researched uses that it has been proven to have. It’s a great resource!

Most herbalists and in-depth materia medicas or blog posts should list contraindications. People will have different opinions and cited sources, there is a lot of scientific research that will warn against plants people have used safely and traditionally for many many centuries. So then really it’s up to you as the taker of the herb to get the info, maybe discuss with a trained herbalist and decide what you feel safe doing.

For instance, Motherwort, the herb that spurred this blog post, has “hormone balancing” actions, specifically called for with estrogen imbalances and the generative system, helping regulate the rhythms of the menstrual cycle and alleviate symptoms of menopause caused by fluctuations in estrogen. Some may refer to it as “pro-estrogenic.” In the case of the person who reached out to me, they said they are a breast cancer survivor. Breast cancer and other estrogen-dependent cancers can be aggravated or brought back by estrogen in Hormone Replacement Therapy and it may be that phytoestrogenic and estrogen-balancing plant medicines will also do this. I believe this is controversial! Some people will say this, others won’t. Medscape doesn’t. But knowing all this information, making sure you or your potential client feels safe with the choice of whether or not to take a certain medicine—that’s the most important thing. Most bottles of Motherwort tincture will not list any such information and most instagram posts will not get into the dirty details of scientific research, unfortunately. I can do better with sharing what I know however, but, hopefully now you know a few places for where to find it too!

White Pine Medicine

It’s been a white pine heavy winter and early spring for me here in upstate new york. We have a few white pines on the land where I live, two specifically that I think of on our back hillside that I visit often—one enormous and old, over 100 feet tall with a broad trunk it would take two of me, arms fully extended to wrap all the way around and branches high and unreachable. The other one is younger, with a few low branches I can get to on my tiptoes—this is the one I gather from. 

white pine.jpg

Ecologically white pine—Pinus strobus Pinaceae—is pretty fascinating to me. Not really discussed as a tree under threat, white pine has actually faced centuries of population demise, a fact that is almost completely forgotten by most! A once hugely prolific tree, with amazing large tracts of white pine-dominated woodlands that spanned the east—enormous 200-500 year old trees, reaching up to 250 feet tall—white pines have been over-harvested for so long we often overlook how they originally lived. No one around today would have witnessed such a forest—ground lined with rusted needles, trunks so broad it would take 5 of us then or maybe more to encircle them, so dark and quiet and majestic. Now, white pines grow singularly, often found in the woods where an old pasture once was and the pine was left to be grazed or mowed around and thus allowed to grow to the enormous size it is able to reach, completely solitary in the woods. Or we see them come up in disturbed zones, a tree to quickly colonize openings. The small young saplings popping up reveal its’ old communal growth pattern. Nonetheless, I think it’s important to think about this tree’s history of degradation and use, with one of the broadest range of uses as lumber, how it used to grow, how it grows now in comparison, when considering it as medicine. 


That all being said, white pine is actually our most common pine in the east! And our most common evergreen at that. Easily identified amongst other pines by their 5-needle bundles and their dark thick, fire-proof bark, white pines grow everywhere. And they grow to such a large size that I feel very comfortable harvesting minimally from them and telling others to do so as well. So this is a brief monograph on how to use and prepare white pine for its healing virtues.

White pine medicine is plentiful and just as wide-ranging as its functional role as lumber. The needles and inner bark—I like to use the small twigs too—have resin-rich, antimicrobial, astringent, drawing, and expectorant qualities, used for colds and flus to break up congestion and as a wash or poultice to heal and prevent infected wounds. Chopped up and simmered in water or “decocted,” the needles—vibrant green throughout the year, which draws me to its company in the cold months—make a great wintertime tea. It has an incredible flavour, bright and almost citrusy, but with also a rich and heavy quality from the resinous nature of its various components. The needles are high in Vitamin C and warming in this deep way, stimulating circulation of both the blood and the spirit, and also a lovely immune and nutritive tonic.

