Plotinus says that plants embody "the more rebellious and self-assertive part of the soul (Mackenna, Plotinus [Medici, 1917] 131). Death herbs, poppy, hemlock, datura, get all the press so why not say what life herbs are. Yarrow achillea, mugwort artemisia head the list with lippias, creosote, milkweed aesclepius and polymintha bushes. One is tempted to say these are salvias because they save, but they are from different families, a good sign for the peoples of the earth.
Death Herbs
Call the death plants poison plants. There is a long list. At the Drug Garden classic black hellebore, hen bane, digitalis, mandrake, belladonna, ricinus, datura. I have to get out the lists. They were grown practically in gravel in Austin, Texas. There was no hemlock because it loves the wet and can grow over your head with white disc blooms. It just looks edible. Tell that to Socrates as you tap his insensate groin. Feel anything here? That's how you know when you're getting somewhere with the death plants. You can't feel anything. Inebriates are in this class. Marijuana of course has led to thousands of innovative ad campaigns for casinos. Imaginative, fantastic, the big trouble with marijuana writing is no feeling. One is tempted to put the cow patty mushroom into the life class for the beautiful glow it puts on its devoted faces, like they had been making love, or worshiping God instead orcaught up in some other worldly event. The difference between the counterfeit and the true makes bi-polar experience common. What used to be the province of birth, life and death you can get in a jar. Is vegetable Viagra a life drug? You know the answer.
The Drug Garden and the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research
I saw the herbs in glass jars in a casement window in Chicago. The tops were off and they radiated the room with fragrance. My relation with herbs came from that, except later I learned it was latent in Mennonite farmer ancestors and immediately in the green minds of my mother and grandmother. It needed waking. I discovered the Drug Garden by accident one spring after awakening. My first thought was to get cuttings. That's the way my mind went then, if you could get a cutting it would grow. After conversations with the student assistant I learned the boss was Henry Burlage, dean emeritus, and since I had loads of time, despising the MLA job market for new Ph.Ds, I would visit him in his third floor office. Close by, I was washing dishes for the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research in Experimental Science and its Aikido master Bill Lee. Dr. Burlage was cantankerous, but more serious than I realized when he then jawboned Dean Doluisio into an invite to me that fall about a job. Henry was eager to save the Garden since he, Dr. Albers with Dr. Franke and others took an interest, but the place was born late and died early, lasted maybe 30 years, 1950-1980. Prime central Austin land. Five acres! Dean Doluisio threw a bone to the old dean, who had just finished Pharmacy's Foundation in Texas: A History of the College of Pharmacy, 1893–1976, so a temporary part-time appointment was made up. When he asked how I knew these abstruse things I told him I had studied herbs in Tibet and in the Andes. When I decided to move on after six months he ordered a raise.
I did this three years and the Clayton Foundation five. Jim Bowman, who below gets his knee fixed by artemisia, held the bottle job but broke his leg and needed a few months temp. Then he said I should just keep the job. I had met him at a Hyde Park community sale, traded a beautiful ten gallon peppermint for a charcoal drawing, self-portrait of himself. I said it looked like Shakespeare. The post docs complained I ruined their experiments in pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphatase, that their beakers weren't clean! These were the same guys that had a refrigerator they were afraid to open, it was so radioactive. One of them kept a rabbit in the basement for his experiments but turned the cage against the wall away from the light. He wanted me to feed his rabbit when he went away. I turned the cage. They got a real machine that washed the dishes in high temp and pressure that I could load and forget instead of doing it by hand with soap and water. They used thousands of little bottles of irradiated xylene in their work. Xylene is a strong solvent. The post docs wanted to save pennies to impress the boss by recycling the bottles. They mandated Bill make me do it. He opened a window twenty feet away and said, pour it down the drain and wash the little bottles. I wondered in the next days why my nose was bleeding at night until I realized it was the solvent. I filed a workman's comp case and got a free bili-rubin liver test. The recycling stopped. Thanks to these post docs I had a first row seat at the pollution of Barton Creek.
