What do 'Indian' Hemp, Cook Pine, Cedar, Ironwood and Mahogany have in common?
Well-rounded multi-layered embodied wisdom can only happen from years of experience, of observation, of focused study and repeated learning.
It’s a rainy day, finally, here in western Colorado and I plan to work in my studio for awhile conjuring something from the piles of textures materials I have around the room and the many ideas I have for them and then go do some gardening. I’m trying to get blue corn in the ground this year that I have tended on and off for over a decade, and it’s starting to get to be too late to plant it. There’s also the grasshoppers here that decimated lots of crops last year, and they are out again, all pretty tiny right now and seem to be on a trajectory to decimate again so I’m scared to plant anything at the same time. Especially seed that I want to grow out and save again. I gathered the last of my Rose petal harvest yesterday at the valley floor elevation and the grasshoppers were even eating the rose petals. I’m considering the possibility of total decimation in my allotment of time and energy building someone else’s soil in their garden plot where I can grow and have my time and energy wasted. I’ve built other folks’ gardens over the years over and over to then have to leave or not get to tend anymore so I’m cautious about where I give my energy now, though I miss gardening terribly and tending land like it is my child. It’s a love language for me. Because of my focus on wild lands for a few years now and really on and off for a decade, my farming has transitioned to tending in a different way. It’s gathering seed and replanting on public and private land without a monetization factor, its digging roots and replanting them when appropriate. It’s taking divisions and spreading out plant patches so they have room to breathe not just in the fence-line but outside of it or on it or somewhere in-between subverting it.
I wasn’t going to write again today and give people time and space to breathe into what I published last week, but I felt compelled this morning after a few things I noticed that I have been noticing, but it finally perturbed me enough to write about it.
(Studio scene, really my whole life revolves around creative ecology. Not pictured: the willow and sumac and devil’s claw soaking in my bathtub for weaving in a few days)
So, I teach ecology classes. I have been doing botanical research unaffiliated with any academic organization officially for over 12 years now. I take it really seriously, my research. I made it my whole life, which in some ways has ostracized me from normalcy and I don’t quite relate to anyone who isn’t as obsessed with plants and history and story as I am, and because I’ve made it my whole life, I don’t quite know how to live in mainstream society (I guess there’s a few reasons for that). I didn’t teach a lot for a long time because I believe in having a quality well rounded multi-layered embodied wisdom about something before I think someone should teach it and a humility to admit we’re always learning forever. So I waiting, and sometimes felt I didn’t know enough, though I could have shared what I did know, for awhile, in order to give myself the time to be able to teach well, the way I wanted to teach. I believe that the time and dedication and attentiveness we spend now in our lifetimes will change connection and awareness and the world beyond us, much like planting seeds for 7 generations. So I think it’s important to learn well, often and ongoing. Well-rounded multi-layered embodied wisdom can only happen from years of experience, of observation, of focused study and repeated learning. From experimentation, from being consistently persistent, tuned in and willing to shift, learn more constantly.
I didn’t use ID apps over the years for most of my time in experiential research mode. I didn’t rely on an app to tell me what a plant was. I used books, other teachers, question asking, self imposed art-inspired research ideas using a horizontal approach, online articles, my philosophy degree, my own observation to learn so the webbed map of relationship formed in my brain over time, and every time I learned something new, it was added to this map in my brain and body. Using apps short circuits this and doesn’t get us really investigating.
Albeit now, I do use apps like iNaturalist to document and record plants in different places, or to help me narrow down to a family or genus and I research from there but I always take it with a certain level of possibility of error. These apps aren’t reliable for accurate information though more and more folks who know what their talking about, depending on the place, will vet the artificial intelligence and confirm or deny the accuracy of the findings especially in iNaturalist, where retired botanists of a specific region spend every morning checking people’s IDs while having their morning coffee (my friend who is a botanist in California said this is the case for the eastern Sierras!). I hear new phones will automatically try to tell you what a plant is if you take a picture of it. These things bother me and also worry me because I feel as though it takes away the work required to really ‘know’ and observe life. No matter what an app tells you, you’re not learning the same way. I see a lot of folks fast track to becoming herbalists or teaching about ‘wild foods’ or ‘permaculture’ with these head in the sky ideas and reciting the same circle-jerk info without any on the ground experience.
It frustrates me taking so long dedicating myself to a knowledge base, and see other folks fast track it and share wrong or slightly misinformed, or not fully correct but halfway correct information and others listen and think it is true or do not ask critical questions. It frustrates me when I feel like ecology should be taught in a certain way, with the context and layers of why, how and what we know about a plant, place or ecological environment also as a part of the work, and I often don’t see that happening. I often don’t see the critical analysis that I feel is essential to the conversation. I am frustrated when people rely solely on common names, and assume things about a plant because of what else is called a similar common name and getting it sometimes dangerously wrong because of that.
I understand that using Latin (and some of it is greek or modern words named after the white men who ‘discovered’ the plants) is a helpful taxonomical language that brings us all into center, into a commonality to relate from, an ability to systematize a set of life that we can all orient in despite where we live in the world or what languages we speak. And, I know that relying on something like this to bring life into ‘order’ and a baseline also can be homogenizing, or erasing of more nuanced uncategorized life or languages that speak about interconnected beings from a place of living built into the words themselves, not as an object as a means to an end1. Because Latin is a dead language it is easy to use, but it also has its problems, it does have roots in the Roman empire after all, a colonial empire who raped, pillaged, genocided and forced rule just as much as some modern world powers do today. At least if we use it, we can understand what we’re wielding and how there is a bias lens or an influenced lens because of that and that goes for use of common names as well. There are lots of confusing plant common names that get people mixed up, but we have a responsibility to research them and be sure of the context of what we’re talking about. Or, at least admit we don’t know or are wrong or that these things are disagreed upon. I often will say that some people think this way and others think this other way and you can decide how you feel. As often is the case in botany, not everyone agrees even with modern technology that can genetic test the ways that plants or any life is related, on whether to ‘join’ like plants together into conglomerates or ‘split’ them apart into finer and finer compartmentalized separations. (Joiners and splitters are often at odds over such minute details it is laughable)
A few of the things I encountered recently in the vein of what I speak to here have bothered me.
