So while the first edition took history in chronological order, we allow the folk old Texas first. Since the native and the modern are both more absent we take them togethere and second and last but you will have to bear the comedic turn on every page to upset the terrible piety of the time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Consultation of Robert A. Vines, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest and Correll and. Johnston's Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas will be found among a host of other sources generally and specifically here. Mrs. Alta Neibuhr's manuscript of the herbs of Texas was an inspiration for this work along with Dr. H. M. Burlage, Dean Emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy, who initially stimulated my interest in these and other natives. The years I spent working with him in the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden were rich and instructive. Carroll Abbott gave encouragement to this effort in publishing two articles in the last issues of his Texas Wildflower Newsletter while the manuscript was in the writing. Other articles appeared in the Newsletter of the Friends of Greenhills, the Texas Native Plant Society News and the Newsletter of the Heard Natural Science Museum to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made. I thank the C. R. Carlson family of San Antonio who shared with me their knowledge of early settlers, land use and much deepened my perception of the human background of the relation of plants and people herein. I dedicate this book to my botanist spouse and companion in these travels over Texas who has seen with her own eyes the marvels related here
Preface
This work is a study of the interrelation of selected flora of the Edwards Plateau of Texas, known as the Texas Hill Country, with the peoples who have inhabited this land. The area extending from the Balcones Escarpment and Austin, south to San Antonio and west to the Pecos are generally characterized by canyons, honeycombed limestone and caliche subsoils with prolonged dry spells punctuated with floods. The eastern and southern to the central Edwards receives about twice the rainfall (thirty inches) as does the west. The many clear rivers and streams that emerge from the eastern and southern base of the Edwards make this country as choice as it is, where the Guadalupe, Sabinal, Medina, Nueces, Frio, San Marcos and Corral Rivers and the myriad creeks are mostly unspoiled waterways. The land itself was traditionally range, but there is widespread clearing of land today for housing developments further than fifty miles west of San. Antonio. The canyons and rugged topography secludes many known and unknown sites of American Indian campgrounds of great age. For the native Texan the Edwards is a case in point for a number of endemic plants that do not range out of the Edwards and thus are peculiar to it. There was even an Edwards who ran for president. The area has been studied in botanical works, but here we take a selected number of species to examine their environments and relation to themselves and successive peoples who have lived with them.
6
In considering these interrelations and their meaning, an underlying premise in this work observes that plants are like poems in their appreciation to teach and delight. Everything in its own way is like a plants Poems communicate some intellectual, even moral perception and are not mere fluff of amusement Only 25% of modern prescriptions, or less if that retain any vegetative base in modern medicine, required in the manufacture of essential modern drugs. We should not restrict the organic matrix within which human existence has found its identity, to pharmacology. the "teaching" of plants comprise social and philosophic contexts of an even greater instruction for us. Each successive layer of civilization has left a record of itself in the beliefs and utilizations of plants. We call these plants natives to establish our point about their social significance, for we are the natives too! But we know all of us came here from somewhere else. This is so instructive a subject that it gets notices in the press of the three human groups that have utilized them, that is, the Indians, the Europeans and the moderns, or, the first, second and third waves.
The classical herbs of Egypt, India, Greece and. China, with those of England and Europe, are old world along side the immense flora of North and South America equally old, but called "new world" plants. Conflict between the old and the new pervades the modern age, for what is old and what is new? Perspectives may easily be reversed. For North American tribes European immigrants were new and they themselves old, but for Europeans the tribes were new and Europeans were from the "old" world.
Within this context of old and new conflicts of the successive waves of "native" Texans occurs. Plants however, do not adhere to political boundaries. By Texas natives we mean any which are endemic to, naturalized in or migrating through the modern. We may rank the most native of these endemics, such as Matelea edwardsensis, within the Edwards Plateau, but if there are perfectly endemic plants, there are not perfectly endemic peoples. It must be the first teaching of the plants. The oldest Anglo family in Texas will call itself native, and so do the Hispanic and the Apache, Commanche, Tonkawa before but the land gives no such title, hence, if we follow the plants' teaching we call them all native, any man, woman, boy, girl, plant or cow born in, migrant to or passing through and encourage all to be fruitful and multiply so their progeny obtain both a birthright and a bumpersticker.
Many species are endangered. Predictions that in excess of 2000 species of flowering plants will be extinct by the turn of the century have been exceeded. Lists of the endangered are published periodically, but the idea of an endangered native species may be extended also to ways of life, another plant teaching. Saying that if Texas is not an endangered plant it is an endangered species would mean that its escarpments, aquifers, prairies are endangered with also the past and present customs and beliefs of its peoples. Whether this should exercise our concern is an inevitable and ongoing process of the struggle of life, however, in the three distinct waves of immigration that successively possessed the land, are mirrored in the changing reputations of the plants and in the three sections of this work.
If we speak of Indians as being natives, older and younger, each tribe named itself in its own language as a synomny for human being, so they are not Indians, in spite of Columbus. There are records of their civilizations from the first millennium A.D., there is also evidence of somebody's habitation of "Texas" 50,000 years ago. These native peoples ranged the land until the European immigrants began to arrive in large numbers, about 1850.
European immigrants comprise the second wave of native Texans, but the second wave is not as long-lived as the first. We may include Indian-Hispanic peoples in this group even when they were first in inhabiting parts of "Texas" prior to empressio groups. Hispanics brought ideas of new world domination were shared with later immigrants. This second wave continues only until about 1970. It comprised "old" Texas ranches, vaqueros, sixguns, haciendas, longhorns and cowboys deeply human and more interesting than its stereotypes suggest.
A wave does not begin at one precise point that we can see. Whether 1970 is the start of the third wave of immigration to Texas, the third wave builds momentum in the 1980's, but being so recent there is little record of it in the customs and lives of people and plants. This absence is its characteristic. The present and most overwhelming effect of the third wave is its inundation of the second, even as the second overwhelmed the first. What we want to perceive is that series of tensions among these several groups and ebb and flow of peoples that mirrors itself in their conceptions of the plants, in the way they inhabit the land and in the way they use the herbs. Thus native Texans, the plants, record the destinies and beliefs of peoples.
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tribal groups who were exiled from the east and the north. Being European the Hispanics brought similar ideas of new world domination as did later immigrants. The second wave continues only until about 1970. It may be best known as "old" Texas, that is, ranches, vaqueros, sixguns, haciendas, longhorns and cowboys. Old Texas was very deeply human and most interesting, more so than its stereotypes suggest.
The choice of 1970 as the start of the third wave of immigration to Texas is arbitrary. A wave does not begin at one precise point that we can see. The third wave however builds momentum in the 1980's, but being so recent there is little record of it in the customs and lives of people and plants. This very absence is its characteristic. The present and most overwhelming effect of the third wave is its inundation of the second, even as the second overwhelmed the first. What we want to perceive is that series of tensions among these several groups and ebb and flow of peoples that mirrors itself in their conceptions of the plants, in the way they inhabit the land and in the way they use the herbs. Thus native Texans, the plants, record the destinies and beliefs of peoples.
CONTENTS
INDIAN CAMPGROUND, UNDISCOVERED GOLDS RICAN BUCKEYES14
KILLING THE NAKED INDIAN19
TICKLETONGUE25
HEAVENLY FIRE27
DESERT WAX / RED ROCKS29
A TYPICAL SCENARIO OF THE OLD WEST31
TEXAS PERSIMMON35
A GRACIOUS TEXAN38
EUPATORIUMS41
JUJUBE45
0 SAGE ORANGE48
HEDEOMA50
AND THREE SALVIAS52
II.
DISCRIMINATING THE IMMIGRANTS58
THE LONGEST CONTINUOUS ROW OF HOREHOUND63
MILKWEED AND THE WILDFLOWER SKEPTIC66
WESTERN MUGWORT70
PILGRIM MULLEIN74
MONARDA MUMMIFICATION76
TURK'S CAP79
CROTONS84
RETURN OF THE EQUISETUM87
EATING CILANTRO90
THE TEXAS PRICKLY-POPPY93
DATURA96
MUSHROOMS99
YARROW102
RETAMA AND THE NATURAL SETTING107
MESCAL BEAN HUMOR110
CURARE AND THE CORAL BEAN115
CREOSOTE HEALTH SPA118
THE OLEANDER ROAD121
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A PRICKLY PEAR124
LIST OF WORKS CITED.129
INDEX..131
"Investigate the great storehouse of new compounds of possible medicinal use presented by the vast Texas flora.►
Dr. Henry M. Burlage, Director Experimental Drug and Herb Garden UT-Austin, 1978
INDIAN CAMPGROUND, UNDISCOVERED GOLD, MEXICAN BUCKEYES
Indian campgrounds are identifiable as mounds or stone middens formed by placing fist-sized rocks in a campfire. These rocks hold the heat and were used to make saunas or to warm beds. In a large site many years of occupation were necessary to form the mounds and over these years a good many artifacts such as arrowheads, axe heads, flint chips, tools and cooking utensils were left or lost among the stones. These remains are the object of contemporary prospectors but the discovery of the arrowhead often means destruction of the mound. An example of what can happen to these sites occurred at the headwaters of the Hondo Creek where for four summers in a row a systematic dismantling of one large site took place. The means of this operation were a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a screen through which to sift the
dirt and rocks. When the site was sifted however the prospector wheelbarrowed the stones to a gulch and dumped them. When he was finished the campsite was gone.
On finding the "Indies of spice and mine" Columbus thought he had also found the Indians, but he was mistaken in both respects. The Indians themselves were named by tribe but most frequently those
names in the tribal languages meant "the human beings." The Comanches called themselves Nim-ma, meaning "the people," and the Tonkawa named themselves Tickanwatic, "the most human of people." Each tribe considered itself to be an epitome of humanity. The new world discoverers on the other hand hardly thought the Indians human at all. The chief benefit to be gained in association with them was trade for gold or spices and the Indians' remains also can yield a profit. The artifacts,
15
arrowheads, axe heads, flint chips, go into people's homes and collections but are more lost there than when they lay buried in the ground. If this latter day exploitation of the Southwest should
be viewed metaphorically as the ground of our own being, then what will happen to our imaginations when all the treasure is gone from the ground? Is this the wasteland? Well, exploitation was the way of the old, living continuously with the storm and the rainbow was the way of the new.
But the modern prospector uses bulldozers and heavy machinery too. A dramatic example of the effect that this kind of excavation can have upon the natural community of plants, trees and geologic strata almost occurred in the area of Twin Sisters, Texas. Here was once a halfway stop for stagecoach mail. The stop was only a corral and a stone house where two sisters lived on a rocky flat atop a stone escarpment. Underneath the escarpment, no more than fifty feet down, run natural springs in and out and under the rocks; these springs feed the headwaters of the creek. On one side of this flat the escarpment curls around toward a hill and drops sharply off. Here, its roots cracking rocks and dominating the hillside, lives one of the oldest of Live Oak trees (Quercus fusiformis Small.).
It is a tree of the fourteenth century, fed by the springs, anchored by stone, protected by the little plateau of the stage stop. Thirty feet immediately below the oak in the soft dirt of a field remains
a hole dug by well equip*. modern prospectors seeking the lost gold of the Sisterdale stage run. The hole was about twenty five feet deep when it was dug with heavy machinery in the early 1960's. The
perpetrator of this event, a dentist from Kerrville, told the rancher who owned the land that he was sinking test pilings for a dam and that the rancher would be allowed access to the finished site for recreation. Nobody seems to know what was found there, probably nothing. What remains is another dry hole for Eldorado.
It is probable that nothing was found because a year later that rancher, now the wiser, was approached yet again by someone who wanted to excavate the stage stop with a bulldozer. This time the rancher told the prospector to remove himself. Today the original outlines
of the stone building have been restored. The dramatic example that almost occurred is this, had the bulldozer done its work the six hundred year old oak would have been destroyed, its root system compromised, the water table redirected. Still however to this day the doves coo among the rocks as the roots twine with muscular twists. Eupatorium grows there in abundance. The pristine habitat is preserved underneath the hill and above where each spring the oak puts forth new leaves. Also under this oak with the Eupatorium and the putative gold grow three of those large and spectacular shrubs known as Mexican Buckeyes (Ungnadia speciosa Endl.).
But to show the peril of the native, what the bulldozer and the Pickle warehouse failed to do live oak virus achieved in months, eating up centuries. It is the agony of plague on trees from the Chestnuts on that struck the hill country, but hit hardest in the area from Kerrville to Bandera.
Brother Lynch’s diagnosis of Oak wilt was sagacious and prescient considering the later devastations of the Live oaks of the Hill country. (Love. 112f) by 1986, hardest hit from Kerrville to Bandera (113). He was involved in saving the Treaty Oak of Austin after its intended assassination in 1989. (See the Archives of Br. Daniel Lynch).
The one time community of the oak, the presumed gold and the Mexican Buckeyes give us a clue to this neighborhood that we otherwise might miss. The Buckeyes, which bloom like the Redbud but just a little later, bear four and five petaled rose flowers the last two weeks of March and the first week of April. A fortunate onlooker may see all four salient elements together on a branch, last year's seed capsules, this year's flowers and leaves and new fruits.
Last year's fruit occurs in a leathery, three-valved, umber seed capsule which contains three smooth, shining seeds, the color of ripe Texas Persimmon fruits, a little smaller than a marble.
These seeds have been excavated in Amerindian paleolithic rock shelters where they were found with Peyote and Mescal Beans. The connection among the three suggests to scholars that they were involved in cultic uses long ago, but while Peyote and Mescal Beans are well known there
is no evidence about what the Mexican Buckeyes were used for. Certainly we can assume that they were a trade good among these nomadic tribes and reconstruct their occurrence in that luxurious neighborhood beneath the old oak.
There are no other Mexican Buckeyes on that side of the stone escarpment nor any but those three shrubs beneath the oak in the whole area that leads down the watershed to the creek. Their solo occurrence makes us wonder how these three came to exist in this place. Now the Indian campsites in this area were certainly not used much after 1850. Three large mounds, each covering an area about the size of the shade around a Pecan tree at noon, triangulate the area where the headwaters of the creek begin. Scattered in and around the remaining mounds in profusion are flint chips of all kinds, some which have obviously been brought from areas very much further north. One easily imagines the tribesmen chipping out arrowheads and tools around these large fire mounds at night and also trading with other travelers. In the complex of the human and the natural terrain the large Live Oak tree dominates; being only a few hundred feet south of a large mound, it must have been a landmark even hundreds of years ago especially because there was not then so much brush and oak timber as grows on the hills today.
Here beneath the oak met what lovers, warriors or old men, and emphasizing that the three Buckeyes are unique in the immediate vicinity, who sees one of them drop a Buckeye charm? Even if the coincidence of the campsites, the mounds of rock and flint, the springs, the oak and the trading of the Buckeyes and Mescal Beans never happened, we still can gain insight from the way the tribes interacted with the trees, plants and earth, which were mutually reliant before the European invasion. We might say that the undiscovered gold here is the community of the earth and its peoples as much as it is literally the escarpment and the spring, the oak and the stone, the plant and the Buckeyes blooming away and producing their satin seeds.
Last year's Buckeye seed exists with this year's flowers. The flowers are coincident with this year's leaves and some of the flowers have already begun to produce this year's seeds. So the four elements of the Buckeye's fruition mutually coexist: seed capsules, flowers, leaves and new fruits. So last year speaks to this and this year to next in the unbroken natural continuity.
KILLING THE NAKED INDIAN
It almost seems to us that the Indian is named for this tree whose limbs resemble the naked h an torso. Its clothing of bark peels away when the tree matures, revealing the muscular, often red and orange-skinned trunks. If the Indian were named for the tree, rather than the other way around, it would make little difference
to the historical outcome of either species. But those are not real naked Indians in the hills, these were exiled years ago. Talk of alternative futures, can you imagine an alternative history of the American west where the several groups concerned have lived together peacefully for the last 150 years? No, the feeling was that the
the Naked Indian Tree or Texas Madrone (Arbutus xalapensis H.B.K.) was expunged by the spread of Juniper (Cedar) brought about by the effect of ranches and farms upon the land.
