herb walks

Herb Walk – late spring, early summer – part one

Jun 6, 2012

Originally I’d thought I’d post an herb walk every two months, but now I’m thinking quarterly is a bit more reasonable for me. I kinda like doing them around the turn in the seasons. There seems to be a lot of overlap between those seasonal shifts and my wild-harvesting activities. And I’m dividing this one into two parts. They have a tendency to get quite long. So, here’s the end of spring, beginning of summer walk part one. This walk was taken at a nearby park/green space that is mostly allowed to be overgrown with natives and volunteer weeds. My favorite kind of park! I generally steer clear of most manicured (sterile) parks except for the occasional trip to playgrounds with the kids. I much prefer wandering along unkempt green spaces and letting the kids climb on rocks and trees instead. They seem to prefer it too.

Again, we’ll let Gray be the tour guide, shall we? Audrey was there too (that’s who handed him the wild plums to enjoy) but she spent her time climbing high in the trees and Gray and I wandered around underneath, harvesting herbs (and eating super sour, unripe plums).

wild rose, flower and foliage (Rosa Californica)

wild rose, foliage (Rosa Californica)

The roses were in full bloom. I already shared a tutorial for infusing the flowers in honey. But really there’s so much you can do with rose blossoms. Making syrups and infusing the petals in apple cider vinegar are two other favorites of mine. Kiva taught me about the wonderfully healing nature of rose petal vinegar. Along with fresh aloe gel scraped from my aloe plants, rose vinegar is my go-to for sunburn treatment and other hot skin irritations. Dilute it in two parts water and splash or spray on the skin area. It’s very cooling and healing.

black elderberry, elder flowers (Sambucus nigra)

black elderberry, elder flower buds (Sambucus nigra)

black elderberry, green berries (Sambucus nigra)

The other flowers I harvested were elder blossoms. Like rose petals, there’s so many things you can do with them. I’ll just mention a few. I dry some every year to have on hand for cold and flu season. Elder flowers are one of the best fever reducers for children. They’re gentle and yet powerfully effective. Strip them of their stems and dry them for later use. You can combine them with yarrow flowering tops and leaves and peppermint leaves for an excellent fever-reducing tea. Add some honey or a little fruit juice and you can usually get your sick, feverish little one to drink it. Have them sip on a couple cups of the warm tea throughout the day. Do use the tea warm; when it cools the energetic action is very different and much less effective for fever reduction.

The thing to remember with elder flowers is that energetically they’re cooling and draining. This makes them excellent for pushing internal heat and toxins outward, especially during the acute, early stages of infection. If you feel weak and chilly/cold, then elder flowers wouldn’t be appropriate unless formulated with warming, stimulating herbs.

If you’d rather eat your medicine, elder flowers are lovely, stripped of their stems and mixed into your favorite pancake batter. They also make a very tasty syrup. You can either infuse them in honey, like I did with the rose petals or make a flower syrup. I’ve had trouble heat-processing the syrup for storage, though. It loses much of its aroma. So I was very excited when l read this recipe by Hank Shaw of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. No heating necessary as the syrup is stored in the fridge!

In the post, he also mentions taking care when harvesting elder flowers as sometimes they can be confused with water hemlock: “Sometimes over-eager foragers fail to look at the plant they are picking from and grab hemlock by mistake. This can be fatal. But hemlock looks nothing like elderberry, so I have a tough time figuring out how this mistake happens…”

I totally would have agreed with him as they do look entirely different. But the day before reading his post, I’d found a water hemlock plant growing under one of the elder trees I was harvesting from. It’s stalks and flowers had grown up into the elder branches and its flowers were mixing freely with the elder flowers. Now I could clearly tell the difference (the water hemlock flowers are the bright white ones with the feathery leaves, the elder flowers are the cream ones with the long, tapered leaves), because I’m familiar with elder flowers and water hemlock, but someone picking for the first time and maybe not paying close attention could quite easily have grabbed some water hemlock flowers along with the elder flowers!

water hemlock, flowers and foliage (Cicuta maculata)

water hemlock, foliage and spotted stem (Cicuta maculata)

black elderberry, flowers and foliage (Sambucus nigra) and water hemlock, flowers and foliage (Cicuta maculata)

I generally err on the side of encouragement rather than caution when it comes to picking wild plants. I feel that there is a tremendous amount of fear and uncertainty about wild places and wild plants in our culture as a whole and I don’t want to contribute to that. I really want people to use the plants around them and feel comfortable doing so. And yet…comfort is not the same thing as ignorance or being fool-hardy. You must, must, take the time to identify the plant you are picking before you ingest it.