The head of the lab, Dr. Lester J. Reed held a Christmas party each year for his post docs and visiting scientists. Somehow Bill decided I should get an invite. I went to two of these, around the punch fell into talk with a Hungarian quantum chemist and quoted a flurry of Shakespeare sonnets to him. He said what Ilya Prigione said, poetry and physics are the same. But Dr. Reed's son killed himself and the parties ended for a while. I took Dr. Reed the largest aloe I had in a clay pot, almost needed a dolly. I had had a student, M.K. Hage, in a previous year who had done the same thing inadvertently with the herbs of death! In aikido I was boss Bill's budo, the one he demonstrates on. We were born the same day and year, which all in all leaves with affection. All this ended when I was surprised with the news I was to be a father. The English department and I had parted ways and to get back in their grace I visited every member of the executive committee that summer of 1979, to get a job as a Temp Adjunct! I kept the bottle job until that Christmas. The Drug Garden got bull dozed. I got married! The train left the station.
Life Herbs
I say all this to try to create some context for life plants, which are better to apprehend, less dramatic than death plants and more disputed. We go to the pharmacy of antibiotics instead of to the garden. The amazing, the wonderful, the new snake oil medicine has one flaw, just at the moment it saves you die. The package carries its antithesis. So while the inventions save they destroy. PR machines deny all knowledge of this. Medicine's moribund handmaid, industry, that caused the entire world to be morbidly obese, poisoned by its food inside and its environment outside, thought so highly of yourself, live in the one last great super power, ran a cell on the internet and so the death herbs reigned.
Inebriate obesity licensed, they just could not locate funds to verify the folk wisdom of life such as the usual life herbs for the kitchen herb, or milfoil, the much preferred name of yarrow. How many drug gardens are left in the lower 48 in the sense of working gardens? At Texas they called it the University Drug Garden (Alcade, Feb 1965) and this article gives a good sense of it, but about 1980, there is no mention of it in the history because it was bulldozed for an archery range in trade for a new pharmacy building. Herbs are still worth something All the old faculty members interested were gone. Esther Wood Hall expressed an interest and of course Henry Burlage who had several of his own works on medicinal and native plants, but this was way insufficient. They had had to hire a complete non pharmacy mate to run it, from the English department! It fell in the crack between the ages of pharmacognosy, microbial transformation and new Bioprocessing Medicinal Gardens hatched when all of a sudden plants, animals, oceans and forests seemed to go under. At Rhode Island they call it Natural Products Research. [Compare Western Reserve University's Drug Garden.]
There are still botanical gardens, not quite the same thing, unless you count the Cannabis garden in the basement of the Cannabis College in Amsterdam. That have a following. Kim Keubel had a banisteropsis in the green house for a while. Renegade botanists had an S. divinorum in the one on campus.Texas land being so valuable it made perfect sense to change its use, except that the habit of guilty administrators is so defensive they have to hide the fact instead of celebrate it, which Dean James T. Doluisio felt compelled in utero. "We have not been able to identify funds for next year or for your salary." This gravel ground of the drug garden had seen 50 pickup loads of composted horse manure over two acres, countless dumptruck loads of leaves each fall dumped by the university. These had been plowed in sufficiently with a tractor so that the second a bean fell Jack went up. The stalk went up. High dill towered over our heads. Locals in the know brought their own tractors and trucks and scraped the topsoil and took it away to their churches and gardens. It was two feet deep in places.
The ground may not seem important in an era that consumed all prairie whose topsoil washed to the Gulf. Some gardens yet exist as plant museums. USDA has plots where they grow things unheard of. Major chemical companies have drug gardens, genetic gardens they call them where they splice the gene of a rabbit to a cucumber. It helps them hold still. My neighbor's rabbits silfay in the yard early morning, don't move when I walk the dogs past, like little rabbit statues. Food crops must be considered herbs of life, I mean non-monocropped natives, which are the foods of death, easily shown by comparing this ear of corn from the supermarket product of the food bubble, inflated with fake genes, injection of sugars and puffed out of all recognition. Shucked from the store its kernels resembled the Indian corn here, at first, but when the flesh dried so that if you ate the Safeway corn your teeth would have had an operation. The kernels lost half their size and what nutrition was left? The Indian corn dried as full as it was when picked, like a grape, not a raisin, complete as when it grew. We grind Indian corn for crepes. No Idaho Burbank potatoes or hybrids, blue corns and all rainbow corns and potatoes from First Mesa and the Bolivia highlands.
