Steven Foster's Blog, page 3

Yuccas

Yucca flaccida, Yucca

Often when I’m out on a group hike, we come across plants that some are surprised to see in Arkansas. One of those plants is yucca. In fact, that are five species of Yucca recorded from Arkansas, including two or three from Carroll County, depending upon botanical whim. Botanists are so adept at changing plant names, that if they were put in charge of naming planets, we would surely wake-up one morning to discover that we no longer live on a planet called Earth. Telling Arkansas’s five yucca species apart from one another takes a good deal of chin rubbing.

Yucca elata

Fortunately for lay-folk consumers of botanical knowledge, the common name yucca is the same as the genus name—Yucca. One species of Yucca here in Carroll County has a name that’s easy to remember —Yucca arkansana which is kin to Yucca louisianensis due to inbreeding or some other evolutionary exchange of genes in the pre-human past. In 2014, the late Dr. George P. Johnson, a botanist at Arkansas Tech in Russellville found Yucca freemanii in Miller County. Besides these three native species, Yucca filamentosa and Yucca flaccida occur here but are not native to Arkansas; they are naturalized. In other words, they were planted at some point and now grow and reproduce without the help of humans.

Mojave Yucca

In North America (north of Mexico) there are twenty-eight species of Yucca. Yuccas have been used for thousands of years for food, beverages, detergents, medicines, construction material, and especially as a fiber plant. During the First World War, 80 million pounds of yucca fiber were used to make course bags. The U.S. Navy used a special heavy paper made from yucca fiber during material shortages of the Second World War. Over the centuries, among indigenous groups of the American Southwest, yuccas were the foremost wild plants used for material necessities.

One National Park in California is named after a yucca (Yucca brevifolia) the 792,683-acre, Joshua Tree National Park. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decreed it a National Monument in 1933. In that same year, a cousin of Roosevelt’s, Susan Delano McKelvey, published a paper on yuccas in the Journal of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University where she worked as a research associate and valued patron. So which came first, the President’s decree or his cousin’s interest in Joshua tree and other yuccas? Later, she wrote the definitive two volume work Yuccas of the Southwestern United States. My vote goes to Roosevelt’s cousin.

Yucca brevifolia, Joshua Tree

Let Nature Touch You—A Botanical Photo Workshop

Praying Mantis; Costa Rica

Join me for a botanical photo workshop sponsored by Finca Luna Neuva Lodge in Costa Rica, 9-15 April 2016. Spend six nights at the beautiful eco-lodge and Certified Biodynamic herb farm, Finca Luna Nueva. Located just miles from one of the world’s most active volcanoes, the Arenal Volcano, Finca Luna Nueva is nestled in the heart of the country’s most pristine rainforests. Sign-up deadline is 8 March 2016.

Turmeric

The workshop will focus on techniques for improving plant and nature photography while exploring tropical beauty and attaining a deeper understanding of how to relate to plants. The fee is $1300 (double occupancy) and $1600 (single room) that includes six nights accommodation, all meals and airport transfer. Round trip airfare from your originating airport to San Jose Costa Rica (SJO) is additional. To reserve your space email: grupos@fincalunanuevalodge.com.

Finca Luna Nueva Lodge features the best of tropical comfort including an ozonated swimming pool and solar heated Jacuzzi along with spa services. Delightful meals of Costa Rican-Asian fusion cuisine, served three times a day are included with the package. Much of the food is produced on the farm.

