Pharma Karma — What Grows Around, Comes Around
By PAUL WEIDEMAN, IMAGES COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
The galaxy of grasses, flowers, and shrubs growing in our mountains offers a wealth of practical uses for those in the know. Indian craftsmen and artists in the Southwest, for example, still employ a variety of native plants to produce fabric dyes and pottery pigments.
Knowledge about each local member of the plant kingdom must have been won, long ago, with a period of experimentation. Those early scientists discovered which plants held deadly poisons and sometimes found that smaller doses of those poisons had curative powers.
The bottom line was getting the most
out of what was available, and many plants were found to have multiple advantages. Native people have long used parts of Rocky Mountain beeplant to create black pigment for painting pottery and as a food source; it’s also known as Indian spinach. Grape-holly, an evergreen shrub in the barberry family, has traditionally been used to make a yellow-green dye and to alleviate upset stomachs.
“When you think about it, early man, even before agriculture, had nothing but plants to use for food and structures and clothing,” said Albuquerque-based biologist Carolyn Dodson. “Everything came from plants.”
Dodson, who holds a master’s degree in biological sciences and teaches wildflower-identification classes in the University of New Mexico’s continuing-education division, is the principal author of Mountain Wildflowers of the Southern Rockies: Revealing Their Natural History, just out from University of New Mexico Press. A member of the New Mexico Native Plant Society and the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, Dodson is now at work on a book about the plants of the Chihuahua Desert and how they have adapted to living there.
Her co-author on the project is William W. Dunmire, a 28-year veteran naturalist with the National Park Service whose books include Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province (co-author) and Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America. For Mountain Wildflowers Dunmire contributed sections on human uses of plants for food, medicine, and dyes. “The beautiful picture on the cover also is his,” Dodson said. “That’s in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, a wonderful place to look for flowers.”
The authors do not intend the new book to function as a field guide to wildflowers. Rather it presents profiles of 75 plants that grow between Wyoming’s Laramie and Medicine Bow mountain ranges and the Sandia Mountains south of Santa Fe.
More than 1,000 species of wildflowers occur over that area, Dodson explained. Why discuss only 75? “The concept was not to have every plant in there so that you can take it with you in the field but to go into depth about how each plant lives, how it’s pollinated, where it got its name, why it looks the way it does — anything interesting that I could find out about it I put in there.”
The book’s first entry is monkshood, a plant in the buttercup family with a purple flower that resembles a friar’s cowl. The authors discuss the poison aconite, extracted from this plant, that once was employed to kill wolves and now is used in medicine to slow the heart rate and lower blood pressure.
Monkshood offers a fascinating example of a flower with an appearance and structure that targets a specific pollinator. In this case, it’s the bumblebee, which uses its long tongue to probe the flower’s deep nectary. There the insect finds nourishment, but it simultaneously benefits the monkshood community by carrying dusty pollen to the next flower.
Scientists regard the long-term beneficial adaptation of bumblebee
to monkshood and monkshood to bumblebee as co-evolution. “This is definitely co-evolution, and it’s happened over millions of years,” Dodson said. “Flowering plants have been here for about 125 million years.”
Another plant that likely co-evolved with the bumblebee is elephanthead, Dodson’s favorite wildflower. Each small blossom in a flower spike of this member of the snapdragon family looks like a pink elephant’s head. “To gather pollen, bumblebees must complete an acrobatic exercise of pushing the tiny trunk upward with their head while pressing down the lower part of the flower with their hind legs,” she writes. “Then the bee vibrates its wings, forcing a small yellow cloud of pollen out of the anthers that is caught in the hairs of the bee’s abdomen. Most of the pollen will be carried back to the hive for food, but some will remain on the bee to fertilize the next visited flower.”
On the pages about silverweed cinquefoil, a member of the rose family, Dodson introduces Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century botanist known as the “father of modern taxonomy” because he came up with the modern system of naming living organisms. The scientific name of silverweed cinquefoil is Argentina anserina. The genus, Argentina, is the Latin word for “silver” and relates to the color cast of the leaves. Linnaeus bestowed the species name based on anser, Latin
for “goose.” Another common name for this plant is goose grass.
Dodson peppers her presentation with descriptions of plant families and some of their key characteristics. Members of the mint family can be identified by their square stems. Plants in the pink family are not characterized by pink flowers as we would assume but by petal tips that are notched, as if cut with pinking shears. Anise, dill, caraway, cumin, celery, and parsley are among the plants in the carrot family, which is known by its umbrellalike flower heads.
The carrot family’s giant is cow parsnip, which the authors use as a springboard for a discussion of chemical warfare. “We get medicines from plants and spices from plants because the plants produce compounds that taste good or help us medicinally,” Dodson said. “The plants produce these compounds for a reason, and that is to deter the insects that eat them.
“Many times it’s an accident that the insects don’t like these things and we do. The whole idea is that it affects physiology, so maybe for certain heart patients a plant can be good because it makes the heart beat stronger, while for a normal person it would make the heart beat too fast. These were designed to affect the physiology of the insects that eat the plant, and it also has an effect on us — and sometimes it’s
a different effect than it is on the insect.”
Scores of wildflowers in this area have traditionally been used medicinally. They include the cure-all osha, another carrot-family plant, and foxglove, which yields the heart medicine digitalis.
“In the first part of the 1800s, practically all medicine came from plants, and that was true until we were able to synthesize them,” said Dodson. “Many medicines still come from plants.”
Mountain Wildflowers of the Southern Rockies lets the reader in on some of the small miracles of specialization to be found in the plant kingdom. One is the scarlet penstemon, which caters to the hummingbird’s appetite, excellent color vision, and poor sense of smell by offering flowers that are filled with nectar, and are brightly colored and odorless.
Another is the beautifully fuzzy pasque flower, which keeps warm with an abundance of silky hairs and a structure designed to get the most from the sun. “This happens in plants in the mountains and in the arctic regions,” Dodson said. “They’re able to use sunlight to warm themselves by focusing the sun’s rays on the center of the flower. The plant can live without that extra heat, but it speeds up seed maturity.”
Is the natural history of plants a new focus in popular literature? “I don’t think it’s been done a lot,” said Dodson. “It’s hard for a layman to find this information. I got the facts from the scientific literature and adapted it for the average reader.
“The idea is that people like going to mountains and seeing all these beautiful colors, and they enjoy it more if they know the names of the plants. This goes further, giving people information about pollination or the shape of the flower or the leaf, things about plants that can enhance people’s enjoyment of them.”
details
Carolyn Dodson & William W. Dunmire sign & discuss Mountain Wildflowers of the Southern Rock
5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 20
Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St.
No charge, 986-0151
(c) 2007 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.