The immigration of the European into the country of the American tribes produced a killing off of more than one species and what the Juniper has done to the Texas Madrone parallels in part the relation
of the European with the Indian. Further, while the farmer and cattleman occupied the land like the Juniper, they also put into motion a series of changes that have not stopped even till today. The native species had little hope to withstand these changes, but the surprise correlate to the analogy is that the nineteenth century immigrants
and their twentieth century families are to the Indians and the Madrones what the recent or third wave of immigration to Texas is to them,
that is, their extinction. The immediate subject however is to show
how the Texas Madrone came to be in the position it is in.
The Madrone is an endangered species first because when, after 1850, the immigrants cleared the land and set up ranches and farms they interrupted the natural corrections nature brings to itself. Instead of the Juniper being burned off in periodic fires or its seedlings being choked out by native grasses, the ranchers overgrazed the country so that the grasses no longer grew in profusion and cattle trails washed and eroded into gulches. As the topsoil eroded and
the grasses thinned the Juniper that lived in the canyons moved down into the valleys and fields. Since cattle are not fond of Juniper
the seedlings thrived and grew. The outcome of this process is obvious if you drive in the Hill Country, but the profusion of Juniper there
is brand new and did not occur before the early part of this century. Under these conditions of erosion and overgrazing it is no wonder that the native could not compete.
In addition to ranching and
farming, hunting has also caused the Madrone to be in danger, for the country
of the Texas Madrone also harbors an unnaturally large deer population. After
removing so many species of animals, including all the natural enemies of the
deer, it seems thatTexanscompensated by overprotecting the deer
to the point where they sometimes starve in the forageless hills where there is
little food compared to what was once available. The deer are also stunted.
Natural predators took the weakest and the least able
to survive, but the yearly harvest of hunters tends to take the biggest and the best, leaving the weak to repopulate the herd. The buffalo, mountain lion, bobcat, wolf, coyote, bear, fox and turkey were killed
mainly for profit, which is the same reason the deer are kept alive.
Our only regret is that while farmers, ranchers, hunters and prospectors are getting their share, some innocent bystanders, like the Texas Madrone, are cut down in the fray.
A sharp-eyed driver will see more deer than Madrones along the highways from Boerne west or south, but in another twenty years most of these remaining Naked Indians will be encroached upon by the fast-growing Juniper.
As if the Texas Madrone did not have enough trouble already, some experts seem to think that the tree also endangers itself because there are very few, if any young seedlings, although the seeds are viable enough. Go out around Thanksgiving and collect a sackfull of the drying fruit. You can have hundreds of germinations in the spring but when the seedlings are about two or three years old they die habitually and mysteriously. Scientists at Southwest Texas State University have speculated that the trees depend upon a symbiotic relation to either a certain soil, to a micro-organism in the soil or that a grove of the trees conditions the soil but prevents their growth elsewhere. Of course one can easily see here that the changing of the habitat, depth of soils and soil chemistry, brought about in the last one hundred years, is an influence. But even if
the seeds did manage to germinate and grow in their native soil, which is very frequently prevented because they cannot grow under Cedar trees, then the deer would browse them off. This is true for other desirable trees as well, such as the Redbud. When all the natural checks to
the deer population have been removed andranchers plow up
their fields and sow oats to bring the deer closer for hunting, it
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is no wonder that such artificial conditions produce a population several times larger than the country can bear. It is not true, as some have rumored, that the exotic game farms in Kerr and Bandera Counties are breeding mountain lions to release outside their fences as a cheap means of deer control, but we might wish it were so for the sake of the Madrones.
When the European and American immigrants to the west first began to settle in the Hill Country the land was very different from what it is today. Amasa Clark, one early founder of a Hill Country town, says in his memoirs that
For many years after I came to Bandera County game was plentiful. It was nothing to step out a short
distance from camp and kill deer and turkeys. Grass was knee-high. There was not as much brush and oak timber then as grows on our hills today. The country was open and you could see objects a mile or two away much easier than you can see them .a few hundred yards distant.
The country began to change dramatically when the pastures were overgrazed and the cedar took hold in the fields. Texas A & M plant specialist, Benny Simpson, says that
When the praldbs of Texas were first settled, Juniper grew on the stony hillsides and the heads of canyons in thin soil. They could not survive the periodic fires which were a vital component of the grassland ecotype. If their seedlings came up after fires, the small plants would usually die from shading or be starved out by the vigorous growth of grass.
While the Texas Madrone is endangered in the Hill Country that
is not to say that there is not a sizable, if diminishing population elsewhere. Perhaps the greatest natural stand of Texas Madrones exists in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas. If
you walk up the trail to Guadalupe for instance you will see Madrones growing profusely everywhere. Here you will note the wonderful range of colors in the trunks, which are orange and various shades of red, cinnuaon, amber and gold, but also violet, cream and other delicate shades. You might find yourself so taken with the sight that you will go off the trail before sunset to sit and watch the colors as they vibrate In the evening light. These shimmers among the trunks are one of the great natural spectacles available, but here too,
while there is little Cedar, there are no young seedlings and a large, protected deer herd.
The Texas Highway Department made the greatest inroads of anyone in the effort to preserve the Madrone when it propagated these trees and planted some of them on the scenic routes above Vanderpool. The wire cages surrounding them might outlast the foraging of a bear, but
a good many of the seedlings were robbed anyway by people. The Madrone thus gets it coming and going, pulled up by the roots as these were, they also perished.
Withall we can see that the Nadroneisan economic good. Much interest and effort has gone into its intended reproduction, although we can see that the problem is not so soluble, the Juniper is not going to go away, nor probably the deer, and do we think that we are temporary? All this notwithstanding, the sight of a grove of Texas Madrones is a fine thing to behold and it would be a spectacular.
native in the nursery trade, rivaling the Japanese Maple. Of course, since the Madrone is native to rocky ledges and not good soil it is questionable whether it could thrive in the lawnscape. Ladies have made the sweetish fruits into preserves but to date that has been
the Naked Indian's sole preservation.
Heavenly Fire(Fouquiera splendens Engelm.)
The blooming scarlet-red Ocotillo is also called Candlewood because of its flame-like flowers that appear at the end of each of its stalks, giving suggestion of multiple lit candles waving on slender wands. Truly splendid, the Psalmist would have said that God had lit the desert with heavenly fire. Like divine Visitations, these blooms cannot be predicted. The Ocotillo flowers periodically according to rainfall and, while this is likely in Spring, Ocotillo does nothing without moisture. When rain brings "fire" from water after a rainfall Ocotillo also puts forth new leaves which yellow and dry when it needs to conserve moisture.
In a dry season, most of the year, Ocotillo is leafless and flowerless, giving an impression of lifelessness. Its stems usually reach about eight to ten feet in height but can grow over twenty high. Close up, the stems are whiplike with grooves and ridges impressed deeply into the wood with spines extending down the stem. The Big
Bend Desert affords thousands of these "candles" in bloom at the right time of the year. If you drive west you will find that the Ocotillo extends in its range to ,California.
Old-timers in West Texas used to make fences by planting Ocotillo cuttings close together in trenches. These would root and after some years form a respectable living fence. This use resembles that made of Osame Orange in more easterly Texas. Ocotillo was also reputed for a temporary shelter. A sort of but was made, the walls and ceiling
from Ocotillo stalks and the spaces inbetween were filled with Candelilla. Robert A. Vines says that the flowers were eaten by the Cahuilla Indians
but he does not say what for. We presume hunger. Also the flowers were made into a tea and used as a cough medicine. The bark has a resin that was used to wax and preserve leather. The root was dried, then powdered by the Apaches as a wound dressing.
There is not much firewood in the desert, therefore that dutiful task has often fallen to the Ocotillo. First it is so abundant and secondly, the nights are so chilled. The wood burns quickly because
of the resin. Living and flowering the Ocotillo was the desert candle, giving up its life it was fuel for flame. Nourished by the extreme desert heat, it was consumed, anapt symbol of the Deity, "My God,
a living fire."
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Desert WAX ed (Euphorbia antisyphilitica Zucc. |
plant the economic good, wax, while in the human being it produces the moral good.
Around Glenn Springs in the Big Bend the Candelilla was pulled up, bound into bundles and packed by mule to wax rendering stills where it was boiled and the resultant scum put into barrels comprised the finished product. After further processing this wax was used
in the earlier twentieth century to manufacture phonograph records
and shoe polishes as well as insulation for electrical appliances. It is also said to be an ingredient for chewing gum. Today the American Candelilla market is severely depressed, not because rainfall has increased and the plantdoesn't make wax anymore but because other materials have superceded it. Also, there are some reports that it is a lot scarcer than it once was, but such is the way of
things. The only good we have too much of is the good we don't want, but as soon as we want a thing then there's not enough.
In addition to making candles the Candelilla was also a building material for thatching roofs or walls, both in adobe construction and in the making of simple shelters such as dugouts and Ocotillo huts.
The Candelilla looks a little like a grey-green Equisetum but it is not a reed. It grows in rod-like clumps up to three feet tall
in the gravelly limestone hills of the lowland Big Bend and in Mexico. It had some medicinal use. As the Latin name implies it was a medicine for venereal disease and of course as a Euphorbia it was a powerful purgative. Around the Mariscal Mine you find large clumps still growing. The hills there are pretty steep and covered with various shades of shale-like brown rock, a product of the rush and pouring
of Cenozoic seas.
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Eupatori
Discriminating the Eupatoriums is not the subject of a thesis, but it is a project calling for patience. It is necessary because while most of them have medicinal applications, one or two
are poisonous. By simplifying we may enumerate four ways to classify the twenty four species in Texas: 1) those which are blue-flowered and those which are white; 2) those which are rhizomatous perennials and tend to spread in colonies and those which form fibrous-rooted crowns, occasionally with short rhizomes or sub-rhizomes; 3) those
of east or southeast Texas and the United States; 4) those of Trans-Pecos Texas.
Among the blue Eupatoriums, or Bonesets, E. azureum, incarnatum and coelestinum are easy to spot, but the most likely place to see
them is in your neighbor's garden. The most usual one in this situation is E. coelestinum, also called Mist Flower, which has weak stems that
come from spreading rhizomes. Its flowers are purplish-blue and identical in color and size with the Ageratum, often sold in nurseries and used
as bedding plants. This flower however is as long-lasting a fall
bloom as you could wish, fully six weeks' worth in September and October. It is said to occur naturally in moist, sandy, wooded area in southeast Texas and ranges eastward toward the Atlantic coast and also north
to New Jersey. Although it is a desirable ornamental, it will also make you a tea to help you stop coughing and start sweating, that is, it is a diaphoretic, but also an expectorant. Whether you should actually drink this brew depends upon your degree of desperation, but like other Eupatoriums it was at one time commonly used in the home-
doctoring of colds, coughs and fevers.
There are several white-flowering Eupatoriums which had a wide and popular following in the folk medicine of the southeast United States. Some of these occur in Texas, for example, E. perfoliatum and hyssopifolium, both perennials growing from rhizomes which occur at the extreme of their western range in East Texas. E. 21rWiatum is the more important of the two. Commonly w- • Throughwort, or Sweat Stem, it had in abundance those qualities usually associated
with most Bonesets, that is, as an herb useful in treating the symptoms of colds and fevers. The name Boneset derives from its application
in treating an especially painful influenza once called Break-Bone Fever. In the same sense this Eupatorium was known as Ague-Weed for its use as a febrifuge given in small doses. The stronger the dose however, the more the chemical principle, called Eupatorin, acts as a purgative. In the nineteenth century Yellow Fever and. Typhoid Fever were treated with it. In very small doses it was thought to be a tonic and a stimulant.
Another white-flowered medicinal Eupatorium which also just makes it to Texas is E. hyssopifolium (Justice Weed). This was used in North Carolina as a poultice to draw the poison from insect bites. The other widely celebrated panacea Eupatorium of the southeast, E. purpureum, has not yet been found in Texas, but according to Correll and Johnston, "it is to be expected (1554)."
The need to be this specific about the Eupatoriums is caused by the species E. rugo sum (Houtt), which was at one time called E. urticaefolium (Reich.). It was also named E. ageratoides. This Boneset
is a bad guy. It is called White Snakeroot and is common in the Edwards Plateau and surroundings and it is very likely the first one that you will come upon if you happen to see a white, fuzzy disc-shaped flower with fifteen or twenty bristles in a cluster. This plant loves to multiply in a wet season, of which there are not too many in the Hill Country in summer; this saves the populace from most of the possible bad effects. The prolonged August rains of 1978 brought up hundreds of little E. rugosum in fields and in pastures where they could not viably continue in dry weather. They generally need shade and like to grow under large oaks and on the sides of canyons where they get some runoff, but they can also grow in the Cedar. The largest specimens will be shrubs with a few tall
woody infrequently branched stems to four or five feet. This species grows from a small fibrous-rooted crown and that is one way it can be distinguished from the more eastern medicinal varieties. White Snakeroot is poisonous. It is said to contain tremetol-which is classed as a higher alcohol by chemists. This chemical produces muscular spasms, usually in livestock which graze it after a rainy spell. Inflammation of the skin may also occur. The most usual human effect associated with E. rugosum is in "milk sickness" or
when it is grazed by cows or goats and their milk is consumed by humans. The result of this indiscretion is severe intestinal and abdominal cramps, muscular spasms and unconsciousness which in turn can end in delirium and death! This species is said to have been
used by the "Indians" in much the same way as the other, but medicinally. Eunatoriumsproduce urination, perspiration or elimination. Take
your pick.
E. rugosum can be considered to serve as a kind of bridge between the Eupatorium4 of East Texas and those of the test. Among the Trans-Pecos Eupatoriums, E. Rothrockii is indigenous to the Chisos Mountains where it grows under Oaks and in canyons with the
equally large specimens of Salvia regla. Correll and Johnston believe however that E. Rothrockii is "perhaps conspecific" with E. rugosum which means that you should not instantly brew up a pot of it either unless you want a case of simulated delerium tremens. Inhabiting a
similar range in the Trans Pecos with E. Rothrockii is E. Solidaginifolium (Goldenrod Eupatorium) whose leaves resemble those of Goldenrod. Here
too is E. Wrightii. It, like E. solidaLigalium is small growing, one to two feet in height, with white to purple blooms. These Trans-Pecos species (with E. herbaceum) may also have medicinal applications but their range extends more into Mexico than into the Gulf states.
A majority of the one thousand species of Eupatorium are thought to be of the new world, even if the genus is named for the very old world character of Mithridates Eupator (132-62 B.C.), the great king of Pontus. The drug was also an ingredient in the potpourri formulas that were tried but failed in the effort to make Caesar immortal .
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Hedeoma t,Hedeoma Drummondii Benth.) |
Some might want to compare the scent to that of Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis L.) but that dear thing is one-dimensional compared to Hedeoma. There are several lemon-scented herbs, for instance Lemon Catnip (Nepeta citriodora), Lemon Verbena (Lippia citriodora) and Lemon Thyme (Thymus citriodora), but none of these
can be found by the millions naturally and none possess that desirably implicit expectation of producing in the inquirer life. The vulgar name for Hedeoma is either Mock or American Pennyroyal,but the only thing Hedeoma has in common with the old world Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium) is membership in the Labiatae (Mint Family). Hedeoma
might be better compared with old world Thyme (Thymus vulgaris)
Both have aromatic pink flowers whose fragrance has been long associated with enhancing the vital principle, but Hedeoma has the more outstanding fragrance. Both bush up low from the ground and after flowering their seed pods are similar, Hedeoma however does not form clumps as Thyme plants do. Both love dry ground and thrive in poor
soil; without water English Pennyroyal will die. Its love of dry ground and poor soil should not suggest that Hedeoma cannot be cultivated. Habitually it is found everywhere in the Hill Country but
it is not usually noticed. In the typically dry conditions Hedeoma is a slender-branched low thing, three or four shoots off a main stalk, six to eight inches high. If you dig one and take it home (be careful, this may be against the law), water and fertlize it, it will look like a Thyme plant, bushing up to a foot, spreading out, being literally,-covered with blossoms.
Plant-stalkers like Hedeoma steeped in hot water. If you could get the distilled oil it might double as a perfume and an insect repellent. The only problem with making the tea in dry seasons is that you take quite a while to collect enough flowers.
