Find out uses by the Shakers and Native Americans.

fruit of Aralia nudicaulis

“Sustainable Food Trend May Be Putting Ramps at Risk”

By Nichole Dupont

http://www.iberkshires.com/story/38304/Sustainable-Food-Trend-May-Be-Putting-Ramps-at-Risk.html

Enjoy!

to read about Lobelia inflata, go to:

http://www.newenglandwild.org/grow/medicinal-native-plants/lobelia-inflata.html/?searchterm=anna%20fialkoff

I will be publishing the links to this series of articles about native medicinal plants on my blog. Also, you can become a member of New England Wild Flower Society and receive their monthly enews (that includes a native plant spotlight).

A definition of “craft” from the Oxford English Dictionary is: “Intellectual power; skill; art”.  Nova Kim and Les Hook of Wild Gourmet Food, two very seasoned wildcrafters in  Randolph, Vermont say that the art or craft of wildcrafting, “is ‘the quality, production, expression, or realm of what is beautiful…skilled workmanship or execution.’ …When you know you are ‘a wildcrafter’ is when you walk through a landscape, familiar with the timing and seasons of those other beings around you, knowing that when you leave things will be better for having been there and better for you as well”. 

I have discovered that wildcrafters do not regard wild plants as being simply available for the taking. Tending the plant communities to increase species diversity and to help plants proliferate is very common. Tenure of wild species includes selectively harvesting certain parts of a plant so that it actually grows back more prolifically and replanting sensitive plants. Seed or spore dispersal is also common. These tending activities also blur the line between that which is “wild” or “cultivated”.

Nancy Turner, an ethnobotanist who teaches at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, says that “land tenure has always been an important element of land and resource use by First Nations”. Northeast Native Americans were known to intentionally clear lands by controlled burning in order to diversify plants and create land for the early successional plants that thrive in ‘disturbed’ habitats.

The ‘craft’ aspect of wildcrafting involves a stewardship of lands and plants through observation, knowledge, and intentional action, then using those plant resources to fashion fine art, delectable food, healing medicine, and useful tools. Wildcrafting is as much a cultivation of skill and civilized activity as it is a wild, primitive instinct.

We have seen this with the great potato famine when the potato blight struck the main food source for people in Ireland and throughout Europe in the 1840s. Though many people have lost their foraging skills and traditions, during times of drought and famine, survival and subsistence was (and still is for many people) a very real motivation for farmers and other rural peoples to supplement their diets with wild plants to keep themselves healthy and alive.  

Euell Gibbons, who is deemed the “father of modern wild foods,” started a resurgence of yearning for our ancient survival skills and provided inspiration for a whole generation of back-to-the-landers in the 1970s who were not taught how to use wild plant foods by elders in their families. Learning about wild foods originally from his mother and then acquiring a vast store of wild food knowledge from his curiosity about Native American uses of wild plants, it is said that Euell kept his family alive for a month on foraged puffball mushrooms, pinon nuts, and yellow prickly pears in New Mexico during the Dust-Bowl era.  

by Helen Moore

You see these, she says, hands

rising into the lamplight

from her dappled lap,

their contented coupling

parted for a while – 

palms up, her fingers stick out,

callused, knobbled at every joint,

like a pair of Willows pollarded for years.

In each basin curved lines with tributaries

(of husbands, daughters, a guardian angel),

are streams viewed from high in the hills;

their backs speckled Blackbird eggs,

nails horned as Donkey’s hooves.

Fearless hands that grasped Nettles

(if you hold your breath they won’t sting);

that saved seeds, grubbed in the ground

for Potatoes, Parsnips, Pignuts;

picked Rosehips, Blackberries,

and never mind the scratches;

snipped Betony from the waysides,

slipped stems into mossy pockets,

wound them out again,

fresh as water from a well.

Those constant hands that cored

Spartans, Pippins, Russets,

delved deep in sticky dough,

bounced pies from the oven;

that fed the birds, darned, soothed,

rubbed olive oil into the raw, new

skins of babies; made haphazard

hospital corners, put out huge Spiders

and Small Tortoiseshells, placed

Cowslips on the graves of village people – 

Like this, her fingers interlock

to form the church without the steeple.

In our Earth everything fits together just so….

Solemnly I stare at their curved surface

settling back into her dappled lap

as if in silent prayer – in good hands

I learned to care for every sacred being.

The boundary between a wild and a cultivated plant can be very blurred. Often, we can find a series of gradations of plants as they come into their domesticated forms. For example, dandelions, originally cultivated in numerous varieties in Europe, were either brought over or came with settlers in the New World unintentionally. Here they became naturalized into the landscape and now grow quite vigorously on their own. Or do people help a little?

The word “agrestis” is a Roman word that describes semi-wild plants growing on arable land, pasture land and fallow fields. This word can apply to dandelions, thistles, mullein, plantain and other weedy species that grow as early successional plants, moving into land which has recently been cultivated, mowed, logged, burned, or disturbed in some way. Thus, people actually create ideal habitat for weedy species and often spread their seeds through their activities. Joan M. Frayn speculates in “Wild and Cultivated Plants: A Note on the Peasant Economy of Roman Italy,” that, “The period in which wild and cultivated plants were not fully differentiated in Europe, and when an intermediate category existed, has usually been regarded as earlier than the classical age of Rome. J.G.D. Clarke refers to it: ‘…under primitive conditions the distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ plants is often slight and a multitude of gradations in status may exist between wild, protected, and fully domesticated species’ “.

Wildcrafting is not simply the act of harvesting from nature’s untouched lands and wilderness areas. Many people harvest mainly at the edges of the forest and agrestis-like habitats, which can often hold a larger diversity of plants than in the forest. I’ve spoken to a wildcrafter who considers harvesting the volunteer weeds that grow in the pots on her porch to be wildcrafting. What is the edge of wild?