This article will summarize my findings to date with regard to our local “wild” herbal pharmacopoeia which otherwise we refer to as our lawn, woods, orchard, and environs (it will be a work in progress, so please excuse any as yet incomplete portions). It’s a startling array of riches, for food, nutrition, herbal healing and physical support, as well as obvious delights for the mind and soul. As I’ve declared elsewhere, none of this is to be construed as “medical advice.” But that shouldn’t detract from the fascinating and very real qualities of these beautiful gifts of Nature.
Bear Clover (Chamaebatia foliolosa)
One of my favorites! The Native Americans who used to live in our area (the Miwok, who called it kit-kit-dizze, or kitkitisu) had many uses for this plant (e.g. tea for colds, coughs, measles, rheumatism, etc.), even though it’s been named Mountain Misery by troubled hiker’s and day-trippers (because of the thick, black, sticky, “smelly” resin that accumulates on its fern-like leaves and transfers to shoes and pant-legs). Despite this, the plant is a member of the “Rose Family” (Rosaceae).
For months after we moved here into the Sierra Foothills, I used to smell, during the early summer and in fall, this oder that reminded me of the nicotine smell of cigarettes. I grew to find it a kind of astringent and cleansing aroma, actually. Eventually I identified this wild flower as its source. It only flowers briefly in the late spring, the flower is white and resembles the strawberry flower, or the blossom of the wild rose.
Apart from its potential uses, as applied by the Miwoks, I wonder whether the resin may be useful to keep ants away, or possibly to destroy bacteria? Something to explore further.
Soap Root
Useful in manifold ways and very lovely indeed. Mentioned in this earlier post, Soaproot Discovered!.
Leopard Lilly
Beautiful, increasingly rare, exotic and mystical.
Plantain
Common, but uncommonly valuable.
Miner’s Lettuce
Add to salad to spark conversation.
Spider Wort
A volunteer that graced our land recently (see Intrepid Volunteers).
Fedtid Adder’s Tongue (Scoliopus Bigelovii)
“This stemless plant is one of the earliest blossoms of the year, and may be looked for in February in the damp redwood forests from San Francisco northward. Out of the heart of two shiny green leaves blotched with brown, growing close to the ground, rise several weakish flower stems each terminating in a single flower of curious aspect, and an inch or so broad. The sepals and petals are markedly distinct — the three former lanceolate, spreading, whitish, striped with purple, and the 3 slender linear petals upright, like triple antennae.” – pg. 7, “The Western Flower Guide, Wild Flowers of the Rockies and West to the Pacific,” by Charles Francis Saunders.