Someone in Medina County is thought to be starting a Hedeoma Dude Ranch. Aristophanes waited Thyme planted on his grave, but if you can get yourself planted in some Hill Country field you can have the superior Hedeoma Albertus Magus claims that drowned bees can be revived by the fragrance of M. 1Dulegium and that if you rub it on the "belly of any beast it shall be with birth." The use of Hedeoma in this way would shortly make so many beekeepers and mothers of us all that we indeed would soon be overflowing in milk and honey.
VIAS (Salvia Greggii Gray., regla Cay., ballotaeflora Benth.
Does the name Salvia mean "God will help you" or must you
help yourself? Perhaps a combination of the two best describes the situation of that gardener who has collected these aromatic herbs and shrubs with their large hpped'flowers. There are many desirable Salvias not native to Texas, but which can be grown here, however three native
shrub Salvias deserve special consideration.
years
A shrub in this case means a plant that over several/continues to
develop a woody stem and which does not die back to the root. Each year this stem becomes stronger and thicker depending upon conditions. These shrubby Salvias profit from a little intelligent yearly pruning, especially if grown in a garden where they get more water than they are naturally used too and fertilizer which promotes too fast a growth.
The idea behind this pruning is to select stems worth strengthening and improving in order to produce a strong and symmetrica) growth. These should be both pruned up and back. By pruning up we mean to prune as you would a bush into a tree, that is, by selecting one or several leaders. By pruning back we mean that these selected branches should be pruned back to be strengthened. Thus in a period of years you can help the shrub create a more enduring specimen of itself than would have been possible on its own. Full sun with well—drained soil is the best situation for this operation, especially on the rocky and terraced slope of a hill.
The three Texas Salvias best suited to this operation are Salvia Greggii, regla and ballotaeflora, two reds and a blue. It is impossible to make a shrub out of the herbaceous Salvias such as farinacea, texana
or coccinea.
Of the three shrubby Salvias in Texas Salvia Greggii is the best known and most loved. It is lower growing than the other two mentioned, usually to three feet, but it can reach toward four feet. It bears
its leaves most of the year and they are pleasantly aromatic with a definitely fruity scent. Its flowers may be scarlet red or pink. The pink seems definitely the less preferable for it is more of a washed out red than a true pink. S. Greggii is said to be a native
of South and West Texas, but it is very popular in older neighborhoods where it is sometimes planted as a low hedge or as an accent plant by
the door. The native shrub Salvias are used to flowering after rainfalls which they do all by themselves. How much help they need in this is debatable. Too much water will probably snap their branches from the weight created by all the new growth. Since they bloom naturally in cycles this is the way they do best. In watering them it is wise to allow dry spells, say three weeks between blooming periods, so that
they can recycle, otherwise the shrub will only partially bloom. In the natural cycles of blooming produced by rainfall the whole plant is usually covered with blossoms. S. Greggii is also known as a kind
of natural hummingbird plant. You don't need to mess around with sugar water;if you have several of these in your yard the hummingbirds will visit them. S. Greggii can take some shade even though full sun cannot hurt it at all, thus it is useful in yards that are partially shaded
by Oaks and Pecans.
S. rela, literally King Salvia, is much more magnificant than Greg4i, but much less known. In the 1980's attempts are being made
to introduce it into the nursery trade, but as a king will be, it is
a little temperamental. It grows naturally in West Texas in the mountains, the Chisos,for example. If you were to walk any of the trails up into
the Chisos from the Basin camp you would see hundreds of six foot tall S. reglas under the trees. You can imagine how the plant feels in that habitat, regally rooted in the humus of Oaks, limestone and granite, pampered by the extra rainfall in the mountains, totally undisturbed, unvisited by automobile exhaust. It can be grown in town, and in full sun, but it will die quickly if over-watered. You can see why. In
its habitat among the trees and stones atop the mountains water never lies about the roots.
The flowers of S. regla set it apart from all native Texas Salvias because they are brilliant scarlet-red tubes, as large as some of the most showy blossoms of the conservatory Salvias, such as involucrata, fully two inches long. It is definitely a flowering king of its genera, possible among the top ten of the world-Salvia class. Not as much can be said for its leaves unfortunately, at least for their odor. While the color is an attractive apple-green, if you rub them you will think that a male tome-cat had recently sprayed just the leaf you have smelled. Their odor is acid and pungent, a good defense against predators. While S. regla blooms with the rainfall, it is most typically a fall bloomer when, if given opportunity, it puts on its best show. It too could do well under trees and in cities, all other conditions being equal. You should not however plant S. regla and (reggii near one another. The danger is not so much that they will cross-pollinate ex much as that their colors are not compatible. Comparing the two, S. regla is much
the superior, so give it the place of honor. It is also about twice as tall as S. Greggii.
Fortunately, whoever was designing the genes of these shrub Salvias did not leave us with only red varieties. S. ballotaeflora is very comparable in growth and habit to S. regla, but its flowers are blue,
a darker cobalt blue usually, but shaded toward cerulean. It also reaches six feet in the upper limit of its growth, but because it is used to drier conditions that S. regla, ballotaeflora has learned to drop its leaves to conserve moisture in drought, a little like Ocotillo. This defense is a good one and it has a much greater range than S. regla, including Central and West Texas, New Mexico and Northern Mexico. New leaves appear quickly after rainfall. Its leaves are aromatic too,
but in the same fashion as S. regla.
Of the three shrub Salvias discussed here S. Greggii is the easiest at propagation, fastest from green cuttings. S. regla and ballotaeflora will grow from cuttings too, but they seem reluctant to do so, a little like the Bay which takes three to six months to put out roots. S. ballotaeflora seems harder to grow than S. regla which sets very nice large round seeds after blooming.
For people who live in dry country these three shrub Salvias are treasures that bring endless delight. Out in the hills these plants survive and survive. In the city or garden they live much shorter and more precarious lives.Discriminating the Immigrants (Vernonia and Verbesina
Isn't it silly to pretend that plants conform to political boundaries as if they waited all those years just to be called Texas natives? Do you believe that they are intelligent enough to know that they are now in Texas? What ever happened to the Atlantean Bluebonnet, is it extinct or just had its name changed? The vanity of naming has affected geographers as much as botanists and the thirst for immortality in names continues right up to and through the borders of Texas.
There are native plants that are endemic and those which are immigrants, although the endemic species must also have once been immigrants too. Ironweed consists of several species which occur
in the genera Vernonia and like most of the other plants which appear with it in nature it is not a "Texas" native, meaning that it is
not endemic,according to botanists, but who knows what it thinks of itself? A good demonstration that it is a regional plant occurs
in its having given its name to the title of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize in fiction in William Kennedy's Ironweed. As an immigrant it passes through Texas on its way someplace else. The several species of Ironweed overlap regionally, having slightly different boundaries. V. Baldwinii is midwestern, going from Illinois and Minnesota south to Louisiana and Texas, where it is common on the Edwards Plateau. V. missurica runs on a greater north-south axis, occuring in East
Texas, but ranging from Ohio to New York and south from South Carolina and Georgia to Louisiana. These varieties are very evident in the medians of interstate highways in the summer, being tall and rust red
in color. V. texana stays closer to home. It is found in the area of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. V. Lindheimeri is almost endemic.
It is found abundantly on the Edwards Plateau, but has also been sighted in Arkansas.
The names we give the plants may tell as much about ourselves as they do the plants, but not all Ironweeds are loyal Texans, they are however loyal strong-stemmed Ironweeds. Their view seems to be that it is better to be loyal to the species than to one locality
where it occurs, especially since these seem to change pretty quickly according to human fashion. If the identical species of Ironweed, such as V. Baldwinii, is indigenous to Texas and Minnesota, is it a Texas or a Minnesota native? It must be that political boundaries are arbitrary for plants but not for people.
Plants like to confuse us. Because we are sometimes too literal minded they find us humorous. While we go about discriminating our
divisions, they are conspiring to eliminate theirs. Alarmingly,we have learned that Ironweed all these years has quietly been interbreeding. V. Baldwinii, the regional western Ironweed, has been experimenting with the genes and pure Texanicity of V. Lindheimeri. V. Baldwinii has also been alleged to be cozying up to V. altissima. These plants are apparently creating new species, confusing to botanists. Correll and Johnston say that "the hybrids and backcross types of
this species (V. Baldwinii) and. V. Lindheimeri have been called V. guadlupensis (1536)." Thus the divisions between and among the Ironweeds are blurred by not only geographic distribution but also by genetic mixing.
The "weed" in Ironweed is misleading. A weed is something you want less of, but who has enough Ironweed in Texas? It tends to form clumps as it grows, increasing slightly each year. It is a
tough plant as its range indicates and it is adapted to various conditions of heat and moisture. A very fine example of a stand can be seen on Texas Highway 281 outside Blanco if you are driving south toward San Antonio. On the north side of the bridge over the Little Blanco River is a fine show in summer. Here the Ironweed flourishes while the motorists brake slightly as a tribute to its beauty. The mauve, purple, rose rust-colored flowers show numerous bristles of color; there is a slight iron cast in the colors. Close up its flowers look like tiny brushes.
With such a wide range it is not surprising that the different varieties of Ironweed have had varying applications in folklore. Many
of the several medicinal properties have been suspected to be beneficial, but these applications receive little following today. We no longer
seek teas that purify the blood or bitter tonics that reduce fevers. One thing in its favor medicinally is that Ironweed was not such a drastic purgative as so many other native plants. Some of its alleged medicinal uses were probably spinoffs from the very prolific and
also wide-ranging Iceweed which resembles the leaves of the Ironweed
a little and which is also a member of the Compositae or the Sunflower family.
The coming of the Iceweed metaphorically simulates the recent modern Texas immigrants. These people, like the Iceweed, have come seeking better homes and new lives, but their failure to acculturate
Texas customs and established culture threatens to choke out the species that already inhabit here even as the Iceweed has done to native species of plants. Iceweed is so dense that only a few grasses and no wild flowers to speak of cohabit with it. It loves shade and sun and is prolific in the better soils under trees as well as in
open fields. It seems that Central Texas especially has experienced a resurgence of Iceweed since the 1950's. While plants move in an ebb and flow dictated by various conditions, it is hard to forsee the Iceweed retreating, as hard as it is to imagine a renewal of the native grasses that will choke out the little Junipers again. In the forseeable future the changes that Iceweed and. Cedar
have brought to Texas seem to be here to stay. Further study of the invaders would be profitable.
Iceweed (Verbesina virginica) is everywhere in the fields and
on the rocky slopes of the Edwards Plateau where we could wish Ironweed to be. Iceweed also coextends east to the Gulf states and north to Pennsylvania. Like the Juniper we should not necessarily assume that its present dense inhabitation of the Hill Country was always the case. Old—timers speak of the a time in the 1950's when the Iceweed really began to spread, although they may have done more to help it spread than not. If you have ever tried to pull up a mature specimen from your yard, garden or field, you might wish for more ebb and less flow. The roots are like a muscular hand with long fibrous fingers that
grip the dry ground so solidly that even the most studied pull upon them generally yields no roots but only stalk. In wet weather and when they are young these roots that clutch come from the earth in
only the most difficult way.
The tenacious Iceweed is also called Crown-Beard. It bears large clusters of whitish flowers in a disc at its head, hence the "crown." It is called Iceweed or Frostweed because at the first good freeze the stalks split and produce frost-like icy shadow
stems which are remarkable. When the plant possesses a whole valley, as it often does, the effect is marked and will provoke photographs. There is a yellow Iceweed (V. encelioides) that has showy blooms in summer and fall and also a variety with a variagated leaf. The leaves of all members of the species make it identifiable because they are opposite or alternate on the stem and look like wings that go up and down. The. Iceweed, unlike the "Snowbirds" who spend their winters in South Texas, will not fly away soon. Of the 150 species in the United States, eight occur in. Texas.
It's just as well that the Iceweed brings a benefit along with its noxious infestation, if only the natives could turn these benefits to their advantage. The "Indians" of the Southeast are said to have used the root of V. virginica extensively, mostly in ways similar to their use of Ironweed (Vernonia Baldwinii), that is, internally to purify the blood, promote perspiration, reduce fevers and as another in the unending list of purgatives. Likewise the Hispanics used a
tea of the leaves of V. encelioides internally, usually compounded
with other herbs, for stomach, lung and digestive problems. Externally, the crushed leaves were applied in a poultice to arthritic joints and for rheumatism, to sores, inflammations, swellings and any near relative of such afflictions.
Many of the attributes of
Ironweed and Iceweed are closely allied. From the human standpoint
theyillustrate mixing of
several kinds, geographic and genetic, and thus pose symbolically
to us questionsof the
resistance of the entrenched society that fights for its life against the
encroachment inevitably brought about by increasing population pressures.
Jujube (Ziziphus Jujuba Mill.)
Bushing out in a hedge might be a term the much elder eccentric, Otto V. Weltner (1884-1981) would appreciate. Born in Hondo, buried in Comfort, who lived in the San Antonio hills he would gather jujube fruits by the bushel to dry them on his dining room floor. Since he lived alone there were no objections to the practice. He used to say that his longevity (he was 91 at this take, but lived to 96) was due to his having eaten three Jujubes a day for fifty years. If we ask whether this consumption also accounted for his behavior in the Live Oak trees, there were lots of Live Oak on his place, so up he would go. He kept three or four goats but did always have much money to buy feed, but goats can feed themselves, except in a dry spell when there isn't much to eat even if you are a goat. This required the 91 year old to go into the trees and cut down forage for his goats. The man was worried for by his children who would take him in hand for these splurges. They cried, like the prophets of old might have to Elisha, or Elisha himself might have said at that goodbye, "Father, come down, come down." They felt their responsibility to ensure the father's safety required he be moved to closer observation in his childrens' homes, leaving behind his house in the hills among the gnarled roots, barbed wire, oaks and ants and the cache of Jujubes under the table, where he would have died there like an Indian in the wilder. Do you think they should have left him in the hills, that even with a broken hip he'd yet be alive, rapping about World War I, mystics in the parks of Chicago, his old Texas German prejudices, trolley cars and the weather to grand nieces and second nephews?
The Jujube was brought to Texas from North Carolina about 1837 by wagon train. just about the time the time he was born with most of the old ways, good and bad, that became the hostage of his children.
Jujube in Texas was an escaped immigrant native of Syria, planted in orchards on farms so that when older neighbors moved into town from the farm they planted the Jujube too, along with peaches, pears, plums and figs. Even though they lived in town they thought to have an orchard. The tree averages thirty feet in height, with a slender trunk and attractive small ovate dark green shiny leaves. There is no need to propagate it because it sends out sucker shoots under the ground. If you want one, after a rain, go pull up a sucker shoot and plant it in a pot in the shade for thirty days, then put it in the ground.
The fruit is a sort of double drupe, meaning a fruit with one seed in it, like an olive or a peach, our drupe has two. The skin of the fruit is a dark mahogany, more or less rectangular in shape. Its slight astringency is aged out so that the dry fruits are sweeter. Eaten fresh or dried it lasts through the winter if stored if that the fruits do not touch each other. The Chinese loved it preserved in honey and developed around four hundred varieties, some with fruit two or three times the size. The fruit is not usually sold in supermarkets, although it is a cousin to the date which is.
Jujube also had its own medicinal following like the fig and tomato as a natural poultice for "drawing" heat or minor poisons from the skin. It is said that a boiled tea of the roots was good for fevers and a tea of the dry leaves of one species was a wash for ulcers. A cousin of Z. Jujuba, Z. lotos, has been urged as the fruit of the Lotus Eaters in The Odyssey that so intoxicated Odysseus' sailors that they were in danger of forgetting their homeland. This forgetfulness, but of another variety, may be what affected the old Uncle. He forgot he was old, that the Oak tree was off the ground and that he could fall. Forgetting to fall is a box on Well Check Up form. Would we rather remember or forget such things? You will have to wait and see when you get here. Still we can't leave him up there can we, but if he remembers he is old he will die. What should we do?
Tickletongue (Zanthoxylum Clava-Herculis L.)
Tickletongue is one of those plants worth encountering as a lesson in good health and in how you can heal yourself of your own maladies if you would just shut up. It is a gnarly, tough-spirited thing, survivor of the natural wars and doing what it pleases. For all that it is a neighborly, but full examples of it are not to be found planted like Arizona Ash in every yard. Zanthoxylum holds out hope to dudes and that if they would give up their club memberships and take a seat next to it, they would be delivered from common malaise. It is sometimes called Hercules Club, implying a heightened capacity of self-defense. The trunk has curved prickles or spines on raised nodules of bark. When the spines fall off the older remaining bark resembles a spiked club like one you may imagine in the hand of Hercules when he goes to collect the barking three-headed Cerberus. Every bit is armed and every leaf is a possible anesthetic.
