Tracker of Plants

unrelated photograph

Often people want to know if I have gone to formal herbalism school, and if not how I know what I know. Here is the longer, unedited version of an article I wrote for the TrackersNW newsletter:

As the product of two US Forest Service employees I always enjoyed the outdoors. My parents taught me a few things about plants back east. We made sumac lemonade, ate wild mushrooms plucked from the edge of the graveyard, and chewed on sassafras roots and teaberries for their respective root beer and wintergreen flavors. Once, my cousin and I ate so much sorrel we got sick to our stomachs. Though it was sour, we called it “sweet clover” in the old English sense of sweet, meaning good.

As good at quashing individuality and love of nature as school is, looking back, I can see an interest in plants managed to peep through. For example, in health when we had to cut out articles from the news and read them aloud, mine were always about new wonder herbs like ginkgo and echinacea. In 8th grade I even did a presentation on wild edibles for my outdoor education class. It wasn’t appreciated. The rural Pennsylvania version of outdoor education involved learning how flintlock and matchlock rifles worked and what kinds of guns and bullets are best for killing which animals. This was before Columbine, and we passed handguns around the classroom to study their mechanism. The guys in the class even organized a buck pool (a form of gambling based on who shoots the buck with the most points on its rack) with a prize of $200.

Then, I went to college and enrolled in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. At the time I was interested in green architecture and green technology. I was pretty stoked to start saving the world with bamboo, solar panels, and energy efficient windows, but towards the end of my freshman year I suffered a major blow. One day I studied too long. It gave me a backache, from which I never recovered. To this day I am in constant unrelenting pain.

Take that into consideration when applying for college.

I spent that summer stretching, massaging, and jogging like crazy in an attempted to drive the pain away, dosing myself with over the counter anti-inflammatories as well as herbs I read about on the Internet. I returned to school in fall but it wasn’t the same. Because of my studies I knew that environmental toxins as well as stress could have an effect on people so I made sure I always got enough sleep, never partied, filtered my water and air, and ate organic, yet still my health continued to worsen. I became severely depressed and withdrew first physically and, finally, officially on paper from my classes. I went to western doctors, but they just shrugged and tossed me some free samples of anti-depressants. Returning to Pennsylvania to rest, I spent that spring walking in the forest with my dog and got a little better.

So in 2002 I returned to Vermont and took a summer course in ethnobotany. For this class we had to keep an artist’s sketchbook of pressed plants, drawings, or photographs, identify the plants and research their cultural uses. Like a veil was removed, I never stopped noticing plants after that. I started baking cherry and apple pies to bring to potlucks from fruit that I’d gathered on the street. I started tipping off the tramps down in City Park to overlooked blueberry bushes in the landscaping. I started drinking pineapple weed tea, and eating milkweed and nettles and continued adding plant samples to my notebook. Spring semester 2003 I took Herbalism 101, but by then it was a piece of cake.

As I deepened my personal investigation into what supported health, and made people ill, I fell out of love with all technology including “green”. I was still depressed, but this time it was out of philosophical necessity that I dropped out of school. After a stint at a permaculture ecovillage in Costa Rica came to an abrupt end, I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, enrolled and even sent in a deposit for in a year-long herbal apprenticeship, but things didn’t work out with the guy I was living with and I ended up moving back to Pennsylvania before it started. Back at my parent’s I spent the summer once again recuperating and spending most of my time in the woods. But this time I became absolutely obsessed with plants. I learned habitats, growth patterns, whereas before I hiked up to ten miles a day, now I was lucky if I managed one. The dog wined at me as I studied a goldenrod or mushroom, wanting to keep moving. I became able to identify plants in winter by their buds and leaf scars, or wizened stalks. I discerned patterns in plant families and memorized botanical names without trying. I’d skimmed the Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Wildflowers so many times, I could recognize a new plant before looking it up.