I think it’s important to add here, amidst the list of all the ways pine can be used medicinally, that white pine is native to North America and a medicine of the indigenous people that was then shared with white settlers. For the most part, colonists from Europe, having decimated their own woods, only saw value in a lot of the trees of North America as lumber for building and firewood, eradicating huge populations of some of these trees to send back to Europe to fill the niche of their extinct trees. Pine was no different. And yet it did also make its way into European materia medica and herbal traditions, so it’s always important to acknowledge and remember from whom the knowledge and study of this medicine came.

white pine backpack.JPG


White pine is also a great acute remedy for when you do get sick—it’s a plant I’ve been advocating for as a good medicine to have during these pandemic times as well—a great respiratory herb, helping break up and dry stuck mucous and phlegm, opening the lungs and sinuses, getting things moving and helping make a cough more productive, while also being a mild antiviral. The resin that coats the needles and inner bark is also very antimicrobial, fighting infection, and astringent, thus helping to heal the tissue after so much inflammation and disturbance. 

In this way it also makes a great remedy for wound treatment, helping prevent infection and then making way for skin regrowth and healing. For this I recommend irrigating cuts or soaking them with a strong tea before bandaging them up, or, if infection is happening, soaking in a pine-heavy tea daily until the infection has gone. I like it in the bath or as a steam—helping to warm the body and get those piney volatile oils into the sinuses to start doing their healing work. I personally love to extract pine in oil and use the oil to moisten and massage the skin throughout the winter months to keep circulation normal and help fight stagnation.

white pine botanical drawing3.jpg

One of the first herbal first aid remedies I learned was to use the pine pitch (the pure sap or resin) as a wilderness bandaid. You do this by gathering a little of the pitch, which is sticky and thick and oozes out of wounds on the trunk or places where branches have been cut—essentially serving as the tree’s own bandaid! Then you heat it up over a fire on a spoon until it liquefies, let it cool, and then pour it onto the cut. This helps fight infection, but mostly creates a little seal as it dries, like a liquid bandaid, so that you can hike out without getting it any dirtier and get the care you need. In a pinch, you can eat white pine bark too, not my favorite wild food, but nutritious and edible if you’re lost in the wilderness and need a snack. I prefer to eat the needles actually, chopping them fine and adding them to cookies or as a spice to soup or on a chicken as a rub. It’s citrusy and flavourful and a fun way to broaden the palate.

Below is a recipe for my white pine-cherry bark cough syrup (plus a few other cough remedy herbs). Both of these plants can be a little drying, so the marshmallow root (or any other demulcent) is recommended to help add a little moisture and keep those mucous membranes lining the lungs, sinuses, and digestive tract moist and strong!

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WHITE PINE COUGH SYRUP
2 cups of White pine needles and young twigs, cut up
1 cup Wild Cherry bark (Prunus serotina)
1/2 cup of Elecampane root (Inula helenium)
1/4 cup of Mullein leaves (Verbascum thapsus)
1/4 cup of Marshmallow root (Althaea officinalis)
1/4 cup of Rose hips (Rosa spp.) (any rose species will work but I like to use the invasive multiflora rose because they are so abundant)
Some other herbs to possibly use—Thyme, sage, cinnamon, ginger, spruce needles or hemlock boughs, Anise hyssop, etc. Experiment away! 

Put it all in a pot and cover with water. Simmer on low with the top off until liquid reduces down by about half. Strain off the spent herbs & compost, measure liquid, and add the same amount of honey. Mix while still warm. Store in the refrigerator or add brandy to preserve it. 

The Fight for Ramps!

At a bend along the creek here that I like to visit often throughout the year—past the huge fallen oak rotting on the hillside leading down to the water, so big I can crawl inside it and take shelter from the rain, and farther still, just beyond the strange patch of scouring rush all wiry green and bright throughout the winter months—there’s a huge patch of the notable wild edible Ramps. Right now, as I write this, small perfect purple shoots are piercing the leaf duff, two tender green leaves are splitting through their sheath, unfolding, shaking off the morning rain and broadening in the sunlight pouring in through the open, leafless tree canopy.

Ramps emerging in the rain.

Ramps emerging in the rain.

This is a plant I feel extraordinarily passionate about. A native wildflower and woodland understory plant that often grows in the floodplain of a woodland ravine, ramps (or wild leeks as some call it, referring to edibility and taste, like a sharp strong mix between onions and garlic) grow amidst other special treasures—trilliums and bloodroot, dutchman’s breeches and ostrich ferns—a sweet and magical community of rare ephemeral blooms that have faced years and years of ecosystem degradation and population demise.