Typically it is a shrub around three to six feet though it can reach fifteen. Smaller growths are common in the dry country around Utopia and Tarpley and east and west from there. One large specimen was been reported along the Balcones Fault in North Austin up to twenty feet. Usually it grows with a solitary intent in a similar habitat as the Mescal Bean. The leaves are glossy like varnish, and have a camphor-lemon fragrance in all parts. The leaves small sharp thorns are double protected from predators. Small greenish flowers appear on spikes at the end of each branch in early spring. They then turn into red-brown berries. Even if Zanthoxylum "yellow wood" is a mistranslation from the Greek, the wood has been used as a dye for its color. Pepperwood, Yellowwood, Toothache Tree and Wait a Bit you will figure out if you put a leaf in your mouth. Wait a bit, it will soon be numb.
Tickletongue bark and fruit was an extract in the nineteenth century for rheumatism. The official drug was the dried bark, but a folk-remedy of leaves was a remedy for toothache in the day. Beyond this its reputation gets to be like every another native plant, twelve of one and a dozen of another cures. As a tea it would presumably produce sweating, cleanse the blood, relieve flatulence, diarrhea, rheumatism, sore throat, skin disease, venereal disease, respiratory and menstrual problems.
It was a plant symbolizing hardiness, recovery and medicine and is still out there waiting for you to come limping down the path. It will do you good. The old rule of thumb was that a leaf will shut your mouth and when you were able to feel the trees again.
Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera (Raf.) Schneid.)
Out at the hedgerows some Bois d'Arc trees survive. Even the name is old-fashioned. Osage Orange is easy to spot as you drive for you will see the grapefruit-sized fruit hanging down in summer. Because they have stout thorns and can bush out into a hedge, the trees made effective fence row material. The last planting of the trees for this purpose in Texas may have been as late as Woo.
We encounter the conflict of the native and the foreign in many herbs, plants and people, sometimes combined. Osage Orange at first glance is a relic of rural, farm Texas and at the same time the preferred wood Comanches made their bows from, which they fired, multiple arrows in one hand, seemingly one handed, from under the neck of their horses with accuracy, holding on with their legs, good at 30 yards, a feat of athleticism greater than the new enhanced bionic man, so hope for us all against the new aligned encounter with AI that boasts, it can beat any all comers at any repetitive skill, like memorizing numbers from 1 to 10 or passing the MCAT, GRE, Bar exam and every other tweedle dum while juggling macadamia nuts with its palms and gazing planets with ease. By all means we should take it as conflict of the native and foreign seriously if it were not so desperate to convince us it is a nonpareil. Yes foresight is in jeopardy from the natural and adapted native, even if out teched. You see today the Comanches are still around and enterprising whites have recreated their bowsmanship and written in books.
There used to be rows of Beau Darcs planted as hedgerows that
lined the borders of farms and homes in Elgin. Even today Martha Stewart has a
long row of Osage Orange along the fence of her horse paddock. The rumor at one
time was that they could help you pass your SAT because Beau darc has a brain as bog as a softball. Since it looked
like one. crenulations (folds and wrinkles increase the surface area of
the cerebral cortex, allowing for more neurons and connections of higher
cognitive functions like reasoning. This increased surface area within the
limited volume of the skull makes the brain more efficient by shortening the
"mental commute" between brain regions Its
light green crenulated surface is stippled with little dots that would also
lead to a firmer grip for a pitcher should one need a ball. We cannot imagine a
batter to the brain, so no batter, it is pitch and catch all the way from the
piney woods to the plateau flats. Another repute as an insecticide under
sinks of those houses in Austin that
inhabit the bamboo thickets often planted in the 60s so the shoots could be
harvested and eaten as a delicacy. The bamboo however outgrew the fad and
became ten to fifteen ft tall habitats when the leaves built up a respectable
mulch at the base which was good for those outdoor brown beetles, called ingloriously
sewer bugs that come into the houses at the change of seasons. There the beau
darc was to prove its worth by preventing indoor habitation, since it is
filled with a sticky latex sap reputed to repel insects, but experiments alas proved it wanting and 
Dozens of deserted farms and farmhouses in the mid 1970s around Elgin could be explored then, even if it is a little perilous with the floor and roof half caved in. You did not find any treasure either, for the inhabitants took the gold with them, but sometimes you will come upon a Bible lying open on a three-legged table which you have the opportunity to therefore read something in those circumstances, like "He dealt to every one of Israel, both man and woman, to every one a loaf of bread, and a good piece of flesh and a flagon of wine." The questions that occur to the intruder's mind, like those Keats asked about the urn, is why have all these clothes been left behind with the books? Could they not have drop shipped to the Czech Republic as used clothes for profit? And where have all the people gone? The answer however to these questions is given, they went with the Bois d'Arc trees.
Agarita. A Gracious Texan (Berberis trifoliolata Moric.)
When ranchers chop cedar they leave the Live Oaks and the Agarita. Agarita can grow where almost nothing else but cedar competes with it, on the most bare rocky eroded slopes. It propagates there prolificly. In a garden landscape it makes an impenetrable hedge. It can even take a little shade. It is, with the prickly pear, the most characteristic Texas plant, armed in self defense, yet gracious to those who treat it with respect.
But sometimes the simplest things are the hardest. The poet may execute the villanelle but ponder eternally whether to single or double space it. Likewise the perennial query occurs, is it an
'erb or a herb, with the dilemma, is it an Agarita or an Agarito? This does not seem a matter of the Spanish feminine ending versus the masculine, but someone looking at this shrub would probably first think it to be masculine except it is so pretty. Its leaves occur in prickly triplets which prevent invasion. The leaves are tough and leathery. The stems twine and intertwine. Most folks -go around them. The foliage is an appealing blue, evergreen and the yellow saffron scented flowers nourish bees in that desperate part of the early, early spring. Agarita blooms before the Redbud and before the Buckeye. When the flowers ripen into red berries in late May a great deal of fruit is available for birds and in older, slower times, for people too. The slightly acid berries make jelly it is said, but you have to pick them.
The name is a scientific issue. Vines calls it Mahonia trifoliolata (Fedde.) after Bernard M. Mahon, the American horticulturist (1775-1816) but Correll and Johnston call it Berberis trifoliolata (Moric.) after the Berberidaceae (Barberry Family). This is only a problem in case you are Jooking up somebody's index, knowing it must be there but not finding it, you cry, "how can they leave out the Agarita?"
Universally available
in the Hill Country, Agarita will develop economic and medicinal applications justified
or not. The roots were ground in a tea for toothaches, and a pretty lethel brew
it was, since the plant has 1.32% berberine, an alkaloid which can act as a
circulatory stimulant and which gives the wood its yellow color, but which too
much of can send you on your back down the Styx. It was used medicinally in
small sips for stomach pains. A poultice of the bark was applied externally to
sores. The seeds were sometimes roasted and ground for "coffee." If
someone asks you why the Agarita should continue to exist the answer may not
determine your immortal destiny unless it is decided at every level that
advance toward space link requires rounding off those indiv-
idualosis edges. Then the Agarita has a good lesson to teach, namely, that when
a thing gets too rounded down like a fruit, soft to touch, a delight to the
eye, a desirable software, it is going to be eaten by other species which are
not so civilized.
There are two persimmons in Texas, D. texana on the Edwards Plateau and surroundings, especially west, and D. virginiana, common in the Gulf states and at the end of its range around Austin and San. Antonio. Diospyros means "fruit of the gods." The divine banquet implied in the name is a banquet of the sense. Since the Greek gods are mainly men made divine by revision, we might well think that the fruit symbolizes woman. This holds with D. virginiana. When ripe, its color is golden orange to dark red and its "flesh" is pale and translucent. Evaluating fruit by its "flesh" is an old colonial habit. The same voluptuousness does not connot an apple or acorn. Legends surrounding capture of this fruit serve both fleshly and spiritual ends, but being flesh is what we desire the color and tactile impression associated with the ripe eastern persimmon suggest watching out for shoppers in the fruit section delicately probing ripeness. The would-be amatory knight Sir Guyon in the Faerie Queene views maidens disporting in the fountain of the Bower of Bliss, the "lily paps aloft displayed," when the maid lets down her hair, around, / And the ivory in golden mantle gowned," becomes the epitome.
which flowing long and thick, clothed of health, nourishment and beauty, having been after all our human and universal introduction to the sense banquet of life, it is hoped that the reader is sufficiently aroused to taste the fruit. The Persimmon gives us further valuable instruction. The ripe fruit is so sweet and astringent that to eat more than one provokes a sensory overload. Thus, the Persimmon also suggests monogamy.
The Texas Persimmon fruit is neither breast-shaped nor gold. It is blue-black and about the size of a Concord grape. The skin peels like a grape and the contents squeezed out of it in grape fashion. You might not want to eat them by the thousands, the Texas Persimmon might just be less astringent that D. virginiana. One thing is sure, it was the sweetest natural Texas fruit on the range (Matt Warnock Turner. Remarkable Plants of Texas. Uncommon Accounts of Our Common Natives)
To appreciate the Texas Persimmon you might have to imagine yourself to be one or another of the nomads who once rode the Texas trails, "Indian" or cowboy. Either of these lusted for the high sugar content of this native fruit and were energized by it. It is typically fifteen to twenty feet tall and yields its fruit easily to someone standing on the ground. Of course many birds come to the feast with the deer, fox, possum, raccoon, skunk and squirrel. The wood was a tool handle material and good for carving. A black dye was gotten from the juice which doubled as a natural ink. Preserves and jellies were made. The Texas Persimmon is most abundant in the Edwards Plateau and west and south into Mexico where it is called Chapote. This is another native Texas tree that is not much marketed, perhaps because it is so abundant, but more The smooth bark of the Texas Persimmon gives a tactile impression to its appearance, somewhat like the Crape Myrtle and Texas Madrone. Since the tree is in the Ebony Family the wood is capable of fine wood-working; it takes a high finish, is smooth, hard and even grained. But if you cut the tree down for its wood then how will you ever taste the fruit? Likely the feeling may be that the eastern relative produces the better fruit. This however is error. Tests reported by Vines indicate an uneven quality to several varieties of the eastern fruit which is also subject to insect damage and the leaf-wilt fungus. The Texas Persimmon is hardy, attractive and self-propagating. There are many young trees in the hills and the fruit might just be our superior favorite were our taste not jaded with Prickly Pears.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A PRICKLY PEAR (Opuntia Lindhe meri Engelm.)
The Yellow Rose of Texas should be the flower of the Prickly Pear and not the lady, no slight intended. In the Petrarchan days the flowers in the garden would turn from the sun in order to behold Amarantha, but now, as the Avon bard sees the duality of pain and pleasure, that "Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud," the Prickly Pear is an image of the pleasures of life with the pain which can easily attach themselves to you at no cost, lodging in neat little patterns on the hand. Investigation may report the hand as aggressor and not the cactus, "but I barely touched its" It is not the long spine that one encounters in this way but little brown barbed tufts that grow in the areoles while tuna picking. These can transfer.
The flowers of this beauty look a lot like a golden-flowered floribunda rose. Close up they are delightful. In the center of the golden bowl of the flower the plant's ovules are erect upon thick, fleshy stalks topped by the circular crown of the perianth. The sight of this overt sexuality produces a whole range responses of the bawd, but the most obvious thing is the color so finely tuned to the natural yellow-gold spectrum of the sun's rays. Is the Prickly Pear the best floral match for Sol? The sun in its apparent daily cycle changes the colors of the Prickly Pear. In the morning when sunlight is bluer, in the long wave part the Prickly Pear flower is like refined gold. Towards noon the colors intensify. In afternoon the color leans to an orange-gold, reflecting the solar quickening in the shorter, redder spectrum. You can prove this to yourself by setting up a lounge chair and cooler in a field of Prickly Pears. Watching the colors change in the flower as the earth turns is what you are on earth for.
A Prickly Pear fruit, or tuna is a flower that has already bloomed. When ripe these are more purple than red and can be picked easily for the cost of only a few barbs. Since you have to be in the field all day anyway, do this slowly. With a small knife peel the skin of the tuna, carefully uncovering the ripe purplish flesh. After peeling, cut a small piece and eat seeds and all. This will set you vibrating more to the rate of your subjects. The taste of the fruit is the sweetest Texas fruit next up after you have paid your dues to persimmon. After dessert, use your tweezers to pick out the bristles. These do not hurt too much, they feel a little like chiggers.
Who knows why he would want to ruin our fun, but Luther Burbank, the great genius, wheedled a spineless Prickly Pear. He did this he says by convincing the Prickly Pear that it did not need those thorns and bristles because he loved it and was going to take care of it. Shortly after this the first spineless Prickly Pear came into existence. We can see why this variety does not occur in nature. Every part of the Prickly Pear is edible without the spines. It is even appetizing to people, so no wonder that if there were any wildlife or stock around the spineless Prickly Pear would soon be gone. In many parts of the Hill Country gardens are raided both early and late by deer fond of okra, beans, lettuce, corn but have not developed a taste for squash. The spineless Prickly Pear, like a cat without claws, has to be sheltered (like the deer!), so if you have one in your window as you probably do say a kind word and confirm the idea of humanity that it got from Burbank.
The fruit is called a tuna and the pad is called a nopal. The fruits are good by themselves or in preserves. Syrup is made by boiling and straining out the seeds. This syrup can be fermented or boiled down to a paste. In tea the fruit is believed good for gall stones. The nopal or pads when young and tender are cooked by native peoples and acclimated fried, roasted or cooked as tempura. Sure, peel the spines, bristles and rind.
Good to eat and good for you is the bumper sticker of Prickly Pear. The juice of the fleshy stems is a healing mucilage. The nopals split open apply as a poultice to wounds, sores, swellings, inflammations, ulcers and insect bites. The pads tend to draw out the poison or heat of a wound. The mucilage has been used to stimulate the flow of milk in mothers. The seeds ground into a flour are baked as biscuits and breads. In the days when there were large colonies ranchers would burn the spines off to feed cattle during drought. There is not so much Prickly Pear around for this purpose anymore. Desertification is not going to be a problem for the Prickly Pear. It will come back under those conditions.
Prickly Pear is a sign of the times so T. S. Eliot made it the centerpiece of a new ritual (a Prickly Pear Cult?) he believed would be invented by the "Hollow Men" of the new age. These, would go sightless "round the prickly pear / At five o'clock in the morning." For these people, who do not even complain about the early hour of their parade, when Starbucks isn’t even open, the world ends with a "whimper." Ending world whimpers about the heat, not enough water, too much traffic show need for more tickle tongue. Miranda, rushing up to the mighty Prospero exudes, "What a brave new world that has such people in it." The new world of her speech addresses ours.
Tree Tobacco. A TYPICAL SCENARIO OF THE OLD WEST (Nicotiana glauca)
The thirsty cowboy escaping his pursuers drags his wounded body up against a rocky outcrop, rolls a smoke and goes down firing. That’s the legendary of tobacco in the west, it energizes, relaxes, stimulates the appetite, is good as a meal to a starving man and the last wish of the dying. In real life the cowboy on horse-back, rolls his smoke with one hand in a sixty mile gale. Physical dexterity and prowess with tobacco with the fast draw of a gun, we should think of Tree Tobacco as a fairly serious creature. So what if it makes you dizzy? The more serious side-effects, it might kill you, buffalo, "Indians" and cowboys were not expected to outlive their generation.