Red-eyed Tree Frog

Finca Luna Nueva Lodge features well-groomed hiking trails, along with the Sacred Seed Sanctuary Semillas Sagradas, an ethnobotanical garden harboring over 250 medicinal herbs. The garden, first established in 1994, has evolved under the guidance of New York Botanical Garden ethnobotanist, Michael Balick, America’s herbalist-in-chief, Jim Duke, and Costa Rican ethnobotanist, Rafael Ocampo.  This extraordinary collection of neotropical medicinal plants is under the care of Steven Farrell, President of Finca Luna Nueva and Biodynamic farmer extraordinaire.  The garden serves as a model for the creation of other Semillas Sagradas ethnomedicinal gardens elsewhere, in an effort to preserve not only local biodiversity, but the indigenous traditions that are keepers of the knowledge.  Rafael Ocampo and Michael Balick co-authored Plants of Semillas Sagradas: An Ethnobotanical Garden in Costa Rica (2009). The book can be downloaded as a pdf file at the Finca Luna Nueva website. And that’s just a taste of the botanical offerings. Turn around at any moment and you could see a three-toed sloth, emerald basilisk lizard, green iguana, red-eyed frog, toucan or morpho butterfly!

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Let Nature Touch You —  A Photography Workshop with Steven Foster

Getting great photographs with the equipment you own

Topics Covered:

Our focus will be on techniques for improving your plant photography. Rather than dry optical theory or studio techniques, we will spend most of our time on techniques for fieldwork.
You do not need sophisticated, expensive equipment to take great photographs. It’s more about understanding simple concepts—lighting, being in the right place at the right time, and patience. And like anything worth doing, practice, practice, practice.
We will explore working with ambient natural light and making the most of the equipment you have. Just bring your iPhone. That’s all you need for equipment. Nature presents special conditions for photographing in the rainforest environment, and we will highlight getting the best images in varying situations, whether you are taking photographs for your own personal enjoyment or for use in scientific publication.
Assessing our equipment. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that you don’t have thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment. You can get good photographic results with the equipment you own. One key to successfully capturing images is to know and understand your equipment, while learning to keep your photography simple. For plant photography ideally, you may want to have a decent digital camera body, close-up lens (macro lens or a diopter for a fixed lens), and perhaps the single most important piece of equipment – a tripod. A wide-angle lens (28 mm or wider) and a telephoto lens (at least 200 mm, for a 35 mm camera body) will also enhance your enjoyment of taking plant and flower photos. Photographing plants often requires relatively long exposures, so besides the camera itself, a decent sturdy tripod is essential for plant photography in general.  Another piece of equipment that you will want to long exposures is a cable release. And finally, one other very essential piece of equipment is your camera manual. Read, re-read it and read it again until you begin to understand all of the features available to you as well as the camera’s basic operation. If you don’t understand something in the manual, highlight the item or write down a question to bring to the workshop. It really does take reading the manual several times to understand it. Remember —most camera manual are probably written by an engineer with English as a third language. . . .
Or forget all of that equipment and just bring your iPhone or other pocket digital camera!
If you don’t have thousands of dollars of camera equipment, don’t fret. You can take great photographs with whatever camera you own. One professional photographer with over three decades of experience that I admire, music venue/musician photographer David Horwitz, likes to keep it simple. He uses a 1970s vintage Nikon camera with just three basic lenses, a $79 point-and-shoot digital Minolta and on occasion $10 throwaway camera.
Photography is not about equipment. Photography is about light. As George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak put it, “Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.”
Finding a subject and knowing what you are shooting. Anyone can take a photograph of a beautiful flower. If you want to find great subjects, especially plants, you have to know what you’re looking for and where to find it.  Finca Luna Nueva offers exciting photographic opportunities simply by walking outside the front door of any building. We will also discuss the ethics of plant conservation and “gardening” to create a more pleasing composition. The key to ethical wildflower photography is “leave no trace.”
Bring some of your own work if you wish and share it with the group. We will also look at images and talk about elements that make them interesting compositions, or a technically good photograph, keeping in mind the words of Ansel Adams, “There are no rules for good photographs. There are only good photographs.”
We will cover essentials of you helping to understand photographic concepts such as depth of field, focus, exposure, composition, making the most of ambient light, and macro techniques.
You took a great picture. Now what? In this new era of digital photography, snapping the shutter is only the first step. Once you have captured images and downloaded them to your computer, we will explore digital workflows, with information on useful software, file formats, key-wording and metadata, color space, equipment calibration, and other steps necessary for creating the best output for prints, the web, electronic media, and publication.

