Burdock

This weeks plant was Burdock (Arctium lappa and Arctium minus).

Burdock is a plant of waste places, or at least that is what the field guides would tell you. I suggest redefining just what a "waste place" is and why we are lucky that medicines will grow there. Waste places are areas that the land has been disturbed or neglected. The plants that move into these places are usually advantageous and more often than not, invasive, in that they are able to outgrow the competing vegetation.

In some cases, these plants become ecological problems, as with the case of Scotts Broom and English Ivy. These plants are extremely quick to grow and re-seed and will often fill "waste places" to the point where other plants can not compete. These two plants also offer very little to the humans and animals that live around these waste places.

Burdock, on the other hand, is a plant of the "waste places", but it does not grow in such a way as to eliminate the competition, and it is a provider of food and medicine. So I welcome this worldly plant to the places it now grows.

Let's talk ecology. First thing to consider about Burdock is the burrs. These burrs are the inspiration behind Velcro. How cool is that? The burrs ability to stick to clothing, fur, and many other things has allowed the burdock to hitch-hike it's way around the planet, with species represented on every continent save Antarctica. That's some impressive distribution!

Burdock sinks a nice deep taproot into the soil to take in water and nutrients. It's this carrot like (often bigger) root that we use for food and medicine. It is best to use the plants of the first year's growth. These plants do not flower and are best gathered in the fall. The second year's growth is easier to find in the late fall, and so we worked with it. Plus, this way I was able to utilize the burrs in class as sticky teachers of their clinging ability.

The leaves are large, rhubarblike, widely ovate, on long petioles, a little woolly below and lighter in color below. The margins are scalloped. The flowers are purple to red-purple and look like the burrs, except that the hooked spines do not yet stick.

Burdock is a Biennial plant, which means that it takes two years for the life cycle of the plant to cycle around. In year one the root grows deep and strong while above ground, only a rosette of the fuzzy leaves will grow. During year two, the plant shoots up the central stalk with the alternate leaves that grow up from one to four feet tall to support clusters of the thistle looking flowers that by the end of the cycle turn into the burrs that hitch rides around the world!

So what's a worldly hitch-hiking wanderer of the wastes doing in our pharmacopoeia?

To be crass about it: Burdock helps you flush the crud from your system.

To quote Ellen Greenlaw: "Burdock is like a cleaning woman or a garbage collector: essential to modern life, but underpaid and undervalued. She's the old black rag-a-muffin of herbs."

To quote Alma Hutchens: "Herbalists all over the world use Burdock. Such an effective and ultimate blood purifying plant has well earned its unpretending authentic value...It works slowly, but steadily."

And a word from Michael Moore: "Burdock is a widely used blood purifier and alterative, stronger than sarsparilla but less energetic and with little of the intestinal effects of yellow dock."

I like to use Burdock in combination with other plants. It works well with the herbal antibiotics and antivirals such as Oregon Grape, Lomatium, and Goldenseal. Think about it this way...while the warrior plants are on the front lines killing the bugs that ail you, Burdock is working quietly behind the scenes to clean up the mess. Burdock works on the lymph, sweat, and oil glands; helping you to expel that which the front liners are killing. Burdock also works on the Liver, lungs, kidneys, stomach, uterus(if ya got one) and joints.

Burdock leaves have been used effectively to cure gout, especially when combined with a tincture of the seeds.

The seeds are also diuretic and will help with the output of uric acid.

Burdock roots can be used as a wash to treat acne. Use the tincture as a tonic to keep the skin clean. Make a poultice of the fresh root to treat breakouts that have flared up just days before your hot date.

A bath of burdock root infusion will ease mussel and joint pains.

Cooking weekly with the root in stir fry and other ways roots are prepared will do wonders for your health. You can purchase these roots at New Seasons and Whole Foods...or you can dig em up yourself! They are relatively cheap and they are really good for you! Susan Weed says that a steady diet of Burdock will keep your virility potent and vigorous! Yee-Haw!