Tree Tobacco was allegedly smoked, but since N. glauca is said to contain the alkaloid, anabasine, what happened to the practice is not clear. Maybe those smokers died out. I know Ed Abbey did. Of course "Indians" did a lot of smoking too; a favorite ingredient of theirs was yellow Willow bark. Cowboys and Indians had in common a good smoke, even if the tobaccos were different. Tree Tobacco was smoked for more than pleasure may have had some ceremonial function. Some tobaccos were used as a narcotic by North American tribes. The vision-seeking Huichol used N. rustica, sometimes compounded with the popular native marigold Tagetes lucida, to make their hallucinations clearer something our tech execs are now doing. If you sense an oxymoron oddness in someone wanting to clarify their sight of something that is not seen then you get the sense of a vision. Accompanied by fasting in secluded places and sweat lodges, and smoking, singing made the vision quest a two-handed engine. First it was an Achilles heel to foredoom fall before Anglo technology while they were looking for wisdom from within and missed the significance of the threat from without. On the other hand the hallucinatory agents enabled seeing the natural environment more closely, the landscape at large and in each particular as an ally. Heightened empathy with the natural world before the new world was made over into the old, Tree tobacco survives so well, that as my last sojourn to the Rio Grande is well past, the last sighting was along the fence of the tennis courts at the Conquistador resort in Oro Valley outside Tucson, so it also likes to watch a little tennis, at least as much as my committee member Tom Whitbread of Whomp and Moonshiver, who proposed we play, but missed the ball so completely we got a beer instead. If you infer that Tree tobacco likes beer and tennis that is the most closely guarded cornerstone of all.
One of the common names of Tree Tobacco was Marihuana, but this name does not mean what it says. The plant had many such names in Spanish, since it was originally a native o f Argentina which spread north. It was called variously, Sacred Mustard, Tabaquillo, Palo Virgen,Tronodora, Arbol de Tabaco, Tepozan Extranjero, Cimarron and Hierba del Gigante. This last name indicates the feature of the plant as a tall shrub, to eighteen feet. The colors of the leaves and flowers together are an image of beauty with the pale yellow flowers contrasting against the blue-green leaves. The leaves' color resembles that of the Silver-Dollar Eucalyptus sold in nurseries, but Tree Tobacco leaves have also a hint of green.
When the plant is grown outside of its natural environment and fertilized these leaves become marvelously enlarged, nearly the size of two hands together. They are ovate in shape and make a spectacle. It most loves the sandy banks of a stream so that if it were planted in very sandy soil it would do well. Since it grows easily from seed you can have it where and when you will. The Tree Tobacco flowers continually with large, two inch, pale yellow tubular flowers. If you need to see one before you fall in love with it, drive to the banks of the Rio Grande in the Big Bend and look along the river. There on both sides of the river you can take your pick of photographs. The flowers are also very fragrant and you will notice them attracting others of your fellow creatures.
The main use of any Nicotiana besides smoking is as an insecticide. It is bad for aphids especially. The curanderos of the Trans-Pecos use the leaf of N. glauca to cure headaches and for sunstroke, a compress of the leaf with powdered sunflower seeds and cottonseed oil applied to the head, spread upon the leaves of the Tree Tobacco. The idea is that the tobacco "draws" the heat out of the body and the leaf is supposed to "brown" during the course of the treatment, which continues with new leaves replacing the old ones until the leaves remain blue. Other reputed applications of N. glauca for treating wounds and sores by direct application or in a syrup for respiratory problems or in a tea of the seeds for toothaches might be somewhat dangerous, but you can always use the, plant to justify your next trip to the Big Bend.
The Longest Continuous Row of Horehound arrubium vulg,pze L.)
The longest dontinuous row of horehound in the state of Texas and therefore in the world, grows beside Highway 290 west from Austin to Fort Stockton. If this plant had a commercial value it would be extinct for sure, but not from plant lovers' trowels and prints of tennis shoes in the spring dirt. No, like the American Ginseng or wee thornless pie-oat, it would be (tug in shifts by crews; systematically dump trunks would bear it away. Happily, at least for Horehound, this has not happened, in fact the reverse is the case. It was the dump trucks that brought it, if not in the fill dirt itself, then implicitly the road prepared the way. As highways are built or enlarged the soil is disturbed. Then,either in the grading dirt used for the road shoulders or on fleet little wings of seed and need the Horehound appears, spreads and follows the line of new-disturbed dirt along the highway. It does not spread away from the road but follows it. If you drive west and see where it ends then you may make claim for the prize being offered for the sighting of the last Horehound in Texas.
White Horehound has wrinkled, grey-green leaves and wooly-white cottony stems with white flowers whorled about the stems. It will grow to twenty four inches or so while blooming, higher if cultivated or in a good rainy season. In winter it forms a rosette low upon the ground. Its seeds are fecund and it is so old as to emerge into
historical Egypt as the "seed of Ho s." Hitchhiking in cuffs, blouses, hair, bags and camel-hair sweaters, it made its way to America with the perennial Caucasoid to spring up in new and
waste places to thrive, but who, like Horehound, seemed to produce a bitter effect. In all fairness we should add that there is also a black Horehound that parallels the white variety, as well as a yellow (M. velutinum).
Any herb as old as this one would have volumes of potential uses attached to it from antiquity. Anyone however who has ever picked it green, dried it and put the herb in a jar, would be cured of the Horehound habit forever if, when they lift the lid after six months, they take a deep breath. Deer know better than to browse it; goats don't like it except as a dessert after Agarita. Some young ecologists call it an "important green resource," whatever that means. Imagine what they would say about gras! Rumor once had it that Horehound was an ingredient in Smith Brothers' Coughdrops. Are they still on the market, you know, the guys with the beards? Pioneers made Horehound candy with it. They also aged very quickly. Grandmothers of the nineteenth century used it as a tea to purge the sap of boys in spring. As a tea, it, along with Mugwort, Yarrow and oak galls was once a panacea for weltschmertz (world-pain) of the Goethean variety, in addition to colds, coughs; asthma, kidney stones, fevers, menstrual pains, worms, sores, flies, perspiration and *hat else is wrong with 'ya? Since it was trem ously available it was a waste not to use it. It is said to have a relaxing effect with lemon in a glass of whiskey. The pharmphils called it a lot of big names: astringent, antispasmodic and like practically everything, if taken in large enough doses, it was also a laxative.
Nurseries have been known to sell it in three inch pots for a
As a poison or blessed for its timely aid. Who is to blame ourselves or Mother Nature?
Milkweed and the Wildflower Skeptic (Asclepias
The wildflower skeptic will complain that he must be bothered by every little plant that grows beside the road. Shouldn't he be allowed to just drive along in blind peace without a continual commentary, oh there's a Bluebonnet! Look, Winecups! Stop, there's a Paintbrush! This soul will get our sympathy too because, first, he is ignorant and, bless him, remains so, and second, if he were
to stop for every Gilia in Texas when would he tend to his own yard? We have no statistics immediately available, but who knows how many accidents have been caused by the Gallardia viciously waving its blanket of colors in our faces. While these are the common dangers of the Texas spring our skeptic would feel more kindly toward the lowly Milkweed, were it is not among these serious 7 wildflower felons. And worse name for Ascelpias, implicated in death of Socrates: This drama can be appreciated as a kind of still life. The executioner, honking and sniffling, had been tracking the progress of the poison upward from the feet: "He pressed his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; and he said, no; and then his leg and so upwards and showed us that he was cold and stiff." There is only the sound now, the "no," a disembodied syllable. Then Socrates raises up the sheet and says to Crito, "I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?" which suggests that Socrates is the scapegoat sacrifice for the health of the stateexcept it is a scapecock and the killing of the cock is an impiety itself, killed when Socrates will not save Athens by escaping from its own admitted injustice. The established order shows the inefficacy of Asclepius who have failed to rescue Socrates yet is thanked, in the successful sacrifice of himself to his affront of all pious remainders.
Let this then serve as a warning, for many Milkweeds do not grow much over eighteen inches in height and some of the most characteristic perennial varieties by the road-side, such as A. asperula (Dene) and A. oenotheroides (Chain & Schlecht) have pale yellowish green flowers, moderately tinged with purple, which while they do not assault the eye are a shock to see a green flower, not hybridized like the minigreen roses that so surprised baby Stephen and Joyce,
who invented the green rose. His character in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, as a young boy, playfully confuses the color with the place: "0 the green wothe botheth." The Milkweed flower, a cluster of green and purple flowers "botheth" maybe the size of an American golf ball. It has rough, narrow leaves and sprawls along roadsides, pastures and hills. Most of the one hundred plus species are new world natives.. The San Antonio Botanical Garden sells seeds some very vivid and brightly colored Milkweeds suitable to cultivation. The annual A. curassavica (1,.)(Blood-Red Milkweed), whose flowers are a bright crimson, large and showy Correll and Johnston poetically call that this is a "ubiquitous waif" of the tropics (1233). A.brachystephana (Torr.), Purple Milkweed, is a low perennial of reddish-purple to greenish-purple flowers and A. tuberosa or Orange Butterfly Weed has showy reddish-orange flowers.
Milkweed is sometimes called Silkweed, not to confuse its whiteness with the ice weed that in winter gets its own white beard. Milkweed gets its name from the milky sap that exudes from any broken stem, a milk of some controversy in that in the brief time the European occupied the land it has been thought that this milk could either kill you or cure you. Killing is the more recent idea. Chemical analysis posits glycosides and an alkaloid in the sap. This seems to support some ranchers' ideas that the Milkweed is poisoning their cattle. One critic has countered this claim in defense of the Milkweed, suggesting that if the ranchers had not overgrazed their pastures in the first place, killed out the more desirable forage, their cows never would have eaten Milkweed at all. Some of these "pastures" today look a little like they have been stripmined and have only just been repossessed by the hardiest wild plants that like disturbed soil, such as Euphorbias and. Ratibidas. Since the milkweed is low upon the ground it often escapes the cowman's ire,unlike the poor mesquite which pours nitrogen into the soil and for its effort in some parts of the state is being pulled, up by the roots by helicopters, but that's another story.
The reasoning that Milkweed may cure you is the older view than the Kill School, consisting first of "Indian" remedies. Virgil J. Vogel (American Indian Medicine, 1970, 336-337) says that many Milkweeds in,general were used by the Catawbas to remove warts with the milky sap or that the root was boiled by the Natchez for a tea to treat kidney ailments. Specifically, A verticillata (L.) was used as a treatment for snakebite and A. incarnata (L.), probably in a tea, was used as an expectorant, for as,thma and for rheumatism. All of these occur in Texas also. A. tuberosa and incarnata were official drugs in the United States until well after the Civil War when they were superseded. Hispanics in West Texas and New Mexico are alleged today to still use the powdered root of A. asperula as a pain reliever in childbirth and afterbirth, both as a tea and as a poultice. Other applications resemble those attributed to eastern and southeastern tribes, for asthma=- and to induce perspiration in a fever.
In addition to its possible medicinal qualities the Milkweed species have been a hoped for but not realized commeroial good. The latex was attempted unsuccessfully as a substitute for rubber.
During World War II the floss of the seed hairs was replacement for kapok in life jackets which worked because the waxy coating makes its floss water resistant. Several efforts were made to extract sugar from the nectar glands of the flower. The sugar content of the flowers led to experiments in making wine, wLich as Gaertner says, had an"exotic aroma." In the nineteenth century it was a pot herb with a little popularity as an erzatz asparagus. The parts of the plant eaten were the young shoots, the unopened buds, but it is toxic for desert tortoises.and the young pods. Of course these uses might be palatable or they might not depending on the conditions of growth. A. yriaca L. was thought to be the edible variety. Some of the southwest Milkweeds such as A. subverticillata Vail are poisonous. Another danger is that the plant has been mistaken in its tender growths with the similar Dogbane (Apocynum species).
The Milkweed extends some thirty six representations into Texas. It has been admired for its beauty, extirpated as a poison and blessed for its timely aid. Who is to blame ourselves or Mother Nature?
Pilgrim Mullein(Verbascum thapsus L.)
Ladies will stand up for Mullein.The comforting prospects of its soft leaves and the cheering yellow spikes of flowers it bears in its second year are appealing to the feminine. When you are out wandering through the endless summer fields of Mexican Hat (Ratibida columnaris) and Snow-on-theMountain (Euphorbia bicolor produced by Hill Country over-grazingin the second quarter of this century, then the Great Mullein cheers the eye. They forbid their husbands to mow it.
The plant is a biennial, blooming in its second year. It is in
the same family as Digitalis (Foxglove) and Snapdragon (Scrophulariaceae) and when it blooms it resembles these, except that Mullein will grow in poor, dry, alkaline soil where Digitalis will not. The leaves look and feel like large lamb's ears, soft, velvety greyish green. Even though they are perfectly adapted to Texas they are naturalized, not native. If you imagine the pilgrims carrying along a totebag of seeds of medicinal plants that they were used to in the old, world, then you know how Mullein got here. Mullein was on the Mayflower when it landed.
In the old world it had so many names that Mrs. M, Grieve gives five pages to it. It had a host of Bible names, Aaron's Rod, Jacob's Staff, Peter's Staff among the puritans. It had names from domestic use, Candlewick, Torches, Hedge Taper and Ragpaper. Names came from the feel of the leaves: Lady's (Adam's, Old Man's) Flannel, Woolen, Velvet Dock, Beggar's Blanket, Feltwort. Finally, Mullein had names associated with its use,
75
for instance, Lungwort or Cuddy's Lungs. Because the plant secretes a resin, not a volatile oil the resin makes the leaves useful as a poultice panacea for bruises, hemorrhoids swellings, inflammations, frostbite and anything else traffic will invent.
Mullein was said to be a yellow dye and a possible tea for coughs, but Mrs. Grieve says to strain the tea through muslin to remove the hairs which will cause the throat to itch. At one time during the
ersatz movement for chicory-malt "coffee" and soybean "hamburgers" the powdered milk and potato crowd made an ersatz cigarette out of lettuce. You had to have smoked one of these to really appreciate it, another of the cowboy Indian saga, forMullein also has since been claimed as a substitute tobacco and herbal cigarette smoke for respiratory ailments, with thyme cigarettes for bleeding lungs. That the root would lessen the pain of a toothache. Really, as Carroll Abbott used to say, go to the doctor. We add the dentist. Toothaches were common among the populace. Otherwise Mullein tea would stimulate the flow of urine. To reduce coughing, put you to sleep and just carry it around from place to place in your purse.
Mostly harmless, we hope, these optimistic applications were all there was to a woman of old who was cook, doctor, teacher, gardener and inventory clerk, and today it is held in highest repute by housewives cultivating it as the plant that freed Odysseus from the wiles of Circe and brought him home at last to the arms of Penelope.
Monarda Mummification
If there are herbalists out there on the plain of the Edwards Plateau living high off the Horsemint it probably is doing their health a world of good. Since the herb has alhight percentage of thymol in its leaves we can distinguish its uses as being parallel
to those of old world Thyme, a great enhancer of the vital principle. In both old and new world sources of thymol we find prominent their usages in both preserving and pickling.
Even though these are horse tales Horsemint Monarda is not a mint for horses, nor is it a coarse as implied by the epithet "horse," as in "horselaugh." Among beekeepers and gardeners the several varieties of Monarda are much sought, but for different reasons. Beekeepers around Austin wait for the Monarda to bloom because it makes an especially flavorful contribution to the taste of honey and
it also produces pollen in great amounts. Monarda shares its essential oil with Thymus vulgaris (English Thyme). It is called thymol after the Thyme plant, but since Monarda is a much larger plant, around three feet tall, and since it produces such a great abundance of large fragrant blossoms, one Monarda might be equivalent to several Thymes in pollen production. Mrs. Grieve says that the oil of M. punctata "contains 61 percent of Thymol" or twice as much as that produced by T. vulgaris (811). If of old Thyme was said to be the most desirable bee plant and to make the best honey for its sweetness, then the Monarda is doubly so when it blooms in June.
Gardeners grow Monarda
because it is hard to find a more out
standing flower among native plants, however, the dozen or so species
in Texas are not so easy to differentiate. Perhaps they might be divided between the pink and the white flowering species and the annuals and the perennials. The flowers of most Monardas occur in serial order, one to six, and terminate at the end of the stem.
Each flower is whorled about the stem and forms a bowl-shaped bristle. The leaves immediately surrounding these flowers are called bracts and are comparatively smaller in size than elsewhere on the plant.
The inner bracts of M. citriodora, a pink variety, are covered with small hairs and are typically purple with the flowers ranging from white to pink, dotted with purple. This species is an annual and it has a lemon scent. Thus it is called Lemon Beebaim.
Another popular annual is M. punctata, a white variety, but also sometimes called Yellow Horsemint. M. 2unctata is a good contrast to citriodora because its leaf bracts are white to yellow, as is the flower itself. The flower has small maroon spots on it, hence it is also called Spotted Beebalm.