Is pumpkin an herb? Absolutely. It helps to see it however as the Hokkaido, from the island of Japan. All foods are medicinal, or were before altered, super starched and sugared.
Death Herbs
Call the death plants poison plants. There is a long list. At the Drug Garden classic black hellebore, hen bane, digitalis, mandrake, belladonna, ricinus, datura. I have to get out the lists. They were grown practically in gravel in Austin, Texas. There was no hemlock because it loves the wet and can grow over your head with white disc blooms. It just looks edible. Tell that to Socrates as you tap his insensate groin. Feel anything here? That's how you know when you're getting somewhere with the death plants. You can't feel anything. Inebriates are in this class. Marijuana of course has led to thousands of innovative ad campaigns for casinos. Imaginative, fantastic, the big trouble with marijuana writing is no feeling. One is tempted to put the cow patty mushroom into the life class for the beautiful glow it puts on its devoted faces, like they had been making love, or worshiping God instead orcaught up in some other worldly event. The difference between the counterfeit and the true makes bi-polar experience common. What used to be the province of birth, life and death you can get in a jar. Is vegetable Viagra a life drug? You know the answer.
The Drug Garden and the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research
I saw the herbs in glass jars in a casement window in Chicago. The tops were off and they radiated the room with fragrance. My relation with herbs came from that, except later I learned it was latent in Mennonite farmer ancestors and immediately in the green minds of my mother and grandmother. It needed waking. I discovered the Drug Garden by accident one spring after awakening. My first thought was to get cuttings. That's the way my mind went then, if you could get a cutting it would grow. After conversations with the student assistant I learned the boss was Henry Burlage, dean emeritus, and since I had loads of time, despising the MLA job market for new Ph.Ds, I would visit him in his third floor office. Close by, I was washing dishes for the Clayton Foundation for Biochemical Research in Experimental Science and its Aikido master Bill Lee. Dr. Burlage was cantankerous, but more serious than I realized when he then jawboned Dean Doluisio into an invite to me that fall about a job. Henry was eager to save the Garden since he, Dr. Albers with Dr. Franke and others took an interest, but the place was born late and died early, lasted maybe 30 years, 1950-1980. Prime central Austin land. Five acres! Dean Doluisio threw a bone to the old dean, who had just finished Pharmacy's Foundation in Texas: A History of the College of Pharmacy, 1893–1976, so a temporary part-time appointment was made up. When he asked how I knew these abstruse things I told him I had studied herbs in Tibet and in the Andes. When I decided to move on after six months he ordered a raise.
I did this three years and the Clayton Foundation five. Jim Bowman, who below gets his knee fixed by artemisia, held the bottle job but broke his leg and needed a few months temp. Then he said I should just keep the job. I had met him at a Hyde Park community sale, traded a beautiful ten gallon peppermint for a charcoal drawing, self-portrait of himself. I said it looked like Shakespeare. The post docs complained I ruined their experiments in pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphatase, that their beakers weren't clean! These were the same guys that had a refrigerator they were afraid to open, it was so radioactive. One of them kept a rabbit in the basement for his experiments but turned the cage against the wall away from the light. He wanted me to feed his rabbit when he went away. I turned the cage. They got a real machine that washed the dishes in high temp and pressure that I could load and forget instead of doing it by hand with soap and water. They used thousands of little bottles of irradiated xylene in their work. Xylene is a strong solvent. The post docs wanted to save pennies to impress the boss by recycling the bottles. They mandated Bill make me do it. He opened a window twenty feet away and said, pour it down the drain and wash the little bottles. I wondered in the next days why my nose was bleeding at night until I realized it was the solvent. I filed a workman's comp case and got a free bili-rubin liver test. The recycling stopped. Thanks to these post docs I had a first row seat at the pollution of Barton Creek.
