Western Medicinal Plants and Herbs

452 Pages·2002·146.32 MB·English

by  Christopher Hobbs

PETERSONc0Pift'.E'~D GUIDES ~
A FIELD GUIDE TO
WESTERN MEDICINAL
PLANTS AND HERBS

A FIELD GUID E TO
WESTERN
MEDICINAL
PLANTS AND
STEVE N FOS T ER
A N D CHRISTOPH E R HOBB S
SPONSORED BY
NATIONAL WILD LIFE FEDEHATION AND
T HE_ ROGER TORY PETERSON INST ITUTE
.h,~ HOUGHTON MIFFL IN COM PANY
~BOSTON NEW YORK 2002
Text copyright© 2002 by Steven Foster and Christopher Hobbs
All rights reserved
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PREFACE
The exploration of the flora of the American West by European
settlers of North America is a relatively recent undertaking,
scarcely two centuries old. In the 1 78os the vast expanses of the
West beckoned people of a scientific turn of mind as well as those
looking to conquer for political and economic gain. Spanish ships
had reached the Pacific Northwest by the mid-177os, and Cap
tain James Cook sailed north along the West Coast on his third
expedition to the Pacific in r 778. The British sent Captain
George Vancouver to search for the elusive Northwest Passage in
1 792. Though that passage proved nonexistent, he did examine
hundreds of miles of coastline from California to Alaska.
Tn 1 786 the French Academy of Sciences organized an e.>..-pedi
tion led by Jean-Fran~ois de Gala up, comte de La Perouse, to col
lect information about plants, particularly those that would grow
in the French climate. The explorers were to study roots, woods,
barks, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds to ascertain their potential
as "matiere medicale" - materia meclica, or medicinal plants. The
expedition, though primarily scientific in purpose, was also
charged with learning the extent and power of Spanish posses
sions in the American \!\Test.
The two ships forming the expedition arrived in California in
the summer of 1 786, a time when many plants were already dor
mant from the heat. Potatoes gathered in Chile were left with the
Spanish mission at Monterey. After ten clays at anchor, the expe
dition sailed west to Asia. At Kamchatka, in Russia, a member of
the scientific crew left the ship and was sent across the great ex
panse of Asia to France with journals and records of the expedi
tion's finds to elate.
In February 1 788, the ships stopped at Botany Bay, New South
Wales, Australia, and the leaders arranged for the shipment of im
portant journals and records to France. After leaving port on
PREFACE •
·-·---····-·-·-··- -----
February 1 5, 1788, the ships were never heard from again. Their
wreckage was discovered forty years later off one of the Solomon
Islands. AJthough most of the scientific records and collections
from the voyage were lost, two packets of seeds collected at Mon
terey by the expedition's gardener did make their way to Paris and
were grown at the Jardin des Plantes. Botanists recognized one
plant as a new genus, and in 1 791 Lamarck published the name
Abronia umbellata, a common sand verbena from San Diego
north to the Columbia River. It was the earliest California plant
described in acceptable scientific terms.
Between l 787 and 1 793 the eminent British botanist Sir
Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Cook on his voyages, sent
Archibald Menzies to the West Coast for extensive plant collec
tions. Menzies is honored in numerous species names such as
Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). The plants he collected in
what are now Washington, California, and British Columbia were
deposited in various European herbaria.
The third American president, Thomas Jefferson, consum
mated the purchase of vast lands west of the Mississippi River
from France in 1 803. In May 1 804, Jefferson sent Captains Meri
wether Lewis and William Clark to explore the territory of the
Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis in
September l 806 with 1 23 new plant species. Many of those
species were published in London in 1 81 4 in Frederick Pursh's
Flora Americae Septentrionalis, considered the first flora to cover
the continent, including species from the Pacific Northwest.