The Monarda most often cultivated in yards is M. fistulosa. This is a perennial which has more narrow triangularly-shaped leaves than the two annuals mentioned. It also has a downy soft leaf. Its bracts and flowers are very pink lavender and it is the tallest of the three, around four feet. It cannot be mistaken when flowering because its flowers typically occur singly at the end of the stems, rather then serially, and they are long, bushy and very striking, hence it is also Called Long-Flowered Hors-oint.
There are several variations of M. punctata, among them M. maritima, fruticulosa, viridissima. Perhaps the most striking of these is the deep cerise pink red or maroon flower of M. viridissima.
In the old world Thyme was first of all an antiseptic used in the dressing of wounds. It was also "painted" on skin irritations of all kinds from eczema to burns. It was a mouth spray, mouth wash, deodorant, anaesthetic, cough medicine, parasite remover, gargle, meat preserver and mosquito repellent. It was used to flavor soups, stews and sauces. Before the advent of modern medicine it was an "official" drug.
The new world pioneers used. Monarda in a similar fashion. There are reports of it being applied to rheumatic joints, as a tea to relieve indigestion, to both stimulate and surpress the flow of urine (! to relieve fits, headaches and backaches. The "Indians" were also reported to have used it for "heartaches," that is, as a stimulant for the heart. There was also some popularity among the tribes for a kind of Horsemint perfume. The relatively famous "Oswego Tea" was an "Indian" remedy of the swego tribes that was common in use also among the if,igrants. This tea was prepared from an infusion of the leaves of M. didyma.
It stands to reason than an herb like Th•nae or Monarda that was useful as a disinfectant, preservative, anesthetic and as an antiseptic would not necessarily be drunk promiscuously as a tea, unless of course the inebriant were desirous of preserving the inward matter before
his or her time. This self-pickling capacity when indulged in large enough doses, would go doubly for the lemon variety of Monarda (Citriodora) because in addition to containing the pheonol compound useful in preservation, it also has a citral (lemon) element somewhat bitter to the taste.
If, in your travels in search of the ultimate panacea among the Texas natives, you come upon a completely mummified herbalist, you might consider the good effects of the Monarda.
Croton
You are standing on some Croton right now! Be careful.
It looks like a miniature maypole around which the faeries of Middle Earth might dance. They used to use it as tea before the settlers drove them out. The plant is low, much branched and has small, oval, gray-green leaves, which because of their aromatic fragrance, have traditionally suggested medicinal applications. More probably, Croton was used in a culinary fashion,as a tea or as seasoning for meats.
You can hardly avoid standing on it as it is literally everywhere in Central Texas in summer and fall.
There are over 600 varieties in the world and around 40 in. Texas, the most appreciated species being C. monanthogynus. There is a C. fruticulosus which Hispanics call kierba loca. It is very sweet-smelling, but the Spanish name connotes a less wholesome effect. It is not the loco weed made popular by western fiction writers after the manner of Zane Grey. There is a C. Texensis with a less pleasant odor
that is allegedly medicinal but it is surely not culinary. C. texensis is appreciably larger than the other two species mentioned above. There is a C. tiglium from which the pharmaceutical Croton Oil is produced, but the seeds are supposedly toxic. The one you are standing on is probably the benign C. monanthoanus. Mrs. Alta Niebuhr of Austin provides a fine illustration of the need for discriminating Crotons.
She writes that she "first met this plant by mail. It was mailed to me by a frantic Texan who had drunk this tea all her life and had just been told by her veterinarian that it was poison." The veterinarian was probably thinking of C. tiglium or ciliatoglandulifer while the lady
was drinking monanthogynus. No doubt he was only trying to be helpful but it is always best to check with your postman before being alarmed by what your vet says about herbs.
Texas Croton was thought to be strong medicine against bugs. Presumably you could rub it on your skin as a repellent or make smoke with it (but cover your mouth). Any member of the Euphorbiaceae however is likely to have a drastic effect unless otherwise indicated. Like many other native plants, Texas Croton is said to have been used by the "Indians," in this case the Hopi who, it is claimed, used it "to induce vomiting." Likewise the powder in water was "a strong laxative." Did you ever wonder what it was that the "Indians" ate
so much of that they either had to throw it back up again or that they were always needing a laxative for? It seems like these two uses are mentioned as verities for the great preponderance of native plants, like a carryover from 19th century medicine where the doctor would do one of two things, bleed'em or purge'em. On this basis herbalists of the 25th century will speculate that "Americans of the 20th century had a medicinal application for many of their technological advances. Their motor oil, for instance, is said to have been drunk in small amounts to induce vomiting and it was also used as a laxative." Surely no one thinks that the Hopi today use Croton in this way, if they ever did. And does anyone else use it thus either? Shocking as it must seem, newspaper accounts have appeared alleging that some persons in North Texas have gone for as long as a decade without either vomiting
or being purged As far as a Croton poultice for headaches is concerned, or seeds for earaches, insecticides and teas, powders and leaves good
for the stomach and the urinary tract, well, here's a common sense rule. Do you feel sick? Go to a doctor.
Return of Equisetum
For a plant, the profesors once thought extinct the Horse-
tail Reed is doing pretty well. At least one prestigious
Dallas nursery (North Haven Gardens) has offered it in one gallon pots for
planting around estate ponds. In nature the reeds love a sandy bank along
a Hill Country stream that tends to seasonal flood. A rancher in Bandera County trying to save a law from erosion planted a single specimen. In three years the horsetails had spread over an area of one hundred square yards and more than thirty feet from the stream up the bank. These days he has to mow it. The flood of 1978 deposited another six feet of sand on that bbut the Horsetails easily re-possessed it in three months. One can say that it is a useful plant for preventing erosion.
The reeds do not, regardless of their name, resemble the tail of a horse, neither will they whinny if picked. The new reeds are light green and when mature have a black band below each joint. The stems have many ridges and are hollow between the joints which will
leave jagged edges when broken. The gritty silex or silica particles cause the reeds to have once been called Scouring Rush. If tied in small bundles the reeds can be used for scouring pots, if you happen to be caught out on a cattle drive, or even if you are camping and forgot to bring the Brillo pads.
Folklore and herbal literatures attribute a number of questionable uses to the reeds. It is said for instance that the Navajo made flutes from the hollow stems, but surely this refers to another, larger reed species. Another writer says that Equisetumis an irritant and can be used on small cuts to stop bleeding, but why would anyone put an irritant on a cut? Since these uses are all usually attributed to the "Indians," who are not around to defend themselves, we might ask why that native zould pass up the Achillea so easily found along the same probable stream which legend prefers as a better topical agent? We are asked to believe further that the "Indians" used Horsetail tea as a gargle, as a mild diuretic and in the treatment of venereal disease, but if the reed is a diuretic why does the folklorist tell us that the Kickapoo used Horsetails in
tea to prevent bedwetting? Thus kind of application would be contraindicated. Finally it is claimed that the Piute and Shoshone used ashes from burned Horsetails to treat sores of the mouth, but be careful because E. hyemale contains aconitic acid and an alkaloidal nerve poison, equisitine.
If you've a mind to believe all or any of unsupported statments about herbs and native plants then the Horsetail Reed is for you. It is taxonomically just about the simplest plant in Texas.
EATING CILANTRO Coriandrum sativum L.)
Cilantro, were there to be an herb of Texas competition, but not Coriander would survive to the final cutting. The Hispanic name denotes the green herb as a culinary spice in salads, soups, with beans and some meat dishes. The English name specifies the dried
fragrant seeds, also used as a spice, but in a different way, especially in baked goods.
To the untutored sense Cilantro can be overpowering. The leaves release a foetid odor when crushed and the taste is at first strange, but grows with familarity. This odor was the cause of its being named Coriander in the first place, which means that "it smells like a crushed bug," but isn't this merely prejudice against bugs? After all, grasshoppers and worms make good sources of protein, for birds, and the chicken that ate the bug that you ate, did you ever stop to think that a great part of the food chain is built up on bugs? So what is all this anti bug business about? The exterminator's sign proclaims, "Who shall reap, bugs or people?" But exterminators are making the buck harvest, and anyway, as the Californians might say, bugs are people too. The facetious mage claims to have made a breakthrough into bug consciousness, especially mosquitoes which he claims were persuaded not to bite him, and if mosquitoes, what bug is not susceptible to human influence? And if susceptible to human influence, then intelligent, for we all know that the subject of hypnotism must be intelligent in order to be hypnotized and should
we not therefore, on Crowleys sayso, extend the hand of humanity to bugs?
Even if this were not all a mistake we would realize that Cilantro doesn't smell bad to its initiates. The culturally conditioned good
or badness of a smell may say more of the culture than the food. The musty, acidic smell of Cilantro is not as bad as that of boiled eggs in cream sauce, which can actually kill!
Coming down to the practical so that you could recognize the Cilantro when you see it, the plant looks a lot like Queen Anne's Lace, but it is bushier. It blooms with white flowers in early spring and bears seed prolifically. If left alone in its own patch from
year to year it acts more like a perennial than an annual. In Austin and San Antonio in an average winter a patch of this kind usually
has little plants growing in it year round, especially if the soil is a sandy loam with good drainage on a hillside. While the green part of the herb is a seasoning, the seed-fruit also has a medicinal application. It has been used, like Fennel seed, for gas pains,
as a tonic for the stomach and as a sedative. The seeds have also been smoked for headaches. Ingesting too many seeds is said to be dangerous since they have a slight narcotic effect. Overall the seeds are stimulating, sweet-smelling and attractive in cookies
or in cakes.
The C. sativum got to the new world from India and Burma by way of Rome. From Rome it made its way to England and with the English
came to America as an immigrant. It is at home in Texas and has escaped cultivation, gone into the natural competition of species.
One of these days an innovative seed company will introduce a yellow-flowered Cilantro that has foetid fruit and leaves of anise.
Unknown to the seed company but discovered soon by avid experimenters, this plant will have hallucinogenic properties. Space voyagers will plant it on terra formed planets where it will eventually enter the materia medica as a specific treatment in the malady of earth shoes. Who knows then but that there are stranger things in the earth than eating Cilantro?
The Texas Prickly-Poppy (Argemone aurantiaca G. Ownbey., albiflora Hornem. subsp. texana G. Ownbey)
Once upon a time when the classical science of pharmacognosy was endangered in the pharmacy buildings and colleges of the United
States, a rebirth began on the outside, among the young experimenters who went about sampling the flora. Their intention was mainly the production of any altered state of the mind, which they hoped to produce through the agency of the alkaloids contained in many of these plants. So, they smoked datura, ingested mescal beans, gave Burpee's morning glory seeds a totally unexpected application and yes, they slit the Texas Prickly-Poppy.
This large white poppy thrives in disturbed soil and
in dry, open so-called waste places. When the Mo-Pac Expressway was built
through West Austin this poppy came up in profusion in the fill .dirt used on
the entrances and exits from below Enfield to beyond 45th Street. These solid
masses were a beautiful show all by themselves, even if they were rugged and
tough. Because of the spiny stems, Wills and Irwin say that "..only the
insects visit to partake of
the abundant pollen." In Austin, in the early 1970's, this was not
absolutely true.
Exactly how the Prickly-Poppy gained a reputation for having narcotic properties (as H. M. Burlage says in his The Wild. Flowering, Plants of the Highland Lakes) is no doubt by. confusion and exaggeration. In any case persons of the younger generation in Austin rumored that these white Poppies were narcotic (hallucinogenic) and that "opium" could be gotten from them if one merely had sufficient patience and opportunity. Thus it was purported that on warm spring nights in
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Further examination of the properties of A. mexicana reveals that |
Austin hippies would descend on the Mo Pac interchanges and slit the sides of each budding capsule with razor blades. After waiting a couple of days, back they would go, again nocturnally, to collect the red-orange exuded resin. Whether or not this by-product of their labors taught them anything we cannot know. Certainly their zeal
and dedication to native plants would be laudable, if a little misplaced. Such youthful fun, if harmless, would be entertaining. It is not harmless however, but it provides a serious lesson to the do-it-yourself pharmacognosist,
The legends surrounding the white Prickly-Poppy may possibly be a transference from the Mexican variety which has smaller, yellow flowers. The seeds of this plant have been alleged to contain some ten different alkaloids, most notably berberine, but also traces of the familiar morphine and codeine. The presence of these alkaloids is presumed to make this plant a hallucinogen. The roasted seeds and leaves are said to have a medicinal application in Mexico, but the most notable effect of a tea made from them is vomiting and intestinal purging. Of course you can get thiseffect in a variety of ways, catching the flu for instance. Another means of applying the plant was by using the milky-yellow sap produced by cutting the stem or seed capsule. Apprentices to the Castenada brand of magic may smoke the leaves and brew up the sap of Argemone mexicana in order to disorder their minds and thus to tap what they consider to be the power of the plant, but aa we will not see, this is unhealthful,
the ingestion of the plant, if not apocryphal, is a serious error. Burlage reports that the seeds have been used to make a "painter's oil," but the seed oil has also been used by itself and mixed with other oils for cooking. The culinary use of this Argemone oil is
clearly associated with "Death, Cardio-myopathy, Symptomless Glaucoma and Cancer," the title of an article by S. A. E. Hakim -(Maharashtra Medical Journal 17:109-30, 1970). This research is reported in the Proceedings of the Society for Economic Botany (Vol. 60, No. 8, A st, 1976) published as the Cancer Treatment Reports by the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Apparently, as early as 1948, an oncogenic (cancer causing) agent called sanguinarine was isolated
from the oil of Argemone mexicana and found to produce cancer in rats. This same volume also reports that sanguinarine is very prevalent among the Papaveraceae (Poppy Family), including Argemone albiflora and many others. From this evidence we might conclude it unwise to eat it, drink it or smoke it. Finally there is a paradox here, because while sanguinarine is associated with cardiomyopathy, glaucoma and cancer, another part of the substance sanguinarine contains an alkaloid which has shown potential as an anti cancer agent. Of course you will get them both together in sanguinarine, which must
be considered an oncogenic substance.
Thus the Texas Prickly-Poppy is implicated with its cousins in more or less homicidal intentions and if you were to bring legal action against it its probable defense would be that you should have known better, what did you think those prickles were for anyway?
DATURA
The long, white fragrant tubes of Datura stramonium L. may suggest purity and serenity, but Datura is not what it appears to be, the ornamental aspect conceals a very great potency in leaf, root and seed. It is a surprise however to learn that this mind-changing hallucinogen of shamens, that extends from antiquity through India to many parts of the world, including Texas and the Southwest, is the white trumpet flower that Aunt Betty brings into her office.
Datura is known popularly as Jimson Weed and Thornapple. The first name der-ivas from its abuse by the settlers at Jamestown, Virginia. The name Thornapple appropriately brings together the connotations of danger with temptation. Thornapple is a good name for describing the fruit which is about the size of a small green
egg but is covered with sharp spines. When this pod dries and browns it will crack open and spill out an abundance of black seeds.
Taken at large Datura may not be the friend to humanity that its long and prevelant usage suggests. Chemically speaking the alkaloids common to the fifteen or twenty species produce confusion, mental disorder and other bad effects. The active ingredient in all species is the same according to Schultes and Hofmann, Scopolamine. They say that all species are also the same "with respect to their content of minor alkaloids (286)." Taking D. stramonium as being representative of the
new world species and D. metal for the old, researchers find that the
potent
leaves and seeds are similarly,/the roots and fruits less so. The
plant has a very wide old world range, from Southern Russia, Western
Asia, Europe, India, China to Greece and North Africa. It is mentioned early in new world explorations by Acosta and a great deal is known about its uses among the North American tribes, especially of the Southwest and Mexico, where it was used in the ritual initiation of youths into warriors.
Among the ethno-botanists Schultes has done the most, if not all for our knowledge of this genera, but Casteneda made the plant a kind of a hero in The Teachings of Don Juan. Despite the fact that the leaves emit a mousy odor they were smoked to relieve asthma and other respiratory problems. This worked because the scopolamine partially paralyzed the nerve endings in the lungs, reducing the pain and the spasms temporarily. It was the practice of the shaman to drink a tea of the leaves in order to divine an illness and to cure it. Sometimes Datura was reported to be used as a primitive anesthetic in childbirth, or as a sedative. Whatever it was that the priests of Delphi used for their rituals, Datura has always seemed to scholars to be a possible candidate.