 

Eat Your Blackeyed Peas

By Steven Foster |

People often ask me if they can grow something here in the Ozarks that was the same plant or group of plants that they could grow wherever it was that they came from, be it New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, Florida or California. In almost every instance one of the major limiting factors between the Ozarks and wherever you came from, is that back there—wherever “there” might be—they had soil. Here in the Ozarks, that dirt underfoot is a poor excuse for soil.

We live in a tough landscape, despite our abundance of water and somewhat intact forests. The hot, dry summers and marginally productive soils challenge survival skills especially in times of food insecurity. Among the agricultural plants that provided a food source when all else fails are beans collectively known as cowpeas or field peas (Vigna unguiculata) which includes acre peas, blackeyed peas, cream peas, crowder peas, southern peas, table peas and whippoorwills, among others. In the South these are grown by home gardeners and seed collectors, replaced by soybeans in mega-agriculture as a small dry bean with high protein content that grows on marginal land.

All of these small, dry peas or beans come from Vigna unguiculata, which is believed to originate in dry lands in Africa, and was grown in Arabia and Asia Minor before the Christian era and found in northwestern India, present-day Pakistan and adjacent Persia (Iran) in ancient times. It was known in China by at least the fourteenth century. It arrived in Jamaica somewhere between 1672 and 1687, and one might speculate that captive African slaves managed to smuggle the seeds with them from West Africa. It was known in Florida by 1775. George Washington acquired seeds and grew it out at Mount Vernon around 1797.

George Washington Carver (whose birthplace is a National Monument in Diamond, Missouri, south of Joplin) promoted the planting and development of black-eyed peas, now associated with Southern cuisine and soul food.

The tradition of eating black-eyed peas for good luck to celebrate the New Year is synonymous with American Southern tradition. Coming from Maine originally, I never heard of it until moving to Arkansas. However, it is not a tradition that originated in the American South, but stems from a tradition to celebrate Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud (from about the year 500). Black-eyed peas swell when cooked, symbolizing prosperity. On New Year’s day, remember to eat black-eyed peas before you buy a lottery ticket.

See:

Campbell, B.C. 2014. Just Eat Peas and Dance: Field Peas (Vigna unguiculata) and Food Security in the Ozark Highlands, US. Journal of Ethnobiology 34(1):104-122.

Wright, W.F. 1907. History of the Cowpea and its Introduction into America. USDA Bureau of Plant Industries Bulletin 102: 43-59.

Choose Your Poison: Blarney on Cannabis

By Steven Foster |

Dispatch from County Cork, Ireland! Just returned from an Herbal Excursion to the Emerald Isle, sponsored by Cynthia Graham at Nurse Natural Path.  Among the many things that I learned is that what you read into your own expectations may not be true. For example, I did not expect any place on earth at 53 degrees North latitude to be harboring palm trees and herbaceous plants from the Amazon. The warm clothes I brought with me proved mostly superfluous, a pleasant surprise, indeed, while basking in the comfort of temperatures in the low to mid 60°F range.

We visited Blarney Castle on 30 August 2015, famous for the Blarney Stone, which one kisses to gain the gift of eloquence and exposure to unknown microorganisms from tourist the world over. The first castle at the site was a wooden hunting lodge built in 1210, which seems old until you consider that some of the stone structures in Ireland were built a thousand years before the great pyramids in Egypt. The present Blarney Castle was built in 1446, so in Irish historical terms, it is a relatively new structure. Please forgive my lack of eloquence as I was too busy looking at the plants around Blarney Castle to stand in line to kiss the Blarney Stone, and as I wrote the intital draft of this article I was well into an evening draft or two of Guinness.