One of America's best-traveled field botanists, the English nat
uralist Thomas Nuttall (1 786-1 859), arrived in Philadelphia in
1 808, where he met with Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, author of
one of the first treatises on American medicinal plants, Essays To
wards a Materia Medica of the United States, published in three
parts between 1798 and 1 804. Backed by Barton's patronage,
Nuttall's travels on the Missouri River took him as far north and
west as southern North Dakota in 1811. Two decades later, in
r 834, he traveled overland to the Columbia River and collected
plants along the California coast on his way home. Further gov
ernment-sponsored scientific expeditions to the West did not oc
cur until 1 841. These are just a few of the important botanical ex
plorers of the American Wesl.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the botanists who
explored the plants of the western United States could be classi
fied as either describers or collectors. The describers primarily
worked in the academic institutions of eastern North America
and Europe; it was the collectors who did the hard field work in
the western wilderness. Both a collector and a describer, Con-
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PREFACE
stantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-r 840), author of Medical
Flora; or Manual of the Medical Botany of North America (2 vols.,
r 828, 1 830), described the experience of a botanist traveling in
Lhe western wilderness:
Let the practical Botanist who wishes like myself to
be a pioneer of science, and to increase the knowl
edge of plants, be fully prepared to meet clangers of
all sorts in the wild groves and mountains of America.
The mere fatigue of a pedestrian journey is nothing
compared to the gloom of solitary forests, where not a
human being is met for many miles, and if met he
may be mistrusted; when the food and collections
must be carried in your pocket or knapsack from day
to clay; when the fare is not only scanty but some
times worse; when you must live on corn bread and
salt pork, be burnt and steamed by a hot sun at noon,
or drenched by rain, even with an umbrella in hand,
as I always had.
Musquiotes [sic] and flies will often annoy you or
suck your blood if you stop or leave a hurried step.
Gnats dance before the eyes and often fall in unless
you shut them; insects creep on you and into your
ears. Ants crawl on you where ever you rest on the
ground, wasps will assail you like furies if you touch
their nests. But ticks the worst of all are unavoidable
wherever you go among bushes, and stick to you in
crowds ...
The pleasures of a botanical exploration fully com
pensate for these miseries and dangers, else no one
would be a traveling Botanist, nor spend his time and
money in vain. Many fair-days and fair-roads are met
with, a clear sky or a bracing breeze inspires delights
and ease, you breathe the pure air of the country, ev
ery rill and brook offers a drink of limpid fluid ...
Every step taken into the fields, groves, and hills,
appears to afford new enjoyments, Landscapes and
I lants jointly meet in your sight. Here is an old ac
quaintance seen again; there a novelty, a rare plant,
p ·rhaps a new one! greets your view: you hasten to
pluck it, examine it, admire, and put it in your book.
Then you walk on thinking what it might be, or may
he made by you thereafter. You feel exultation, you are
:1 'Onqucror, you have made a conquest over Nature,
1ou ur · going to add a new object, or a page to sci-
1111
PnEFACE
ence. This peaceful conquest has cost no tears ...
To these botanical pleasures may be added the an
ticipation of the future names, places, uses, history,
&c. of the plants you discover. For the winter or sea
son of rest, are reserved the sedentary pleasures of
comparing, studying, naming, describing, and pub
lishing [as quoted in McKelvey, 1 956, p. xxxix, from
Rafinesque, New Flora of North.America, 1836].
The descriptive botanists who stayed at their desks include the
elder Augustin Pyrames de Candolle (1 778-1841) in Geneva and
Paris; Sir William Jackson Hooker (1 785-1865) at the Royal
Botanical Gardens at Kew; John Torrey (1796-1873) of New
York; the preeminent nineteenth-century American botanist Asa
Gray (1 810-1888); and the botanical gatekeeper of the West in
St. Louis, George Engelmann (1 809-r 884). Other important col
lectors and describers of western plants include John M. Coulter
(1 85 l-1928), David Douglas (1798-1 834), Edward L. Greene
(1843-191 5), Willis Linn Jepson (1867-1946), Joseph N. Rose
( 1 862- 1 928), Per Axel Rydberg (1 860-1 931 ), and Sereno Wat
son (1 826 - r 892).