Ramps specifically have now long been an overly-popularized wild edible spring green, delicious, vibrant and choice, dug up for their onion-like bulbs and touted by restauranteurs proclaiming their terroir and local and wild offerings. And this has had detrimental consequences.

Plants like ramps, native understory herbs, are slow-growing. Ramps themselves take about 7-10 years to reach full maturity to set seed and reproduce and a ramps stand, if heavily harvested, takes more than 20 years to bounce back to full vibrancy, if it even does at all. And ramps role in the forest is far more intricate than is often discussed, a fine balancing act of nutrients and minerals and soil building. Ramps are said to play a huge role in nitrogen mineralization in the environment, storing vast quantities of nitrogen and other minerals in the early spring, nitrogen “sinks” as they are called, and then slowly releasing them for use over the rest of the season for other plants to use as they become more active, thus playing a huge role in nutrient stability in the forest. For all of these reasons, I spend every spring doing my best to advocate for these small special plants. A huge part of my goal and life’s work as an herbalist and plant person is to promote this one simple idea: not everything’s role and purpose and benefit is for us. Despite how delicious and cleansing ramps are, using them is not worth the expense of an intact native plant community like the one I’ve described. It is my firm opinion that we need to leave ramps be. As one of favourite wild foodies, Mallory O’Donnell, expressed: “if I can live without them, so can you.”

Ramps piercing through the leaf duff. This is one I found that got twisted up in the leaves and I thought it was so beautiful.

Ramps piercing through the leaf duff. This is one I found that got twisted up in the leaves and I thought it was so beautiful.

Ecologically, balance is everything. As humans we tend to have this very self-centered attitude about conservation and about the environment, that it needs our intervention, our cleaning up, our control, our management to thrive. The truth is, the forest is better off without us messing around in there, and, in fact, we most often do harm when we try to “help.” With harvesting, it is really no different. When we harvest large swaths of these patches—and they really grow very thickly in wide stands when healthy and mature—we open up empty space in the forest floor. Because these and most native plants are so slow growing, that space is quickly usurped by opportunistic, aggressive, fast-growing, and often problematic plants, thus decreasing the odds the natives will return. Those plants I speak of are here too by our own—we, the people—by our mistake and misguidance and we continue to flub it all up still, carrying their seeds unknowingly into the woods on the bottoms of our shoes or attached to our wool sweaters, digging up the forest floor, taking trees down and letting in more heat and light. Minor things that make a big difference in the plant world where time moves at a different pace.

More specifically, with ramps, I really say the best harvesting advice to promote is “please don't!” In other words, to not harvest these plants at all, even if you feel like an ethical, gentle harvester—if you’re harvesting from a patch, even on your own property, you never know who else might be coming there and taking some as well, and collectively, you could be putting significant pressure on the population. If you are certain, beyond absolute certain you’re the only one, these are the ethical principles I outline and ask everyone to follow:

  1. harvest leaves only, one leaf per plant, one plant per 25 or even 50

  2. take only for yourself and only what you can use

  3. never buy ramps and never sell ramps—even if you know they are sustainably collected, it only promotes this intense over-obsession with the plant. I, personally have seen people popping out of the woods with garbage bags full of ramps, roots and all, to sell at the market or to restaurants, and it’s simply heart-breaking. As long as people know they are desired and can get paid a high price for ramps, they will heavily harvest them and sell them. We cannot promote this in any way with our social platforms, our actions, or our dollars.

  4. wild tend your ramps patch! You can plant ramps! You can go back in the fall after they have flowered and spread their little dark seeds around! You can take a few years off picking the leaves and let them replenish and regenerate! You can sit amongst them throughout the season, watch them grow, read them poetry!

This year, we have the unique and strange experience of restaurants being shuttered, events cancelled, festivals closed down, and markets minimal. I think it’s a rare and perfect opportunity to do a little shifting as a society about how we look at plants and particularly these ones we have spent a lot of recent years abusing. An opportunity to find a little balance, to shift our mindset about the forest to one of stewardship, to learn to sit and be and admire from afar. At least, that’s what I’m going to do.