Instead, at Blarney Castle, I spent most my two hours at the site in the Poison Plant Garden, which is the only one of its kind in Ireland. I was somewhat amused by the selection of plants in the garden, which included our Ozark native mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), black cohosh (Actaea racemosa) and skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora). While mayapple has legitimate claims to toxicity, black cohosh and skullcap themselves have no real safety issues except for products bearing their names that have been adulterated with toxic imposters. Nevertheless, by association in the absence of a complete understanding of the literature, the casual observer might think that they have some toxicity. There was a display of our native eastern North American poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) imprisoned in a cage with thick iron bars that a grizzly bear looking for a honey-rich beehive could not break-through.

One of my fellow travelers beckoned, “Steven, look at this.” And there at the other end of the garden, beneath what appeared to be a repurposed geodesic dome playground monkey bar were caged marijuana plants. The warning sign was boldly emblazoned with skull and cross bones, a warning of the potential danger of the plant. Hmmm, I thought. A playground structure as a make-shift cage for marijuana plants? This can only be Irish humor.

Swooned by the Sweet Black Locust

By Steven Foster |

Several times in the last week, people have asked what is that tree with the white or pinkish pendulous clusters of pea-like flowers? It is Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), a very  early introduction from North America to Europe. Go almost anywhere in Europe or temperate Asia today, and the “Virginia acacia”—our Black Locust—is widely planted as a street tree, and appears as if part of the native landscape. In his 1823 Sylva Florifera, Henry Phillips, tell us that American Indians made a declaration of love by presenting a branch of this tree in blossom to the object of their attachment. No doubt our native Black Locust itself was the object of desire. “Of all exotic trees,” Phillips writes, ” with which we have adorned our native groves, this North American stands first”.

Black Locust, Robinia pseudoacacia

Our common Black Locust was fancied by early missionaries to be the Egyptian acacia that supported St. John in the wilderness. They were wrong, so it was called “false acacia,” thus the species designation “pseudoacacia.” It was introduced to Europe at a very early date and planted with religious zeal.

The name Robinia honors Jean Robin (1550-1620) a Parisian apothecary recognized as one of the best French botanists of his time. Henry III appointed him herbalist and arborist at the gardens of the Louvre. His son, Vaspasian Robin (1579-1660) continued his father’s work and planted the tree in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris by 1636. John Parkinson (1567-1650) first described it in his monumental Theatrum Botanicum (Theatre of Plants), published in 1640. By the 1660s our woodland waif was widely planted as a street tree throughout Paris and London.

The love affair continues over 400 years later. Just last week, I posted a photo of the flowers on Facebook, and a friend from Turkey noted it is common avenue tree there, and that as a child, he ate the flowers. Other chimed in that the sweetly fragrant flowers dipped in cool water are delicious, or that dressed with oil and balsamic vinegar, the flowers are a nice addition to salads, and are great added to pancakes. The heady fragrance was blamed, too, for inducing nausea and headaches, though that accusation has the odor of a swooning Victorian suffering from unrequited love. For better or worse, this is one American tree that we rediscover each spring!

A bee-friended Black Locust, Robinia pseudoacacia

Nature’s Network

By Steven Foster |

There are activities that get people out from in front of some type of electronic devise and out into nature. For some it’s hunting season, for others hiking, and if my Facebook page is to be believed, many of my acquaintance have been out hunting morel mushrooms. How many have I found? Zero. Not because I haven’t been out in the woods, it’s just that my attention is focused on unfurling tree leaves.

Sassafras trees in bloom—dancing along a fence.

Morels are a great signal marking what I think of as the most magical time of year in the Ozarks. It is the time between redbuds and the blooms of dogwood, when the oaks, hickories and dozens of other woody plants are unfurling their leaves, inconspicuously flowering depositing their pollen on the hood of your car. It is the time of year when you look out across a valley and see a thousand shades of green. Beauty abounds with each glance.