And really (forgive my lecturing), top priority should be learning to identify the poisonous plants around you. There aren’t that many. Only a handful of truly life-threatening plants. There are many that aren’t edible, but are medicinal in small quantities. There are a few that are downright poisonous. I think taking the time to know them well is an excellent preventative measure. If you’re going to harvest umbel flowers, take the time to get to know water hemlock. It grows everywhere around here and it’s quite lovely to look at. And incredibly toxic. People have died eating it. One key characteristic is the purple splotches on the stem.

But you already take the time to ID your plants, right? Preaching to the choir and all that…

plantain leaves (Plantago lanceolata)

plantain flowers (Plantago lanceolata)

Now’s also a great time to harvest plantain for use in herbal oils and salves. I use the blender method to process the leaves into an oil. Later on in the summer (at least around here) plantain tends to dry out and largely disappear except near water. But right now it’s growing everywhere. Plantain is famous for its drawing action. Splinters, bug bites, boils, skin infections of all kinds respond very well to a fresh plantain poultice. Energetically, plantain is cooling and draining. So use it for hot, irritated skin conditions where you want to pull out venom, toxins, infections and other nasties and cool down inflammation.

Tomorrow I’ll continue part two of the herb walk.

Herb Walk – Early Spring

Mar 14, 2012

Herb Walk. A seasonal post featuring some of the herbal and edible plants growing in Napa, California and the surrounding Bay Area.

This walk was taken at a park nearby my house before the spring rainstorms blew in. The park is full of native plants and volunteer ‘weeds’. It’s one of my favorite places to wander and poke around and see what’s growing. Once you start to learn to identify the plants around you, it’s amazing how many useful plants grow in small, weedy places like this. You don’t need to hike way out into the wilderness to find medicinal plants (although that’s wonderful, too). More often than not they grow right in our neighborhoods.

[Gray is our herb walk tour guide :) His sweater is one of Aaron's sweaters upcycled using the baby envelope tee pattern (12-18 months) from Growing Up Sew Liberated. His pants are also from upcycled sweaters. Because I know you all care about the baby's wardrobe, right?]

Ahem…back to the actual herbs…

(black willow catkins, Salix nigra)

(black willow catkins, Salix nigra)

(black willow shoots, Salix nigra)

The willows are leafing out, flowering, and sending up shoots. Their mix of red, yellow, and bright spring green contrasted with the dark bark of the trunks is just stunning. Often the vivid colors aren’t very noticeable from a distance. But when you get up close, suddenly all you see are the gorgeous colors.

Willows are, of course, famous for being the original source of salicylic acid, the pain relieving chemical in aspirin. They have been used traditionally all over the world as a pain reliever and fever reducer. But it’s controversial whether the salicin in willow bark is actually what makes it so useful as a pain reliever and fever reducer. Willow bark contains very low levels of salicin and only about a third of the salicin is converted into salicylic acid within the body.

I prefer to think of willow bark’s actions in energetic terms, rather than specific chemical compounds. The intense bitterness and aromatic nature of the bark helps break up the stagnant energy that is causing pain. Also, the bitterness indicates a powerful heat draining action, making it useful for fevers and other signs of inflammation in the body.

Willow bark is very astringent (that dry, puckery feeling in your mouth when you taste it) due to its high levels of tannins. This makes it useful for treating boggy tissues combined with signs of inflammation, like sinus pain from seasonal allergies.

Willow bark was traditionally used for the intermittent chills and fever of malarial infections. And it is especially useful for this kind of alternating hot and cold sensation accompanied by achy pain often experienced during the flu or other viral infections.

The bark is gathered in the fall or early spring and tinctured fresh or dried, or used in a decoction (if you can brave the bitter taste). The best bark is intensely bitter with an aromatic quality. The strength can vary from tree to tree so taste the various willows around you before harvesting.