I end this blog with appreciation to the work of Susun S. Weed and I ask that you all go out and buy a copy of her book, Healing Wise. If you don't want to buy it, check it out of the library. She is hilarious, wise, wacky, and her book has been an amazing teacher and opener of the way into the wisdom of the green.

A Fungus Among Us

This week at the Medicine Club was a different week. We diverged away from the plant kingdom for a moment to delve into the world of fungus. I brought in one representative of a most interesting genus, the Psilocybe. This week we worked with Psilocybe azurescens

We will not be working with this medicine internally. Each person must walk that road on their own, I can not be a guide to that realm through this avenue. But I can point the way.

All of my initial information about this curious little mushroom comes from Paul Stamets book, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, a landmark achievement for fungophiles everywhere. If you want to locate these mushrooms, I suggest you start there. I, too, wrote a book, entitled Columbiana!, in which I shamelessly reveal many of my secrets from my 20's. You can buy this book from me for 23 dollars if you are so inclined, or I suppose you can go to the Common Ground coffee shop on Hawthorne and look at the house copy they have there.

The fact of the matter is, I had to put in some leg work to meet these emissaries of the natural world and so should you. If things of this nature come too easily, they are not appreciated enough.

But we can start with the basic habitat. The azurescens are beach dwellers. They were not discovered until 1979 and the first place they were found is at the mouth of the epic river that drains all of our rainfall, springs, rivulets, and rivers out to the sea. From the mouth of the what the natives called Chenewa, these mushrooms sing their song of the mycelium connection.

Mycelium is facinating stuff. It is the organism of the mushroom. The above ground portion that most of us are familiar with is the fruiting body of the underground decomposing organism that is the mycelium, a vast network of interwoven tendrills. Under a microscope, it does not look too different from the interconnected pathways of nerves in the body or synapses in the brain.

Mushrooms, in general, play a very important role in any given ecosystem that we find them in. They are decomposers, breaking down dead and rotting material and transforming it into rich soils and substrates for new life. Some of them have a very interesting relationship with trees, in which the mycelium grows in a protective sheath around the rootlets of trees. The rootlets and the mycelium exchange nutrients with one another, making each one stronger than they would be on their own. Some trees need this relationship in order to grow. This relationship is called a mychorhizal relationship.

Mychorhizal relationships have been proven to be an integral aspect of the health of old growth forests. Restoration artists and tree planers have found that encouraging the proper mychorhizal relationships with newly planted trees by introducing mycelium into the planting process helps the new trees survive and establish themselves.

Paul Stamets is not just a psychonaut. He and his organization, Fungi Perfecti of Olympia, have been doing outstanding work on discovering mycelium that can transmute toxins, breakdown oils, and be a great aid in environmental cleanups of the superfund order. Mushrooms may just yet save the world, if we open our minds up to their abilities.

Back to our guest, the azurescens. The genus Psilocybe contains hundreds of species that all have a varying amount of the compounds psilocybin and psilocin. The more these compounds are present, the more these mushrooms affect the humans who work with them. The azurescens have a high content of both, making them the strongest mushroom by weight on the planet.

The Psilocybe mushrooms cause a change in consciousness. Plain and simple. This can be very useful for healing a sick mind. Sadness, depression, confusion, stress and related disorders can be alleviated by a change in perspective. These mushrooms will certainly aid in achieving this. Many healing practitioners who work with these mushrooms claim that the mushrooms "speak" to them and in these conversations provide valuable insights and information regarding the patient or themselves.

This was the modus operendi of the Mazatec healer, Maria Sabina. Sabina was "discovered" by R. Gordon Wasson in 1957, who traveled to the Oaxaca highlands to study folk usage of mushrooms. He wrote an article that appeared in Life magazine. This article went on to spark a great curiosity in the western world, which initiated a flood of wayward pilgrims to Maria's highland village, all seeking a new way to converse with the numinous.

Par for the course with the West, the sacrament was abused and things were taken for granted. Maria ended her career disappointed with the pilgrims and their looking for a shortcut to G-d. By the end of her days she said the "little ones" no longer spoke to her.