The fruiting morel bodies and the unfurling deciduous tree leaves are great reminders of the fact that what is going on with all vegetation, be it trees or fungi is actually happening out of sight, beneath the surface of the soil. About 60% of a tree’s weight and mass is below the soil surface. A single morel fruiting body plucked from above the soil’s surface it not one individual, but an appendage of a biological form whose primary mass is also below the soil surface. The trees and the morels are not separate from one another. One serves the other and vice versa in a vast network of chemical and ion exchange signaling, something akin to the internet, and global in reach.

Delightful, edible (in moderation) Sassafras flowers

We borrow metaphors from nature and consciously or unconsciously mimic her systems. We appear to be individuals on the surface, yet we are inextricably, biologically connected to the same networks, seen or unseen, that connect the underground life of an oak tree with the vast underground network that pops-up in form as a morel. This being the time of the forgotten celebration called “Earth Day,” recall your connection to nature. Look up, look down and look behind you. If no one is watching, go for it—hug a tree and send a signal out its roots to your fellow human beings. Is their any connection? Hello? Anybody home?

Tulips at the Crescent Hotel, 12 April 2015, Eureka Springs, Arkansas

AncientBiotics from Leechbooks

By Steven Foster |

Last week’s annual meeting of the Society for General Microbiology held in Birmingham England, announced some really exciting new research or the Society has a really good publicist. Papers presented at the meeting made worldwide news. One paper from researchers at Cardiff Metropolitan University, showed that date syrup a common sweetener in the Middle East, has antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli (the ubiquitous “E. coli”), that was as good as or better than honey as an antibiotic. Okay, like I said the Society has a great publicist. Researchers from the University of York reported on the discovery of a unique set of enzymes that help the bacterium Staphylococcus hominis create compounds called thioalcohols—revealing the chemical key to turning sweat into body odor! Good work publicist!

The study that got the most air, print, and internet play was from researchers at the University of Nottingham who reported that a complex formula teased from a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon manuscript in the collection of the British Museum—Bald’s Leechbook—was surprisingly effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococus aureus, better known as MRSA.

You don’t want a spacesuit encased physician to walk into your hospital room  to inform you that you have MRSA and that they will have to move you to the hospital’s Ebola wing. . . The irony of this misplaced humor is that eight years ago, my father went to visit my older brother in a hospital after surgery, and just from visiting, my dad got a staph infection that is still with him now. And today, 10 April 2015, I write these words as I sit at my step son’s hospital bed after he had an operation yesterday. As he snores softly while firmly in the embrace of Morphius, the words repeat in my head, “wash your hands often.”

Likely in rural England 1,000 years ago, human immune systems were much more active than today, stimulated by what was undoubtedly a microbial-rich domestic environment. The 9th century recipe studied by the University of Nottingham scientists included two types of onion relatives, combined with wine and oxgall.

Dr. Christina Lee, Associate Professor in Viking Studies and member of the University’s Institute for Medieval Research translated the recipe, the original of which was reportedly a topical eye salve formula. The recipe not only calls for two species of Allium (garlic and onion or leek), wine and oxgall (bile from a cow’s stomach), it also describes a very specific method of making the preparation in a brass vessel, straining it then allowing the mixture to cure for nine days before use. See 30 March  2015 Press Release from the University of Nottingham. A video with interviews with the researchers is embedded in the press release.

The scientists at Nottingham made four separate batches of the remedy using fresh ingredients each time, as well as a control treatment using the same quantity of distilled water and brass sheet to mimic the brewing container but without the vegetable compounds. Microbiologists at the University of Nottingham then recreated and tested the concoction against MRSA, and were astounded to find a more than 90% effective rate against the bacterium.