(last year’s narrow-leaf cattail foliage, Typha angustifolia)

(cattail shoots, Typha angustifolia)

The cattails are sending up new growth. Now’s a great time to harvest the young shoots. Pull them up from the muck, peel off the tough outer green leaves, wash them, and use the inner white to pale green portions. Just blanch them until tender in a pot of boiling salted water, like you would green beans or asparagus. They’re quite delicious!

Only gather cattails from clean water. They bio-accumulate environmental toxins, sometimes to extraordinary levels. In Arcata, where I used to live, the city water supply is cleaned by filtering it through a large marsh. The aquatic plants, including cattails, pull out the toxins from the water rendering it safe to drink (and the plants unsafe to eat).

(California Wild Rose Hips, Rosa californica)

(California Wild Rose, Rosa californica)

There are a few sad looking, withered rose hips still hanging on from last year. But all over the wild rose bushes, new leaves are growing. In a few short months they’ll be covered in pale pink blossoms and oh so happy honey bees. And we’ll have a rose blossom fest, shall we? Until then we can enjoy their beautiful green leaves. Aren’t they the prettiest green? So cheerful.

(day lilies, Hemerocallis spp., extra points if you can spot the ladybug)

I like to pull up and harvest day lily tubers this time of year, when the soil is still soft from the rain but they haven’t begun to flower. I like to add them raw to my lacto-fermented kimchis. You can also cook them like potatoes. I find potatoes better, personally, but some people swear cooked day lily tubers are much better. There are many hybrids of day lilies growing around, so I suspect they vary in tastiness.

Day lilies are not actually lilies at all, although their flowers do resemble lilies. Most lilies are toxic, day lilies are edible and delicious. The easiest way to identify them is to wait until they flower and use a good field guide or have a friend point them out. In California they are planted extensively as highway and shopping center landscaping. Please don’t harvest them from the edges of roads and parking lots. They can have dangerous levels of lead and other toxins. They are widely naturalized into wilder places in North America, so if you keep your eye out, you’ll soon find a safe patch to harvest.

(California Lilac Bush, Ceanothus thyrsiflorus)

The Ceanothus are just starting to bloom. The bees adore this fragrant, beautiful native (I do too). There are many species of Ceanothus in California, as they tend to hybridize extensively. The ones with white blooms are the Red Root commonly employed in herbal practice.

A great lymph, spleen tonic, Red Root can be dug in the fall and winter before the plant flowers. The best root bark is a deep red (hence the name). I’ve harvested the root bark from Ceanothus spp. with pale blue flowers and found their root bark to be equivalent in action to the ones with white blossoms. Mainly what you are looking for are strongly aromatic, almost spicy smelling leaves, a great deal of red color in the root bark and/or inner root, and a soapy quality to the blossoms (they should foam up slightly when agitated in water) which indicates high levels of saponins. Usually Ceanothus plants with these qualities are found in rocky, arid, nutrient poor soil, not the moist, rich soil this particular Ceanothus is growing in.

(Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris)

This Scots pine is sending out sticky resinous buds in preparation for flowering. You can harvest these resin rich buds and the needles and pitch and infuse them in oil for a warming muscle rub. So for those of you in snow covered areas where spring herbs are still a ways away, don’t be too sad. Go find your nearest evergreens! Herbalist Kiva Rose has a great herbal evergreen salve recipe posted over at Learning Herbs, if you are interested.

(Oregon grape flowers, Mahonia aquifolium)

The Oregon grapes are flowering like crazy this year. That yellow! I’m hoping for a bumper harvest of the berries later on. The last couple of years have been disappointing, almost no berries at all. I like to can jam from the rich purple, sour berries. I find the berries to be an an excellent blood tonic, and when cooked up with honey or Rapadura, delicious too. Aaron prefers a good old-fashioned blackberry or strawberry jam, but I really enjoy the rich flavor and slightly earthy taste of Oregon Grape jam. It’s a bit different, but a good different.

So that’s the end of our walk for now. I had to restrain myself from adding more plants (like nettles, and clover, and mustard…). Maybe I’ll do some smaller posts with them soon. And this walk got quite long, didn’t it? Maybe next time I’ll split it into two parts.

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