I had gown to love the land like never before, and didn’t want to leave, yet I knew of no herbalists or herbal schools within 200 miles of my home. Instead, I took the entry exams for a nursing program, figuring that if I did become an herbalist I would garner more respect as an RN. This did not work out either. After a brief stint as a caretaker for the elderly, I realized nursing was really not for me. Out of lack of anything better to do and to increase my chances for employment, I returned to college at the closest campus, the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, an hour from my house, to finish my degree in environmental studies. The first class I signed up for was field botany. Geek that I was, I emailed my teacher weeks in advance for the list of books we needed to buy and to ask if there was anything I could do to prepare for class. I was thrilled to be required to spend money on new field guides. I was shocked when I returned to school, that out of the two-dozen or so kids in the class only three or four were enthusiastic about the subject, especially a fellow named Harry. The others whined when it was raining, refused to go off the paved campus trail, and remarked that they would rather be inside learning from books! But the rest of us had a wonderful time, and as the teacher lectured up front about a tulip poplar or cucumber magnolia I would be holding my own mini-class in the back, extrapolating on the various uses of each plant.

On the coldest outing of the season, wearing only rain boots and a pleated plaid skirt, I raced my classmate Harry through a cranberry swamp where I tripped and fell in head to toe. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time. Granted, after my summer of obsession I didn’t actually need to learn anything to pass the class. The teacher was coming to me with questions!

Later when Harry dropped a log on his foot cutting firewood we treated it with boneset. And when his girlfriend Elise became pregnant we gathered her raspberry leaves to drink. The only time I got a rise from the others students is when giving a presentation about dogwood I said, “Native American’s used the inner bark in their smoking mixtures…I smoked it.” Of course, it doesn’t do anything psychoactive, but that got a laugh. Always one to insist on first-hand knowledge, I ruined my newfound popularity later that same day when it became obvious that each group in the class had copied their notes directly from A Field Guide to Eastern Trees. After hearing three times that the service berry was “edible but not very palatable” I violently exploded: “I think it tastes good!“

This time marked the beginning of my foray into scientific research (not very exciting, actually). As a “serious” adult student I quickly became the darling of the Pitt Bradford campus. I was allowed to free reign design my own classes, and access to microscopes, GPS systems, digital cameras, and whatever other equipment I needed…or said I needed…mostly I just used them for fun. The next two summers I spent working for “the man” as a field researcher for the Allegheny National Forest. The more conservation, less resource extraction -oriented Western Pennsylvania Conservancy wanted me, but they also wanted to me work out of their Pittsburgh office and I couldn’t see moving to the city only to drive back out a couple hours each day to where the plants were.

During the second summer the monotony of counting and measuring the same couple of plants over and over finally got to me, and I struck out for Oregon, giving me a chance to see if my plant knowledge would translate to other ecosystems. It does. Since arriving I’ve done almost zero concentrated study in plants, instead picking things up here and there from various people, trail signs, and recognizing them by their plant families, and PA relatives. Almost immediately I knew more than my fellow outdoorsmen about their native flora!

Skeptical of the city, I went to work as a horticulturist for the Oregon Garden, in small-town Silverton, hoping I would be able to move into teaching, or ethnobotanical tours. But the money just wasn’t there, and I remained a lowly soil janitor, reduced to plucking weeds and scraping moss off the dirt between the shrubs or even worse spraying pesticides to kill them first, and then, plucking and scraping.

Which brings me back to Portland, and our theme of new beginnings. After so many false starts, distractions, and close but not-quite-right jobs, I’m attempting to do that risky thing called following your heart. I’ve long resisted becoming a professional herbalist, due to my failure to cure my own chronic health problems. I admit, I’ve still been tempted to enter into a formal herbalism school, but I’d really only be paying for the confidence. I already have the knowledge! So I’ve recently purchased a web domain to build a new site, and made my first dollars doing herbal consultations, and of course, teaching Wild Plants Tuesdays at TrackersNW. It is my hope that as I introduce the healing power of plants to others, I will find the long-sought relief from my own chronic health problems. Please help me unload the burden of knowledge meant to be shared by joining me every Tuesday night 6:30-8:30 at the Scout Pit!