Dr Lee (quoted in the Press Release linked above) said: “We were genuinely astonished at the results of our experiments in the lab. We believe modern research into disease can benefit from past responses and knowledge, which is largely contained in non-scientific writings. But the potential of these texts to contribute to addressing the challenges cannot be understood without the combined expertise of both the arts and science.

“Medieval leech books and herbaria contain many remedies designed to treat what are clearly bacterial infections (weeping wounds/sores, eye and throat infections, skin conditions such as erysipelas, leprosy and chest infections). Given that these remedies were developed well before the modern understanding of germ theory, this poses two questions: How systematic was the development of these remedies? And how effective were these remedies against the likely causative species of bacteria? Answering these questions will greatly improve our understanding of medieval scholarship and medical empiricism, and may reveal new ways of treating serious bacterial infections that continue to cause illness and death.”

Dr Freya Harrison, a University of Nottingham microbiologist led the work in the laboratory with Dr Steve Diggle and Research Associate Dr Aled Roberts. She presented the findings at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology  on Monday 30th March 2015 in Birmingham, England.

According to the press release, Dr Harrison commented: “We thought that Bald’s eyesalve might show a small amount of antibiotic activity, because each of the ingredients has been shown by other researchers to have some effect on bacteria in the lab – copper and bile salts can kill bacteria, and the garlic family of plants make chemicals that interfere with the bacteria’s ability to damage infected tissues.  But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was.  We tested it in difficult conditions too; we let our artificial ‘infections’ grow into dense, mature populations called ‘biofilms’, where the individual cells bunch together and make a sticky coating that makes it hard for antibiotics to reach them.  But unlike many modern antibiotics, Bald’s eye salve has the power to breach these defences.”

Denied further funding for the project by a UK government agency, the “AncientBiotics Project” leader Dr. Freya Harrison is using  Crowdfunder.co.uk page to request small contributions to continue the research.

The short video clip accompanying the University of Nottingham press release very briefly mentions the 1865 (Volume 2) of T. O. Cockayne’s translations  from  Bald’s Leechbook (and others). You can access the three volumes (1864, 1865, & 1866, respectively) by clicking on the links below:

Cockayne, T. O., et al. (1864). Leechdoms, wortcunning, and starcraft of early England being a collection of documents, for the most part never before printed, illustrating the history of science in this country before the Norman conquest. Vol. 1. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green.

Cockayne, T. O., et al. (1865). Leechdoms, wortcunning, and starcraft of early England: Being a collection of documents, for the most part never before printed, illustrating the history of science in this country before the Norman conquest. Vol. 2. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green.

Cockayne, T. O., et al. (1866). Leechdoms, wortcunning, and starcraft of early England: Being a collection of documents, for the most part never before printed, illustrating the history of science in this country before the Norman conquest. Vol. 3. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green.

One element missing from most news reports on the AncientBiotics Project is the fact that this type of multidisciplinary research called “text mining” is relatively new. Historians or linguists search historic manuscripts or antiquarian books for targeted words or concepts, then field and laboratory researchers from various disciplines use the data to design experiments. The Internet increases text mining exponentially, since once doesn’t have to be in the physical presence of a manuscript to review it, since many records are now digitized and readily accessible on-line. Similar research is being quietly conducted worldwide.

We all know that Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America, but he gets credit for it. Why? It is because the printing press arrived in Europe in 1440, developed by the German goldsmith, Gutenberg. The Chinese had developed movable type and printing processes 600 years earlier. The printing press allowed news to travel faster. The 1493 letter of Christopher Columbus to his sponsors describing his discoveries was immediately published in several languages and distributed throughout Europe. One can image him bowing before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and with a wink and smile while saying, “It’s all in the P.R.”

Today “P.R.” is a mouse click away.

Springtime Inspired “The Curious Mr. Catesby”

By Steven Foster |

It is a time of renewal—Spring. The spring equinox arrived along with a new moon, a moment of perigee (the moon’s closes point to the sun), and to top it all off, a total of solar eclipse, mostly seen in northern Europe. The cosmos screamed—“time for a change.” Roadsides, woodlands, and yards are beginning to green-up after a dreary winter. We enjoy the delight of jonquils and a chorus of songbirds by sunrise. It’s also a time for new books on natural history topics.