The head of the lab, Dr. Lester J. Reed held a Christmas party each year for his post docs and visiting scientists. Somehow Bill decided I should get an invite. I went to two of these, around the punch fell into talk with a Hungarian quantum chemist and quoted a flurry of Shakespeare sonnets to him. He said what Ilya Prigione said, poetry and physics are the same. But Dr. Reed's son killed himself and the parties ended for a while. I took Dr. Reed the largest aloe I had in a clay pot, almost needed a dolly. I had had a student, M.K. Hage, in a previous year who had done the same thing inadvertently with the herbs of death! In aikido I was boss Bill's budo, the one he demonstrates on. We were born the same day and year, which all in all leaves with affection. All this ended when I was surprised with the news I was to be a father. The English department and I had parted ways and to get back in their grace I visited every member of the executive committee that summer of 1979, to get a job as a Temp Adjunct! I kept the bottle job until that Christmas. The Drug Garden got bull dozed. I got married! The train left the station.
Life Herbs
I say all this to try to create some context for life plants, which are better to apprehend, less dramatic than death plants and more disputed. We go to the pharmacy of antibiotics instead of to the garden. The amazing, the wonderful, the new snake oil medicine has one flaw, just at the moment it saves you die. The package carries its antithesis. So while the inventions save they destroy. PR machines deny all knowledge of this. Medicine's moribund handmaid, industry, that caused the entire world to be morbidly obese, poisoned by its food inside and its environment outside, thought so highly of yourself, live in the one last great super power, ran a cell on the internet and so the death herbs reigned.
Inebriate obesity licensed, they just could not locate funds to verify the folk wisdom of life such as the usual life herbs for the kitchen herb, or milfoil, the much preferred name of yarrow. How many drug gardens are left in the lower 48 in the sense of working gardens? At Texas they called it the University Drug Garden (Alcade, Feb 1965) and this article gives a good sense of it, but about 1980, there is no mention of it in the history because it was bulldozed for an archery range in trade for a new pharmacy building. Herbs are still worth something All the old faculty members interested were gone. Esther Wood Hall expressed an interest and of course Henry Burlage who had several of his own works on medicinal and native plants, but this was way insufficient. They had had to hire a complete non pharmacy mate to run it, from the English department! It fell in the crack between the ages of pharmacognosy, microbial transformation and new Bioprocessing Medicinal Gardens hatched when all of a sudden plants, animals, oceans and forests seemed to go under. At Rhode Island they call it Natural Products Research. [Compare Western Reserve University's Drug Garden.]
There are still botanical gardens, not quite the same thing, unless you count the Cannabis garden in the basement of the Cannabis College in Amsterdam. That have a following. Kim Keubel had a banisteropsis in the green house for a while. Renegade botanists had an S. divinorum in the one on campus.Texas land being so valuable it made perfect sense to change its use, except that the habit of guilty administrators is so defensive they have to hide the fact instead of celebrate it, which Dean James T. Doluisio felt compelled in utero. "We have not been able to identify funds for next year or for your salary." This gravel ground of the drug garden had seen 50 pickup loads of composted horse manure over two acres, countless dumptruck loads of leaves each fall dumped by the university. These had been plowed in sufficiently with a tractor so that the second a bean fell Jack went up. The stalk went up. High dill towered over our heads. Locals in the know brought their own tractors and trucks and scraped the topsoil and took it away to their churches and gardens. It was two feet deep in places.
The ground may not seem important in an era that consumed all prairie whose topsoil washed to the Gulf. Some gardens yet exist as plant museums. USDA has plots where they grow things unheard of. Major chemical companies have drug gardens, genetic gardens they call them where they splice the gene of a rabbit to a cucumber. It helps them hold still. My neighbor's rabbits silfay in the yard early morning, don't move when I walk the dogs past, like little rabbit statues. Food crops must be considered herbs of life, I mean non-monocropped natives, which are the foods of death, easily shown by comparing this ear of corn from the supermarket product of the food bubble, inflated with fake genes, injection of sugars and puffed out of all recognition. Shucked from the store its kernels resembled the Indian corn here, at first, but when the flesh dried so that if you ate the Safeway corn your teeth would have had an operation. The kernels lost half their size and what nutrition was left? The Indian corn dried as full as it was when picked, like a grape, not a raisin, complete as when it grew. We grind Indian corn for crepes. No Idaho Burbank potatoes or hybrids, blue corns and all rainbow corns and potatoes from First Mesa and the Bolivia highlands.
Is pumpkin an herb? Absolutely. It helps to see it however as the Hokkaido, from the island of Japan. All foods are medicinal, or were before altered, super starched and sugared.
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