Ramps flowers exploding across the forest floor in late July. Later you can go back and collect the little round black seeds to spread elsewhere or just replant into the soil to assist their self-propagation.

Ramps flowers exploding across the forest floor in late July. Later you can go back and collect the little round black seeds to spread elsewhere or just replant into the soil to assist their self-propagation.

Me in the ramps patch on the land where I live.

Me in the ramps patch on the land where I live.

Some links to other articles:

https://unitedplantsavers.org/ramps-allium-tricoccum/

https://www.grit.com/food/ramps-wild-leeks#axzz2yCpIbusb

https://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=ALTR3

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/dining/20forage.html

https://unitedplantsavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Plugging-the-Leak-on-Wild-Leeks_Edgar-Brubaker-Tuminelli.pdf

Why forage? Why use herbal medicine?

Why forage? Why wildcraft? Why learn about plants, use herbal medicine or eat wild foods? This winter I’ve been doing a lot of visioning and these questions, all focuses of my work and my life, have come up. Why do I do what I do, for one thing, but also why am I invested in sharing it? And why should people care, show up for this and learn?

The first thing I’ll say is that I’m a believer in bioregional herbal medicine. I don’t believe in an industry that centers on shipping plant matter all across the globe in plastic bags—who knows who grew it or chopped it down, how much was used, how many taken, and what was the ecological impact. It’s really hard to truly know. I’m not an advocate of essential oils, tiny expensive bottles of exotic plant scents that contain thousands of plant lives in just a few measly milileters. This is not the herbal medicine I believe in and this year I’m going completely essential oil free. 

So when I say bioregional or often the term I use is “place-based” I mean medicine and food just outside the door, plants that live and thrive in our particular climate, decorate our hillsides or skulk quietly around the edges of our gardens. With this place-based mentality, our medicine and food, we can go out and gather it; it’s something accessible, something that we can form a relationship with, in person, skin to leaf, nose to flower, hands running the grooves in the bark, the kind of relationship our ancestors all had. This might sometimes mean planting and growing the plants ourselves or maybe a nearby friend or farm does and shares in the bounty—these obviously won’t be wild foods and herbs, but still we build a real relationship with our sustenance and with the land. Some people will argue for a deep spiritual element, maybe even say it has to be part of it. I don’t so much feel like that is required, or required in the way that it has to look a particular way for everyone. But I will say that for me, in the forest, I feel closer to a god than I ever felt in a church.

This also means that there’s a seasonality to our food and medicine—that we must learn, change, grow, and eat with the seasons. There are seasons to our bodies as well as to the land, and it’s an exciting practice to merge the two and live accordingly. It’s fun and exciting and deeply empowering to step outside and collect wild strawberries growing along the path or clip a few twigs off a black birch to boil into tea or spend some quiet contemplation hours plucking the bright yellow heads off the pesky dandelions in your neighbor’s yard to make into wine you can sip in winter while you wait for spring to come back. 

This leads me to the inevitability in this craft of having to learn to lean into the fact that those wild strawberries are momentary treasures, and we have to be paying attention to catch them ready to eat and then wait one whole year to taste them again—and we have to live with that. We’re not used to waiting in our culture, rather to feeding our cravings by popping over to the store to grab our plastic carton of strawberries whenever we want, mid-December even. This can be the disappointment factor for some who are used to the same foods they love being available whenever they have the urge, or one could argue that makes this type of living and eating difficult, unsustainable even. Preservation comes hand-in-hand with seasonal wild gathering, an added exciting, mind-stimulating activity as we experiment with collection, processing—drying, pickling, fermenting, powdering, fruit leathering—and storage.

The question as to whether it’s sustainable? Well, it requires effort on our part, moving our bodies and using our minds, but what it doesn’t require is being shipped around by trucks and airplanes and other-gas powered devices, pumped full of chemicals we can’t pronounce to keep it fresh on top of what it was sprayed with while growing to keep it looking the “right” way, and then shrink-wrapped to a piece of styrofoam and handed to you inside another plastic bag plus another one for good measure so it maybe doesn’t drip water in your car that you drove half an hour to go pick it up. If that’s not the definition of unsustainable then I’m not sure what is.  