You may have come to meet the magic mushrooms as a recreational thrill seeker. I know my initial curiosity was not with pure healing intentions. I wanted to get high. That all changed after my initial encounters. As I got older, I matured and came to a place of great reverence for the medicine of the Psilocybe. It is not a genus to be trifled with. This is big medicine and it needs to be respected.

Why am I writing about the mushrooms? They asked me to. In my life, the Psilocybe have been great teachers revealing the wonder of the world when I have forgotten, revealing the nature of my sadness when my mind is ill, and revealing secrets of ecology, connections in the web of relations that were not evident to me until I looked at them with a different perspective. They have humbled me when I thought myself too great and boosted me up when I thought too little of myself. With their aid I have seen the timeless nature of existence and learned to navigate the river of time that we experience as "passing" with a greater ease and grace.

I feel that as denizens of the PNW, we are gifted to live among so many different species of Psilocybe. You don't even need to go to the beach. You can find many of them growing right here in Portland. They are an important part of this ecosystem, simply because they are here. Good luck, happy hunting, give thanks, and have respect.

We will be returning to the plant kingdom with the next Medicine Club.

I wish to close with a translation of one of Maria Sabina's songs that was taught to her by the mushrooms.

Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opossum
Because I am the Lord opossum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says

Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin...

Dandelion and Yellow Dock

This week we did two city plants from my own back yard, Dandelion and Rumex. Working with two plants at once is kind of interesting. You can be sure we won't be working like that again. I had this nagging feeling that Dandelion was irked at loosing the spot light and that Yellow Dock felt like the third wheel on a date with Dandelion and the Herbalist. I wanted to bring Dock in with Dandelion because I was not sure there was enough material on Rumex for an entire class. There is a super abundance of information about Dandelion.

There is good reason for this. Dandelion is a world famous healer that has been in service to the human race for thousands of years. I hope you all know what Dandelion looks like, but for those who do not...here we go. Dandelion is a hairless perennial growing from a stout taproot, up to two feet. Both root and stem bleed a milky sap when cut. Basal rosette of oblong to oblanceolate leaves, deeply lobed or toothed. Yellow flowers in solitary head on hollow, leafless stems. Found growing in lawns, parks, meadows, and disturbed areas all over the world. It's home is Greece, Arabia and Asia Minor. Dandelion was growing in the first cities of the world.

Dandelion's Latin name, Taraxacum officinale means official remedy for disorders It is great to know that a plant so common is so very useful. How useful? The spring greens are good salad, the later greens can be steamed like spinach. The flowers are the basis for a great wine. The root is a liver tonic and can also be roasted and ground into a wonderful tea that is bitter like coffee in taste.

Dandelion is the Liver's best ally. And if you are a liver of life, then please pause to consider the organ that is your liver. Do you like to eat meat? Do you like to eat rich foods? Do you like to drink wine, beer or spirits? Your liver is hard at work so you can be a liver of life.

Every minute of every day three pints of blood circulate through your liver. On one hand your liver filters away chemical condemnations, unneeded hormones, metabolic breakdown by-products, some infectious organisms, and ammonia from your blood. On the other hand the liver adds bile, lipoproteins, urea, cholesterols, phospholipids, and plasma proteins. The liver performs over 500 functions!!! So be good to your liver!

As a bitter tonic, Dandelion will help promote overall wellness. In addition to toning the liver, Dandelion root will also tone your spleen, stomach, pancreas, kidneys, skin, and your nervous, glandular, digestive, urinary, circulatory, immune and lymphatic systems. This is accomplished through Dandelions blend of earth mineral salts with high amounts of iron, manganese, phosphorus, protein, aluminum and carotenes...not to mention the moderate amounts of calcium, chromium, cobalt, magnesium, niacin, potassium, riboflavin, silicon, sodium, tin, zinc, and ascorbic acid.

As a trouble shooter, Dandelion is an ally in the fight against infections and fevers, not to mention mononucleosis, swollen lymph nodes and cancer. Dandelion will help eliminate free radicals and other trouble makers from the body.