Imagine what European settlers arriving in the early 1700s thought about their first American spring. A wide-eyed, well-educated English naturalist of means, Mark Catesby (1683-1749) arrived in Virginia in 1712. Tuesday March 24th 2015 was his 333rd birthday. Catesby collected plants, particularly seeds, along with specimens of fauna and minerals then sent them back to England received by scientists eager to describe the new finds.

Available from the Catesby Commemorative Trust.

Much of what Catesby saw was new to science. He took up watercolor painting to record his observations. In 1719 he returned to England and wealthy sponsors encouraged his return to America in 1722, this time to South Carolina, where he stayed until 1726. Upon returning to England, he spent the next seventeen years illustrating and writing his monumental large-folia two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands: Containing the Figures of Birds, Beats, Fishes, Serpents, Insects, and Plants. . . ” (first published in ten parts from 1731-1742). One of the great classics of American natural history literature, it includes watercolors and descriptions of flora and fauna, many depicted for the first time, such as the exceedingly rare or extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and extinct birds such as  the Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon. The original watercolors are in the Royal art collection at Windsor Castle. The first edition of 160 copies,  with hand-colored plates many from the hand of Catesby himself, are quite precious. You can find an occasional copy for around $640,000.

 

The spring of 2015 brings with it a new book The Curious Mr. Catesby published by the University of Georgia Press. Lavishly illustrated and a fascinating read, it features 23 chapters on various aspects of Catesby’s work. Like a new spring, Catesby’s contribution to American natural history, continue to inspire. Like the first edition of his “Natural History”, The Curious Mr. Catesby, is an enduring example of why e-books will never replace the printed bound book as a physical object to hold and enjoy.

If you don’t have a spare half-million plus, you can view Catesby’s Natural History  Volume 1 and Volume 2 at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. These are just two of the nearly 160,000 volumes available at this incredible resource. Viewing a digital copy is one thing. Seeing the first edition in its physical form is a thrill for anyone interest in natural history. On April 19, 2015 the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati in partnership with the Cincinnati Nature Center, the Cincinnati Museum Center, and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, will hold an opening and book release party for The Curious Mister Catesby at the Cincinnati Museum Center. The opening will feature panel lectures by leading Catesby experts including Dr. Charles Nelson and David Elliott, editors of The Curious Mr. Catesby, along with botanist Prof. W. Hardy Eshbaugh (Miami University, Ohio) and Leslie Overstree, Curator of Natural History Rare Books at the Smithsonian Library. For more information on the extraordinary life and travels of Mark Catesby visit the Catesby Commemorative Trust.

The Lloyd Library and Museum’s rare first edition of Catesby’s Natural History will be on display along with the Cincinnati Museum’s second edition.

Yaupon Holly — My Cup of Tea

by Steven Foster |

It seems that every culture has it’s morning jump-start beverage— coffee, origination in Africa; tea from China; yerba maté imbibed in temperate South America, and chocolate which 500 years ago radiated out to the world from Central America. These plants contain caffeine and chemically-related stimulating alkaloids. Depending on preparation methods, all have their own variations on healthful antioxidants. Europeans adopted these beverages with further refinements.

But what happened to North America’s—yaupon holly? Like other morning beverages, yaupon is loaded with antioxidants, and is the only plant from North America that contains caffeine. Like yerba maté, it is a member of the genus Ilex (hollies). You can buy evergreen, red-fruited yaupon hollies at almost every nursery in the South. Common in forests of south Arkansas, it evolved in the Ouachita Mountains, then spread throughout the Southeast.