On an herbal level the sense of empowerment transcends into health and healthcare because when we start to learn about turning plants into medicine, we start to learn about how to use it. We start to learn about our body, the way it works, the things it needs, its patterns and rhythms. And then we start being an advocate for it, in every sense of the word and in every setting we find ourselves. Food becomes medicine too. And we begin to rely on our experience and expertise in our own body’s needs to determine how to heal ourselves, whether we need to pay money to see a doctor or take a drug, and even if we do, we can start to engage in that relationship with greater awareness and critical thinking. 

Wild food is also FREE, wild medicine is FREE. Much of it is incredibly abundant, sometimes overly abundant and our taking of it actually helps create balance in the ecosystem! This reminds me of the Rainbow Gathering, a yearly pretty ridiculous meeting of a motley crue of folks on National Forest land around the country every summer. At the gathering, everything is free and people set up camp for a week together. There are many little camps scattered about that cook food for everyone—Jesus camp makes pancakes, the Hare Krishnas make kitchri and daal, there’s a camp that each year builds giant mud ovens out of which pump pizza and bread and, on some nights, large batches of weed cookies. When food is ready at a camp, a group of people will get together and shout “FREE FOOD IN THE WOODS” to alert everyone that you can come get you some (but don’t forget your “bliss,” the rainbow term for cup, bowl, and utensils). There’s also this other chant that’s a little less exciting where people gather at night somewhere others are sleeping and shout at the top of their lungs “WAKE UP AND RAGE!” That one I’m less fond of. Whenever I’m out foraging and find something in great abundance or something I’m excited about, I want to shout this out loud to the world—“FREE FOOD IN THE MOTHERFUCKING WOODS!” This freeness allows us a little more leeway to then use our dollars wisely for things we can’t find in the woods, to support causes and producers that match up with our ethics.

There are so many arguments for engaging in foraging, in eating wild foods and taking herbal medicine (or finding someone who practices bioregional medicine and buy from them!). Someone a long time ago, when I was a young fledgling herbalist and somehow found myself on a plant walk with a lot of botanical big wigs, turned to me on this walk, recognizing it as an early time in my journey and said to me very seriously “this life will save you.” Ten years later, dear reader, I’m saying that to you. High nutrition, pure compounds with potent medicinal properties, these wild plants blow store-bought spinach and pre-packaged  freeze-dried supplements out of the fucking water.

This ends me at the point where I dig into the real heart of my work and purpose. On the surface, it’s about herbs and health, botany, wild food; much of my “content” centers on these things. But it’s also about something deeper. Learning about wild food and how to make your own medicine is really just an entry point, I think, for ecological understanding and appreciation. It’s an easy way to corral people into the plant fold—show them how to use and apply nature for themselves, how to benefit from it. But as you learn, understanding grows—you start to recognize, hypothesize, and really see the interplay in the natural world and our role in it, which is most often not a leading one. We see when to simply acknowledge something’s beauty and leave it alone, which is most of the time. Care and meaning, then, I think become inevitable, and we fight for what we care about, for what has meaning to us. This is important.

I often think about what that guy meant when he said to me “this life will save you” because he didn’t elaborate and I was too shy to ask him to. There are countless ways for me personally that it has, the people I’ve met, direction in the hard moments of my 20s. What this work is really about is a re-envisioning that we have to do as a culture, as a species. We have to learn to see, we have to have a huge perspective shift. We have to, with more vigor than ever before, get by with less of certain kinds of things—plastic, fossil fuels, war—and more of another. We have to participate in making our communities and ourselves more localized, more bioregional, more place-based. That has to become normalized and until it is we have to stand behind our beliefs and do the crazy thing even if the dominant culture is laughing in our faces. We have to sign all the treaties and agreements ourselves if the government won’t do it (but we can call them and ask them to and vote out the ones who won’t) and reduce our own personal emissions. We can cut ourselves off from Amazon. I’m not perfect, I say this for myself too as a person who commutes to work and gets food to go. Are we really committed to change? Do we consider every decision? A question I’m committed to constantly asking myself—does this uphold life or does it annihilate it? And if the answer is annihilate, I need to hold myself to turning and walking away. We need a “renaissance of the hands” as Janisse Ray once called for, and I’d like to put all my energy into helping make that happen for people, whatever way I can. That life is going to save all of us.