Instances of Datura poisoning are not so infrequent, although they are usually an accident. A recent instance was reported in The Journal of the American Medical Association (June 15, 1984) where a family was accidently poisoned when some seeds got mixed into hamburger and were eaten with dinner. Within one hour hallucinations, severe diarrhea and elevated heart beat occured. Both parties were shortly unconscious but recovered after three days of hospitalization.
Datura as a recreational drug never developed a following because of its rankness and potency, but it presents a dramatic example of the
effect of toxic inebriation in the human being, of which the first inquiry might be, where did the theory begin anyway that to disorder the mind was to increase consciousness?
MUSHROOMS
Mushrooms in the wild arouse a good many contradictions in people. On seeing one coming up in the yard many will ruthlessly kick them over, according to the adage that the only good mushroom is a dead one, unless of course you buy it at the Safeway where it has the express warranty of being nonpoisonous. The mushroom phobes are the majority party.
There is a much smaller group of people who know enough about edible mushrooms to recognize them. These, on seeing a patch in the yard, pick them and have a fine dinner. If we must have two and only two kinds of people in the world, then let them be the mushroom phobes and the mushroom phils, those that never eat'em and those who always will.
The poor specimens of mushrooms sold by grocery store chains argue that the phobes aren't missing much. Often these saleable products are dessicated and taste like edible wood or wallboard. A freshly picked edible mushroom, taken from a field where the spores have developed for years, is a beautiful sight. One can be as big or bigger than your hand, not perfectly round at all, and have a lovely flesh under a manilla cap, tinged on the edges with umber. Its meat is rapturous, moist, succulent, thick and one may be a meal
in itself. When they are available it is by the bag, so that friends may come into a windfall at this time. Around Austin these mushrooms can pop up any time from the end of December until March, depending on the weather, which must not be too cold or dry. After a rainy
spell in January or February take a walk along Hemphill Park in Austin, on the grass on the eastern side of the culvert that divides the street. Or, cross over 35th Street to the side the fire station
is on and look on the hillsides west and north of the basketball court. Mushrooms! You will need a sack. Take'em home, wash, cut out the damaged parts.
To the fancier the wild mushroom resembles human flesh. The "blood" suffuses in the facial cap, a glow seems to emanate from the skin, pastel lights frame the head and the whole connotes a softness and gentleness. The edible mushroom is the least violent vegetable, but there are many people who treat others just the way that they do the little poppers
in the yard. The phrase, the only good one is a dead one, was after all not first used of mushrooms. In the accounts of the edible but sensory heightening effect of the Bastrop mushroom discovered by Wasson, the person comes to resemble the plant. To a carnivore this suggestion must be repugnant, after all, who wants to be a mushroom? But "bright and beautiful colors were seen on persons and objects" says Singer (see Rumak and Salzman, 205) and a harmonious emanation from face and skin
suggested that the benign animation of the mushroom, was also the man's.
The danger to this mushroom eater is that after the glimpse is over, how will he any longer be satisfied with himself? The analogy of voyaging to new worlds from old may be helpful to our understanding. When the Europeans voyaged to their new world they made it over into the old. Of course it is of the inner voyage that we speak here, but
if you go over you must leave the old world behind, not recreate it in the new. Can you take water to the sun? To be given a glimpse of the golden age and then to fall back into the civilized state is the reward of the old world. The mushroom however is not at fault. If you ask of yourself what you do of the plant then the new world will be formed.
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Yarrow (Achillea millefolium |
are useful in flower arranging, and for its fern-like nearly perennial foliage.
Yarrow spread westward with the Europeans so quickly that it
also came to be thought
of as an "Indian" remedy. However, while there are claims that it was
used by tribes in Illinois as early as 1724 and reports that it served
medicinally among the Piutes, the Winnebagoes, Chickasaws and other tribes, it still
just gets into the medicine
man's teepee in time to make it to the reservation.
There are basically three kinds of Yarrow marketed by the nursery chains in spring. The "common" A. millefolium, called Milfoil or simply Yarrow, blooms with a three foot tall stalk in early May. If grown in full sun these stalks will be very straight
and fit for arranging in displays or for seeking the distributive pattern of the changing universe. The stalks are topped with a white, disc shaped flower, a little bigger than a silver dollar. This is the
only variety that has medicinal properties which are evident in the leaves; when crushed they emit a sharp but pleasant odor. The best
use of these leaves is in a very strong tea given at bed time to
persons just starting to catch a cold. Honey, a lemon and mint are often added
to make the tea palatable, but the main ingredient is yarrow: "three cups
and then to bed," the doctor said. The tea promotes a perspiration and is
also believed to have an "anti viral" effect,attested by science,
however also untested. Before so
many topical ingredients were available for wounds, Yarrow built
its empire as;,.a healing agent. The epic poet nowhere identifies it with Achilles, who had an Olympian pharmacy of ungents and elixars from his mother Thetis to preserve the body of beloved Patrolkus. Later association, more likely in the early Anglo-Saxon wars, where it was called gearwe, gives the plant its reputation expressed in the host of common names such as Bloodwort, Nosebleed and. Woundwort. Today we could rename it Covidwort.
Milfoil is attractive in a garden, but it doesn't need to be overplanted. It spreads by creeping rhizomes and one start in two years' time will need to be cut back. Some half truths are current in popular beliefs about Yarrow; one is that it is a good "companion" plant. Fine, if what you want in a companion is somebody who will
grow all around you and over you. The reason Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) is said to be an uncompaniable plant is not because other plants don't like it, it is a fine, sweet thing, but because it grows so tall and profusely that it chokes the others out. Yarrow and Fennel could have
it out on almost an equal basis; both are strong competitors. Two other curious points have also been raised. First, some herbalists believe that Yarrow will increase the content of volatile oils in
nearby herbs, but never is awdocumentation of this conclusion cited. It is also alleged that A. millefolium secretes a toxin that will
defeat its own growth. One wonders how it is that all the Yarrow on the earth has not self-destructed long ago if this is the case.
Yarrow is not two-faced like men, on theone hand killing itself tohelp others and on the other killing others to help itself. The obvious conclusion about the toxin business is that somebody's Yarrow died,
but not from suicide, overwatering maybe? Too much bonemeal? We can easily find stands of the herb in nature that are older than
some herb books. The only way Yarrow would die would be by the misplaced well-intentioned pestering of a gardener who does not know or practice the cardinal rule of growing herbs: don't water 'em. Don't fertilize'em.
In addition to the standard A. millefolium there is a golden-flowered variety, A. filipendulina and a magenta A. millefolium var. rubra, as well as a silver-leafed species with yellow flowers. These are fine ornamental plants but they are not medicinal herbs.
The most pervasive human association with Yarrow occured in ancient and medieval China where the plant is native and where it was part of the applied technology of the I Ching or Book of Changes.
Today, a good many Americans are familiar with this profound explanation of the permutations of the changing world which predicts the conditions surrounding and causing the outcome of a given act. Jung used it as
the best demonstration of his theory of synchronicity or the
"timeliness" of a thought and an act. While modern Americans throw
coins to inquire of the Y,ancients used either tortoise shells or Yarrow
stalks:
"Heaven produced the spiritlike things (the tortoise and the divining
plant) and the sages took advantage of them (translated by James Legge, 14)." This method, which is as old as 2300 B.C., required 49 yarrow stalks which were manipulated 18 times in order to form one hexagram, that is, to find the answer to one question. Perhaps the tediousness of this method aided the inquirer's respect of the profoundity of the response. One old commentary says, "anciently, when the sages made the Yi, in order to give mysterious assistence to the spiritual Intelligences, they produced the divining plant." Legge comments on this: "Perhaps this means no more than that the lineal figures were made to 'hold the mirror up to nature' so that men by the study of them would understand more of the unseen and spiritual operations, to which the phen6mena around them were owing, than they would otherwise do (48)."
Synchronistically, this method is not so different from what Christians might do when they oracularly seek answer to some question by opening the Bible at random and put their finger blindly upon the page. The resulting random choice is taken as an answer from God. The ancient Romans and medieval Europeans found The Aeneid would also work well in this capacity. The issue that is dramatized by the use of Yarrow stalks is whether the power of divination is outside of us in the book, to which we gain access by plant or finger, or whether
we already know the answer in ourselves, but do not know that we know. Such an explanation of fortune-telling seems overly Platonic to the sufferer who asks "what would be the result if I were to cast my bread upon the waters?" Plato of course said that learning is mere remembering, thus we already know but do not know that we do. This possibility
did not escape the fifteenth century Chinese critic of divination who with much wisdom answered the inquiry of a young prince by Baying:
Heaven loves only the virtuous. What intelligence is possessed by spirits? They are intelligent only) in connection with men. The divining stalks are so much withered grass; the tortoise-shell is a withered bone. They are but things, and man is more intelligent than things. Why not listen to yourself instead of seeking (to learn) from things?
(Legge, 41
(The Sayings of Jbehil, translated by Yoel Hoffman, 40)
)
The I Ching is but one, if the most pro found, of divinatory systems that can structure choice making in order that the unlearned or the young might better know their possibilities. These are the lesser means of knowledge. Of course
the irony is that what they learn they already knew but were blind to. Thus we are all of us deeper than we suspected.
It is said that the Yarrow stalks which grow upon the grave of Confucius have a special efficacy in divination, but that under the earth Confucius laughs when he sees the pious come to ask him who they are.
"Someone asked, 'When one is not concerned about before and after, past and future--what is life?"
Ja-shu said, "Forget this 'not being concerned about before and after' thing for a while. To whom are you talking?"
Retama and the Natural Setting (Parkinsonia aculeata L.)
It is said that after
gardeners go through the flowering plants, shrubs and trees that they then long
to recreate the natural setting, a large oak maybe, some native grasses, a
couple of herbs,some
Penstemon. The ultimate enthusiast of native plants might not like
a Retama, especially the young ones which are vigorous and prolific,
for they grow into an impressive thorn bush with green branches fiercely armed with needle-like spines.
There are two ways that you will see the Retama, as a tree or as a shrub. If it is as a tree it can reach to thirty feet in height or so, but the wood is soft and the trunk too soon cracks, making a mess of old wood and new shoots which come everywhere from the decaying
branches and from the old root too. It is better to cut the tree down, but first obtain a signed release from the owner or landlord. People can be emotional about their trees, even Retamas, and might claim that "you killed it!" Of course this is absurd and nearly impossible. Thereafter, when the next spring comes and their Retama is two or three times as vital and larger than it was, return, and bill them again.
The Retama is not good close to a home or where people walk.
A little off the beaten path it is a great beauty. Its flowers are fragrant, borne in clusters six inches long. They are a bright yellow, often with orange or red dots which come with age and they bloom all summer. The flowers produce a fruit, a legume about four inches long, orange-brown in color. These pods contain seeds which, heaven forbid you should be so hungry, are edible. There are a great many Retama
easterly of Austin and south, but not so many west and north. Highway 290 west from Austin is a good test of their range for they are lush along the roadside periodically until about Johnson City when they begin to taper off. Of course if watered and fertilized a little
they will do well but they are not as hardy as Vitex,on the dry rocky slopes.
R ama is the kind of tree that you can be nostalgic about if you move to Dallas, which since it is closer to the acid soil of East Texas is landscaped as if it were some eastern city with azaleas, dogwoods and iris.
Like its flowers Retama has bunches of names: Cloth of Gold describes its flowering, Horse Bean its food quality in bad times, Jerusalem Thorn its spines. It could be mistaken with others of its family and is sometimes called Paloverde along with many other Spanish names such as Espilla, Flor de Rayo and. Acacia de Aguijote. Perhaps the best use of the tree occured during droughts when the pods were eaten by livestock and wildlife, but the seeds can also be ground into flour for human consumption. The wood was once used for making paper. The leaves have had a medicinal application in the American tropics where Retama is native. A tea of the leaves or new ba rk was given to reduce fevers by stimulating perspiration and also it was given as a treatment for diabetes and epilepsy and ulcers. These uses seem unusual but the tree is said to manufacture an alkaloid. Other uses such as for causing abortions suggest that the ingestion of this tea has not a solely benign. effect.
The Retama is not a tree planted usually in parks. Its lushness,
fertility and thorns, its flowers give an exotic impression suited to the tropical plant that it is. It might be a tree that that eccentric character of J.K. Huysmans'invention, Des Essenties, could have planted in his little indoor conservatory, a dangerous plant, one to fear, if you do fear. The opposite view of our fears is that like sunlight and bees, thorn trees,not overindulged, are as benign as moonlight and birds.
Mescal Bean Humor (Sophora secundiflora Ort. DC.)
How the Mescal Bean is getting to be citified can be viewed as a triumph for native plants in general or as a danger to the general
populace. Even in Dallas it is beginning to be considered as a welcome native landscaping plant. The horticulturists at Richland College are growing several hundreds from seed experimentally, while in Austin at native plant sales they are now common in five gallon pots. Probably one of the great deceptions, western jokes if you will, pulled upon
all the immigrant Yankees is calling the Mescal Bean a Texas Mountain Laurel. This gives a rather complete misimpression. In Texas it is called Texas Mountain Laurel for perhaps two reasons. First, to the eastern immigrants of the nineteenth century its flower resembled the eastern rhododendron species. Secondly, its native habitat in Texas is "mountainous," at least it is in the Hill Country, especially that
region on the Edwards Plateau between Vanderpool and Garner State Park. If you drive that way on the high road the terrain will seem mountainous enough. Everywhere there on both sides of the road and all the way up and down the valleys you will see forests of Mescal Bean everywhere. Domesticated it will be a respectable tree up to about twenty five feet tall, if conditions permit, but as it occurs in its native habitat on these dry, rocky hillsides, it is usually less than ten feet tall.
The Mescal Bean is a highly desirable ornamental evergreen blooming shrub. Its flowers are so heavily perfumed with their pendulous violet-purple pea-bell blossoms hanging down,that the co-eds of Austin, where it is planted everywhere, will not walk in its vicinity for fear of being outdone. Indeed spring in this city is always a trial for one
with a sensitive nose.The flowers occur at the same
time as wisteria flowers and they resemble each other in many ways. The plant is a slow grower however, but once rooted it does better. Give it four years from seed and it will begin to be something, about seven years to its first bloom. It has many obvious advantages as
an ornamental shrub: it is evergreen, blooms and perfumes spectacularly, produces red beans when the seed pods crack and some plants have the added bonus of hosting a parasite, shaped like a book mark, that hangs down from the tip of each branch. It is rare to see this shrub in
the nursery trade much north of Austin, but it extends substantially south and west from there.
Just to demonstrate their sense of humor Texas children call the beans "burnin beans" or "blister berries." This designation comes from the aggressive act of rubbing the beans on the sict.ualk to make them hot through friction and putting the hot bean on your playmates arm!
In the same way that Hill Country children used to string Chinaberries for fun so Mescal Beans have also of old been made into an ornamental necklace, but these carmine-scarlet beans are no mere cosmetic jewelry. Each of the seeds is very potent and the plant is ancient in human association in the Southwest. The beans were an intoxicant when they were cured, orange-red and about twice the size of a pea.
The Mescal Bean in this last aspect has several serious lessons to teach us, archeological, pharmacological and perhaps ecological. Archeologically the Mescal Bean has been dug up in rock shelters west of the Pecos River and carbon-dated back to about 8000 B.C. In these excavations the other prominent intoxicant, Peyote, was also found.
Ethnobotanists have suspected that both had cults associated with their use in the paleolithic new world. These speculations have been strengthened by the use of these plants by some modern North American tribes, who some have claimed mix them together and ingest
both at the same time. Their association archeologically and anthropologically may also be supported naturally. The Peyote is said to love to grow under some cover, both for protection from the sun and also because it has no thorns. Thus it is claimed that in regions
the two species cohabit the Peyote grows under the Mescal Bean symbiotically.
A very interesting belief of some of these North American tribes is recounted by W. L. Merrill who says that they believed that the
beans were "living sentient beings capable of reproducing and initiating action on their own." If this means vegetative reproduction we should all probably have to assent, but who knows what it means?
Nature however to the scientific
age is less alive that is either wholesome or healthful. We hesitate hardly at all in cutting down a stand of oaks that may be 150 to 200 years old in order to erect a building that will be used half as long. These buildings are often as temporary as a few generations.