Most of the important early botanists, including Gray, Torrey,
Engelmann, and even Linnaeus, were trained as physicians. In
the eighteenth century, botany was merely a diversion from phar
macy, which ilsel[ had not yet fully emerged as a separate aca
demic pursuit. These medical doctors collected, described, and
published articles on plants new to science. Ironically, most of
these men had only a passing interest in medicinal plants. By the
mid-nineteenth century, botany was accepted as an academic dis
cipline.
As westward settlement continued, professional interest in na
tive plants as sources of medicines declined. Synthetic drugs were
on the horizon and plants were considered "crude drugs" peddled
as nostrums by quacks, "Indian doctors," and medicine side
shows. As a result, far fewer species of western medicinal plants
have found commercial uses even in the modern herb trade than
those from eastern North America, particularly from eastern de
ciduous forests in the first Lwo centuries of European settlement.
When botany matured as a distinct academic discipline, an
thropology evolved to include distinct subclisciplines, including,
in r 895, ethnobotany, the study of the ways indigenous groups
use plants. One rich laboratory for this study was the southwest
ern United States, where many Native American groups still sur
vived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since
many of these groups were culturally intact, and some individuals
am
PREFACE
remembered the old ways, there is far more ethnobotanical infor
mation on Native American medicinal plants of the \Vest, com
pared with those of eastern North America.
Edward Palmer, who collected plants during the heyday of
botanical eJq>loration oftheAmerican West, from 1853 to 1910,
established standards for collecting plants and for noting their
uses; in 1 871 he published Food Products of the North American
Indians.
The Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology
(BAE), under tbe direction of John Wesley Powell, produced
many important ethnobotanical studies, including Matilda Coxe
tevenson's Ethnohotany of the Zuni Indians (191 5) and Jesse
\!\falter Fewkes's A Contribution to Ethnohotany (1 896) on the
Hopi Indians' uses of plants. These anthropologists did not call
Lhemselves ethnobotanists. Edward F. Castetter was the first
botanist of the Southwest to call himself that, followed by Volney
H. Jones, who studied under Melvin R. Gilmore at the University
oFM ichigan. Gilmore established the first ethnobotanical labora
tory at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology in
19 30. The Botanical Museum at Harvard University, under the
lirection of Oakes Ames and students who followed him, includ
ing Paul Vestal and the late Richard Evans Schultes, produced
significant works on southwestern ethnobotany into the r 97os.
1:rom an ethnobotanical perspective, the American Southwest is
the best-studied region in the world.
This wealth of data is synthesized in Daniel E. Moerman's
19 98 book Native American Ethnohotany, which covers the food,
1naterial, and medicinal uses of 4,029 species, subspecies, and va
ri Lies of plants by 291 indigenous groups of North America (and
I IDwaii). This work has served as the primary source for much of
I h · literature on western medicinal plants listed in the Refer
·n ·cs.
111111-: \!\/EST IN THE N ORTH AMERICAN FLORA
'l'h l"lora of North America north of Mexico, including the United
Stut ·~, Greenland, and Canada, consists of at least 21 ,757
iipc ·ics of vascular plants represented by 3,1 64 genera in 290
plunt families. This area encompasses nearly 60 degrees of lati-
111d' and 1 45 degrees of longitude. Many of the world's major
V('fJ,d<1tion formations are included in this diverse climatic ex
p1111s ·. Among the plant communities west of the Mississippi
ltlv ·r arc tundra and polar desert biomes, boreal forests, montane
1'01•t·sts, l ·rnpcrate rain forests, prairie, shrub steppes, decicluous
1111d ev ·rgr · ·n Forests, chaparral, and warm deserts.
m
PBEFACE