Some other interesting facts: Dandelion is one of the five bitter herbs from the Old Testament's Book of Exodus. Dandelion Pollen is used by over 90 different insects. Dandelions seed heads have been known to travel 5 miles from their plant of departure.

No we move on to the Rumex. The plant we worked with is called Broad Leafed Dock or Rumex obtusifolius. This is a very common city plant of Portland and because it loves moist soil it grows prolifically throughout the PNW in lawns, fields, disturbed areas, trail heads, and just about anywhere else people have made an impact on the lands of the lower elevations.

Broad Leafed dock grows from a very deep taproot (sometimes five feet deep) and is yellow in color. The stem is upright two to four feet tall with broad, heart shaped green leaves that are heart shaped at the base. Flowers green, turning a rusty red color in the fall. This a plant of Eurasia and can be found growing throughout the northern hemisphere.

There are two main interest in knowing Broad leafed Dock. First off, the fresh leaves are a great remedy for Stinging Nettle and Dock will often be found growing near Stinging Nettle, which is convenient if you get stung. The leaves of Broad Leaf Dock will also help sooth the pain of bee stings, bug bites, and mosquito insertion bumps. if it stings, itches, or is irritated, odds are that the juice of the fresh Broad Leaf Dock will cure what ails you.

Internally, the tap root is a good liver cleanser. It does contain tannins, however, and is a better systems flush than other liver cleansers. If you have constipation, the root may help you to loosen up and let go.

Combined with Dandelion, this dynamic duo will help your liver be all it can be. I would recommend this combo for a quarterly flush of the bodies vital systems or for post holiday season cleansing to help your body recover from all the eggnog, spirits, and yummies eaten from Thanksgiving until New Years Day.

Apparently the plant we worked with is native to North America and is the only native Rumex of the hundreds of Rumex species that currently live in North America.

I wish I had more to say about this Rumex, but I just don't. I look forward to taking the tincture later on in the year, so I can get to know this plant better.

This weeks class was a fun one. We had a special guest, a freelance writer, Sophia who came to be a part of the class and to write an article. It was a great class for her to come to, because, first off we were studying very accessible and common medicinal plants and second, it was a night packed with Medicine Club regulars who have that certain something in their sense of humor that only a jocular group of herbal enthusiasts can hold. I am excited to see what the article turns out like.

We also had a return of Ben to the Medicine Club, which is good, because he knows how to pronounce French and we needed that in order to understand Susun S. Weed's take on Dandelion from her book, Healing Wise. Marion and Lacy were brave enough to read Dandelion's diatribe from that book in their best French accents, but again, it's a good thing Ben was there to keep things straight.

We made root tinctures from both of the plants, having washed, scrubbed, and chopped the roots. Brandy was used as the base again. People took home the leaves of the Dandelion and the Dock, though some may have been composted.

We had to work double time on the drawings, and the field guide findings. This kind of rushing over the material is something I would like to avoid in the future, so please don't expect me to do two plants at once again for a while (unless they are very, very similar).

Good times with the city healers! Let's give it up one more time for Dandelion and Broad Leaf Dock, two very common and abundant plants that are just waiting in a yard near you to help your liver live life to its fullest!

We used some books that we have not given much time to in the past. I would like to mention these guides, because they are very useful for the study of the weedy healers.

A City Herbal by Maida Silverman, Lore, Legend, and Uses of Common Weeds, Ash Tree Publishing, Woodstock, NY, 1997

Wise Woman Herbal, Healing Wise, by Susun S. Weed, Ash Tree Publishing, Woodstock, NY, 1989

The Book of Herbal Wisdom, Using Plants as Medicines by Matthew Wood, North Atlantic Books, Berkely California, 1997

Check these three titles out!!!! They are very informative as go in depth into some very key healing plants.

Thank you all,
There is no Medicine Club next week, for I will be teaching Animal Tracking.

photo credit to Sophia (first action shot of Medicine Club in progress)