When you’re a flatlander like me, it could be fairly some time between your visits to the gorgeous Alleghany Mountains of West Virginia. I’m, the truth is, a giant fan of jap West Virginia: a improbable place in the summertime for pure historical past, and extra particularly botany.
I fell in love with the darkish forests of this a part of the nation a number of years in the past, the place I used to be additionally concerned in one thing of a mountain music pilgrimage.
One in all my ramblings was inside the deep confines of Pocahontas County, about this time of 12 months. Means on high of Again Allegheny, deep contained in the Monongahela Nationwide Forest, that’s the place I headed.
It was one in all my best botanical adventures ever: a day of bizarre crops (for me!), mountain vistas and a powerful beaver pond, together with related little bogs, drippy locations, and cliffs. Yellowthroats and parula warblers had been singing excessive within the oaks, and a gravelly creek gurgled close by.
I wandered downstream into a giant patch of ramps (Allium tricoccum) in late bloom, already beginning to ripen their little inexperienced capsules. Ramps, in fact, are price their very own essay, however they aren’t the topic right here. There was one thing else down there within the shade which was price a glance.
It resembled a furry Mayapple, with two rounded, jaggedy, toothsome leaves on the high of the stem. There have been dozens of those crops in a thick patch there within the dappled mild. Essentially the most conspicuous a part of this surroundings was a big, juicy, sensible pink raspberry-like fruit atop the herb’s foremost stem. However this was no raspberry.
Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis, is an herbaceous species widespread from New England right down to Alabama, and west about so far as Missouri and Kansas. It likes deep, shady woods, and within the East is seen at comparatively excessive elevations. The crops come up from powerful, slender rhizomes that are shiny yellow internally.
Blooming within the spring, every plant produces one flower, about 2” throughout, that includes numerous whitish stamens, and pistils. No petals. It’s an odd little flower: delicate and form of “drab” I feel. However the fruit is an actual show-stopper.
This plant is crammed with varied peculiar compounds which give it a fairly bitter style. For a lot of, a few years, this plant was used as a medicinal herb, the yellow rhizome specifically, and has ended up as one of the crucial essential North American native species in conventional drugs. It seems, nonetheless, that little or no proof helps claims of its medical efficacy.
The truth is, long-term consumption of it has been proven to be harmful. Nonetheless, an amazing legacy has developed round its use, which has, over time, led to over-collection and an obvious (and severe) lower within the variety of identified pure populations.
This may strike you as just like the situation involving ginseng, and there are some parallels. After all, ginseng and our Thriller Plant are utterly unrelated species.
When you use over-the-counter preparations of this plant for medicinal use, please make sure that what you’re shopping for comes from sustainable, industrial plantings, and never from wild-dug crops.
John Nelson is the retired curator of the A. C. Moore Herbarium on the College of South Carolina, within the Division of Organic Sciences, Columbia SC 29208. As a public service, the Herbarium presents free plant identifications. For extra data, go to www.herbarium.org or e mail johnbnelson@sc.rr.com.
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