In the same or a similar sense the alleged intoxicating or hallucinogenic properties of the Mescal Bean are a mystery. The alkaloid, Sophorine or cytisine, plus the five minor alkaloids found in it, do not seem to have any _Itallucinogenic activity that has been pharmacologically reported (up to 1938 when it was last analyzed). All that seems to be known for sure is that cytisine belongs to the same group as nicotine, a poison, and that it will produce vomiting, convulsions and death through respiratory paralysis when ingested. Either these reports are inaccurate or the 10,000 year old reputed Mescal Bean Cult is a mystery (or both).
These beans, whether ingested by "Indians" or not, were probably an article of trade. In the ancient and tribal primitive world, before technological means produced so many colors and dyes th*t'the sense
of beauty of the eye became denaturalized, their color made the Mescal Beans very desirable. And they last too, their history proves that. Once cured they have tried the patience of many a horticulturist for their ability to resist germination for years. If you see your local plantsman at his workbench with a drill, he is probably trying to crack the outer red seed case of the bean so he can grow the plant,
no easy task. To germinate these seeds you had better get them while the seed pods are still gree4 and the beans still soft. Plant the beans while they are still whitened and they will germinate rapidly.
The prophet says that the "ornaments of delight are better than
the pearls of commerce." Handmade necklaces of Mescal Beans had the highest significance in the practice of some ancient "Indian" rites. That their delight was also their wisdom the European often may doubt, but we wonder who would be getting the last laugh if, when time and place come full circle, the new "Indian" gets to harvest all of the newly planted Texas Mountain Laurels.
Curare and the Coral Bean (Erythrina herbacea L.)
The Coral Bean had a flirtation with legitimacy when science pronounced it similar in action to curare, an important muscle relaxant and extract of the South American vine Strychnos toxifera. Curare is used today in anesthesias to relax the muscles in surgery so that they do not contract during operations. In addition to quieting muscle-jumping curare is used in certain poisonings, such as tetanus, where the greatest threat to life is the contraction of all the muscles of the body. The curare relaxes even the breathing muscles so that tetanus patients in this treatment must breathe with a respirator. The South American "Indians" used curare to poison
their arrows to immobilize their prey. Since curare cannot be ingested these "Indians" did not poison themselves when they ate ther catch. Erythrina's scientific infatuation did not progress much after 1940 however. Today it is not thought to be a useful drug unless you consider its use as a rat poison in Mexico.
Erythrina herbacea or Eastern Coral Bean ranges from the sandy soils of Southeastern North Carolina and Florida westward to New Mexico where it becomes differentiated into Erythrina flabelliformis (Kearney) or Western Coral Bean. The two species are similar. The Texas variety, Eastern Coral Bean, is a very distinguished ornamental. In spring it bears scarlet-red flowers in tubes more than two inches long. In fall the flowers form a legume fruit in the form of scarlet beans, brilliant in color. These are about half as large as a Mescal Bean and shaped similarly, but they are much more brightly colored. First the green seed pods brown, then of themselves they crack open and the beans hang
in the pods for a good while before they fall to the ground. These beans have a low germination rate, but according to Vines, the plant may be reproduced by cuttings. The Coral Bean tolerates extensive drought and poor soil very well. In winter the herbaceous stems die back to the root then emerge more strongly in the following spring. Over a dozen years the root develops into a largish bulb-like tuber. When mature this tuber is capable of sending up a great many of the three foot tall, scarlet red flowering and red bean bearing herbaceous stalks.
A good place to see the Coral Bean at its best in Texas as at the Alamo in San Antonio. Here, the gardens ars walled in and thus protected from the coldest effect of the winter low temperatures and the Coral Bean is not herbaceous but forms a tree, sometimes called
E. arborea. The tree Coral Bean is thought to be botanically identical to the herbaceous variety. Also in the Alamo gardens occur a good
many more exotic shrubs and trees.
There is another, but tropical Erythrina species that you will see in gardens called E. crista-galli (L.). This has been known to hybridize with E. herbacea to form E. X bidwelii (Lindl.). E. cristagalli also grows herbaceously most of the time, but is a little taller than E. herbacea, up to four feet in height. Its flowers are also larger and reddish-brown in color. Like most of the one hundred or
so tropical and sub-tropical Erythrina species it is a native of the tropics, BraTil in this case.
It is said that the Aztecs may have used the Erythrina as an intoxicant. Sometimes the beans were confused with Mescal Beans;
both in Spanish are called colorines. The western Coral Bean is
said to have been ground to a powder by the Tarahumara as a treatment for poor eyesight. Shamans of some tribes have been reported to ingest the beans to stimulate their psychic endeavors, but Schultes says that the use of the beans internally or as hallucinogens is severely in doubt.
In Mexico Eina, has many names, Chilicote and Colorin being
chief among them. The arborea variety is much used there in coffee plantations to shade the coffee plants; presumably the red coffee beans like the encouragment of the scarlet flowers and Coral Beans. The Coral Beans have also been strung into necklaces like Mescal Beans for their striking ornamental color.
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Creosote Health Spa (Larrea tridentata Cov.) |
Exactly what effect the
omnipresence of the Creosote has upon the human population is hard to say.
Perhaps in the next century a chain of Creosote heAlth spas will spring up
around Tera lingua.
Certainly Certainly the air is conditioned by it and the soil as well. The plant's leaves are sticky with a resin, especially when wet.
It is evergreen and may reach ten feet in height, but characteristically the
bushes are around five or six feet tall. It is thought to be poisonous to
sheep,but some deer and antelope browse it. The leaves are a dark green or
yellow-green depending upon the amount of rainfall; their odor
resembles the creosote used to preserve wood, such as railroad ties. This
creosote is most often a product obtained by distilling coal tar, but there is
also a creosote gotten from wood tar, especially beech wood. The word
"creosote" means "flesh-preserver" however, not wood
preserver. (from the Greek word kreas meaning "flesh" plus soter,
meaning "to preserve"). If we follow this sense of the word we can
see why the desert is thought to be health giving, not just for its dry air and climate; Creosote is everywhere.
A host of medicinal applications have been tried with Creosote, mainly externally, especially in treating sores on livestock. Here, the leaves were made into a poultice boiled in water, or the concentrated product of much boiling was made into a lotion or paste, mixed with flour and applied to the sore. The flour however was
not later made up into biscuits and served to cowboys, even if such legends persist. Decoctions or strong teas made from the leaves
were also applied to such human ailments as rheumatism, arthritis, venereal disease, tuberculosis, worms and of course the plant was a pretty fearsome emetic too. Creosote was at the top of the list of desert panaceas applied locally to the injured part, but today it probably is not thought of medicinally at all. Like so many old remedies the modern plant is considered to have been demythologized by science. Thus Creosote, the flesh-preserver, has become "grease-wood" and can be burned in campfires. Still, it is in the air.
Perhaps Creosote could also be called the "cement plant." Robert A. Vines says that "a crustaceous lac is often deposited on the branches by a scale insect, this lac is used by the Indians for cementing pottery and dying leather (574)." The idea here is that
if you are camping in the desert and the handle falls off your coffeepot, you can scrape the branches of the creosote bush, mix in a little crushed rock, heat the mixture and repair the handle.
Creosote is typically found on hardpan soils of West Texas and the greater Southwest, that is, on shallow soils through which the roots cannot penetrate very far because of a compacted clayey layer beneath, but Creosote can also grow elsewhere. How you would obtain
a plant to grow is a problem however, because nurseries do not market them. There was once a very characteristic and fine specimen of a Creosote in Austin at the UT College of Pharmacy's Experimental Drug and Herb Garden. This was planted in sandy soils trucked in from
the Colorado River watershed. -. This sandy soil formed about a three foot thick layer above the typically black clayey soil of Central Austin.
The bush was nearly as old as the garden (forty years) and showed no ill effects from the comparatively greater rainfall of that area nor from the different soil. From this example it is possible that the Creosote would make a good companion plant for the Ocotilla_that are now popular in the "desert" landscaping in front of businesses and commerical buildings in Austin.
THE OLEANDER ROAD(Nerium oleander L.)
People and plants are a mixture of opposites and what is evident on the outside may be absent within and vice versa. So the poor give half of their sustenance to a traveler and a fresh pink flower is a toxin. Who is trying to tell us something about outward appearances?
While there are a dozen or more horticultural varieties and colors from pink to red, crimson, purple and white, the pink Oleander produces the most approachable therefore the most dangerous flower. When the whole bush is covered with blooms it is a sight to see. Oleanders are effective planted in clumps, hedges and rows. The Texas Department of Highways has used Oleander, with Vitex and
Pampas Grass, in the medians of Interstates as a screen between lanes, especially on I 35 between San Antonio and Austin. That these shrubs can survive there is a tribute to their toughness. What drier, more desolate place could there be? When the trucks and Japanese imports jam the lanes on weekends and weekdays
Who is there to greet the commuter and hitchhiker , along
with the other asphyxiated shrubberies of the Interstate, Oleander.
The effect that these plants have in cleaning the air of noxious emissions may be their greatest economic good. If you drive with
your window down you will know what the Oleanders are breathing.
If what we require of our immigrants is that they be useful, hardworking and
adapt to our ways, then Oleander needs to be accepted
as one of us, even if its home .is Asia.
When you first experience Oleander it will likely be in your
home not its. Or you may be visiting a friend, who will tell you not to eat the Oleander, as if they thought you were looking hungry. It used to be that people didn't go around eating the shrubbery of their yards, but that was before Gibbons. Times have changed but Oleander hasn't, so do not think that your friend is stingy and saving all the Oleander for himself, for the flowers, leaves and all parts of the plant are poisonous. Vines says that "an infusion made from four ounces of the root is affirmed to have taken life (877)." Do not wonder who gave
up their life for our knowledge of Oleander, it has been used for centuries in Europe as a rat poison.
The pharmacological effect of Oleander includes vomiting, vertigo, convulsions, dilation of the pupil and a low and erratic pulse, often for several days. The trouble with being forewarned is that now the citizen is afraid to go near the Oleander, as if it might leap out and stuff a flower in their ear. This fear of poison plants, while well founded, can lead in extreme cases to persons avoiding the Interstate because, "did you hear? It is covered with poisonous Oleanders," but there are better ways to control traffic.
The two sides of the one law of opposites suggests that while Oleander is a poison it also has a medical application or once did. The leaves were at one time acceptable drugs in France and Mexico where it was a medicine for malaria, epilepsy and high fevers; it was also a heart stimulant. In the Carribbean it once had a use
as a para-medical inducement of dreams, although what kind of dreams they were is in doubt. The internal use of Oleander is probably not a whole lot more popular than Hemlock. There were in some countries external applications such as in a poultice
for boils or snakebite or as a compress for
headaches. The best
root
use remains in the powd ed / to kill rats and insects.
Plants make those beautiful flowers to attract
insects not people and Oleander manufactures its glycosides either as an old
adaptation where it was native or for some purpose, genetic or otherwise, not
understood. They are sexual because the flower
must be pollinated to make seed and thus the flower is meant to attract the
bug, but not you.
day
A. E. Reiff
Dallas, Texas September, 1984
Second Printing
LIST OF WORKS CITED
The Holy Bible, Authorized Version, 1611.
Brown, Vinson, Great Upon the Mountain. Healdsburg, California: Naturegraph Publishers, 1971.
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the Highland Lakes. |
Cancer Treatment Reports: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany: "Plants and Cancer." Volume 60, Number 8, August 1976.
Clark, Amasa Gleason, Reminiscences of a Centenarian as told to Nora Tope Clark. San Antonio: The Naylor Co., 1972.
Correll and Johnston, Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas. Renner, Texas: Texas Research Foundation, 1970.
Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962.
Gaertner, Erika E., "The History and Use of Milkweed," Economic Botany 33: 119-123 (1979).
Grieve, M., A Modern Herbal. New York: Dover, 1971.
The I Ching, translated by James Legge. New York: Dover, 1963.
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: The Viking Press, 1960.
Magnus, Albertus, The Book of Secrets of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones and Certain Beasts. Edited by Michael R. Best and Frank H.H. Brightman. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Merrill, W. L., An Investigation of Ethnographic and Archeolo ical Specimens of Mescalbeans. Ann Arbor: 1977.
Mushroom Poisoning: Diagonosis and Treatment, Edited by Rumak and Salzman. West Palm Beach: CRC Press, 1978.
Newcomb, W. W., Jr., The Indians of Texas. Austin: UT Press, 1965.
Overfield, Theresa, Epstein, William W. and Gaudioso, "Eskimo Uses of Artemisia tilesii." Economic Botany 34: 97-101.
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130 |
Schultes and Hofmann, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1980.
Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene. London: Oxford, 1960.
Texas Wildflower Newsletter, Green Horizons:.Kerrville,
Texas.
Vines, Robert A., Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest. Austin: UT Press, 1916.
Vogel, Virgil J., American Indian Medicine. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.
Wasson, R. Gordon, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Wills and Irwin, Roadside Flowers of Texas. Austin: UT Press, 1973.
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131 |
Achillea filipendulina103
|
103 27 50-51 82-83 82 63-65 60-62 96 66 45-47 118-120 50 48 18-24 80-82 64 63-65 50
77-79 78 77 78 76-78 77 111-114 66-69 70-73 74-75 99-101 |
|
Foeniculum vulgare Fouquiera splendens Hedeoma Drummondii Hibiscus-coccinea syriacus Horehound Iceweed Ironweed Jimson Weed Joyce, James Jujube Juniper Larrea tridentata Maclura pomifera Madrone Mal vaviscus arboreus var. Drummondii Marrubium velutinum vulgare Melissa officinalis Mentha pulegium Monarda citriodora didyma fruticulosa maritima punctata viridissima Mescal Bean Milkweed Mugwort Mullein Mushrooms |
|
|
millefolium102-106
Agarita38-40
Alamo116
Arbutus xalapensis19-24
Argemone albiflora95
aurantiaca93
mexicana94-95
Artemisia absinthium71
ludoviciana70-73
vulgaris71
tilesii72-73
Aaclepias asperula66
brachystephana 67 curassavica 67 oenotheroides 67 subverticillata 69
syriaca69
tuberosa67
verticillata68
Berberis trifoliolata38-40
Bois d'Arc48-49
Candelilla29-30
Cilantro90-92
Colorines117
Coral Bean115-117
Coriander90-92
Coriandrum sativum91
Creosote118-120
Croton ciliatoglandulifer 84
|
fruticulosus |
84 |
|
monothogynus |
84-86 |
|
tiglium |
84 |
|
Datura metal |
97 |
|
stramonium |
96-98 |
|
Diospyros texana |
35-37 |
|
virginiana |
35-37 |
|
Eliot,T.S. |
127-128 |
|
|
132 |
|
Erythrina arborea |
116 |
|
crista-gahli |
116 |
|
flabelliformis |
115 |
|
herbacea |
115 |
132
|
Yarrow 102-106 |
Oleander122-124Zanthoxylum Clava-Herculis 25-26
Opuntia Lindheimeri125-128Zisiphus Jujaba45 47
Osage Orange48-49lotos47
Parkinsonia aculeata106-108
Penelope75
Persimmon35-37
Prickly Pear125-128
Prickly Poppy93-95
Quercus fusiformis15-16
Retama106-108
Ruta graveolens131
Salvia ballotaeflora55
coccinea53
farinacea52
Greggii51-52
regla53-54
sclarea72
texana52
Sophora secundiflora111-114
Strychnos toxifera115
Tagetes lucida32
Tanacetum vulgare72
Texas Mallow80
Thornapple96
Thymus citriodora50
vulgaris50, 76
Tickletongue25-26
Tobacco31-34
Turk's Cap80-83
Ungnadia speciosa16-17
Verbascum thapsus74-75
Verbesina encelioides61
virginica60-62
Vernonia altissima58
Baldwinii57-58
guadlupensis58
Lindheimeri58
missurica57
texana58
Wissadula holoserica81
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AE Reiff traveled widely over Texas and his travels are in part chronicled here. He has written several other works, including A Calendar of Poems, Encouragements for such As Shall Have Intention To Be Undertakers in the Planting of the New Found Land (Austin, 1974) and A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David, 1-41 (Dallas, 1985). Both of these works are available from the publisher.
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