If you were pre-revolutionary European explorer entering a native village along the Gulf Coast, elders would greet you with an offering of yaupon holly tea. Native groups cultivated yaupon in naturalized groves beyond the plant’s natural range. The leaves were carefully plucked, dried, then prepared and offered as a sacred ceremonial beverage. Referred to as “black drink” simmered to a thick brew (think “espresso”) it was called “cassine” or “asi.”

English naturalist, Mark Catesby (1682-1749) author of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands published from 1731-1742, describes a cleansing ritual in which on one day a year, all of a tribe’s members drank black tea to induce “spring cleaning” (vomiting). Yet, the other 364 days of the year, an infusion of yaupon leaves was drunk like we drink coffee or tea in the morning.

Today yaupon is making a come back. Now you can do an internet search for “asi tea” or “yaupon tea” and instead of references to historic literature, you will discover several small companies offering teas and beverages from the yaupon holly from Texas to Georgia.

Well-established as a beverage tea after the American Revolution, the Civil War seems to have disrupted sourcing in the South and relegated the plant’s use to history until now. Confused botanical nomenclature, finally clarified in 1949, may also have impacted perceptions about the plant. Since 1949, the accepted scientific name, bestowed on the plant in a work by English botanist William Aiton in 1789, lives in infamy— Ilex vomitoria.

More to come.

Here’s my photo gallery of yaupon holly images.

Cold-Blooded Investigator Targets Herbal DNA

| By Steven Foster

Tuesday February 3, 2015, the New York Attorney General, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued a press release on an action taken the previous day in which his office delivered “cease and desist” letters to four major retails including GNC, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart alleging that they were selling herbal dietary supplements that did not contain the plant materials listed on the product labels. The herbs included Echinacea, Garlic, Ginseng, St. John’s Wort, and Saw Palmetto. According to the Attorney General’s press release 79% of the products tested, either did not contain the plant material claimed on the label or contained other plant materials not listed on the label. All of the products were “store brands,” made by contract manufacturers.

“This investigation makes one thing abundantly clear: the old adage ‘buyer beware’ may be especially true for consumers of herbal supplements,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. “The DNA test results seem to confirm long-standing questions about the herbal supplement industry. Mislabeling, contamination, and false advertising are illegal.” “Seem” is the operative word here.

Schneiderman has apparently been watching too many episodes of CSI “city du jour” in which the DNA always solves the crime. DNA analysis for plants is great for botanicals or plant specimens in which intact DNA still exist, but if you are testing an extracted plant ingredient—PRESTO—the DNA except in rare cases no  longer exists!

Every qualified, experienced plant analytical laboratory that authenticates botanicals day-in-and-day-out, knows that DNA alone is unreliable for testing plant extracts. Instead validated chemical analytical methods along with other validated lab methods are used. See link at the end of this article to see the American Herbal Pharmacopeia’s 54-page response to Attorney General Schneiderman which includes the appropriate lab methods to i.d. of the plant extracts in question.

A retired plant scientist friend mused, “if DNA testing is required for validating plant ingredients claimed to be in any product, the supermarket shelves would be empty.” If Schneiderman had applied the same DNA method to the brown liquid in the cup of coffee he might have drunk before his news conference, the test would have likely shown that his cup of coffee contained no detectable DNA of the coffee plant!

This is a case in which a public official, under the guise of science, has made allegations without confirming the validity of the science. Curiously, no plant genomic scientists I know had heard of the lab or researcher who did the testing! Turns out they hired a DNA lab specializing in reptile and dinosaur identification! I suppose that New York Attorney General Eric T.  Schneiderman decided to hire this lab after he had heard that the lab was run by “cold-blooded scientific investigators.”

A version of this story was published in the Eureka Springs Independent Newspaper in the Nature of Eureka column on 11 February 2015.

See response to the New York AG from Roy Upton, Founder and Executive Director of The American Herbal Pharmacopeia, which supplies a rational response to an irrational action.

This is a continuing story.