Here’s one example:
Someone posted on Facebook, on one of the plant ID pages a picture of themselves with Dogbane Apocynum cannabinum, otherwise called ‘Indian Hemp’ and said something like ‘the Indian Hemp is almost ready to harvest, I am just waiting on seeds’ and a screenshot of the app they used to identify it as “Indian Hemp” and I wondered what they were exactly harvesting soon. If you don’t know, Dogbane is a poisonous plant and it is not related at all to Cannibas, or Hemp, which people gather to ingest internally or through smoking, or make fiber with the mature stalks. Dogbane also has good fiber, and was traditionally used all across Turtle Island for that purpose and was traditionally tended with fire, coppicing, and gathering to stimulate stalk growth taller and less branches for longer material. And it still is tended by indigenous folks, there are tribes in California that still tend the traditional patches their ancestors tended for many years. The common name was given to the plant because of how it was seen used by traditional land based peoples in North America, and its importance as a fiber plant by them seemed comparable to Cannibas genus Hemp, which has been historically been used by humans around the world for a long time. Hemp is one of the first rope materials, plant-based clothing fibers and handmade paper fibers to be used by people, some of the first evidence found in what is now China. Alongside Flax, Nettles, Yucca here in the Southwest, Dogbane has also been long used by people when it comes to plant fibers. Anyone who is interested in becoming familiar with this plant, with a little research, would realize that it isn’t even in the same plant family as Cannibas, and it is a cardiac glycoside, basically harmful to humans if ingested though in the past in small doses it was used medicinally, but we have overall lost the ability to wield it as a drop dose poison-medicine plant in current times. It is not a plant to smoke or ingest like ‘Hemp.’ Often I see people posting Dogbane pictures on these pages, saying it is Milkweed because their app says so and then saying it is edible because Milkweed is if processed properly. Someone even said Dogbane was Yarrow the other day on one of the pages because their app said so, and with any amount of investigate ability one see they look nothing alike.
If we use as many senses as we can, smelling, (tasting when we know it’s safe to do so, which learning plant families helps us to be confident about), our sight and seeing leaf and flower patterns, even the sound of their leaves in the wind (hello aspen groves and their forest wide noise cascade) can be information. We can gain a lot of helpful insight for distinguishing who is who. I worry these apps will further separate us from the lands we are already institutionally disengaged from in our building codes, social norms, laws, capitalist practices keeping us in the office holed up away from so-called nature of which we’re actually intrinsically a part. Or, that we will be even more reliant upon or glued to phones that are telling us we can be more connected to one another or the land through these ‘advanced’ programs. There’s certainly helpful tools available to us within Babylon, within the systems that separate us, but we have to be vitally careful to parallel wielding those tools with engaged bodily learning and further independent investigation based on curiosity, internal moral pull and a critical lens.
In my ecology classes I have begun to do exercises with my students to expand our neuroplasticity outside of just academic learning and nerdy language in order to encourage folks that they can learn in lots of ways. This helps to keep these skills alive, which is vitally important in a time with lots of misinformation being passed down without actual field experience and lots of app-informed knowledge not being complete or really deeply known or affirmed in the body. We do sound mapping to tune into how we orient with noise close up and far away, we do landscape field mapping and create scavenger hunts for each other that require describing the landscape in any way possible, whether through a song, performance or riddle or drawing or code to lead someone else to the thing we want them to find, even if it is down to a single blade of grass or a singular leaf in a sea of ‘green’ beings. Even if we don’t know the name, common or latin, we can also practice mapping place and using senses to see and know and feel and be reminded of past experiences and attach out knowing to these somatic maps we already have in us. Isn’t this what the role of oral stories has been in the past, passed down to send us through a map to know something’s why or where or how? And don’t we remember more in our bodies when we hear the story and are totally entrenched in how it feels?
And when it comes to common names and the confusion it can create for folks learning, it just reinforced my conviction that context is everything. Our language informs reality and the lineage behind it should be looked at in addition to the naming of the thing. What is our cultural relationship with Hemp? What does it mean that the latin even has cannibas acronym included in it mean? Where are we noticing this plant growing? How does it tend to act in different environments? There are so many questions to ask to give the plant a full web-woven story, rather than just repeating a name and assuming it can be smoked like hemp. One would realize too that the fiber in the plant does not mature until many frosts have occurred and the fiber has has some time to ret (where the glues and cellulose break down just enough to release the fibers with a little physical nudging, while still not rotted/retted enough to compromise the fibers’ integrity) in sun, snow or rain. The fibers are not currently mature or ready to harvest, so I have no clue what this person is exactly aiming to harvest soon in mid-summer with the plant still green and sappy. I asked, so we’ll see what they say.
Another thing I saw today that perturbed me was a post on some kind of survivalist and homesteading page, where someone was showing their *New!* piece of land they bought, after only visiting the area once or twice, in the desert of Arizona and how they wanted to start a food forest and a youtube channel and have WWOOFers and all that and mind you they have never spent a night there, don’t plan to for a year or two and have no infrastructure on the land. Someone commented for them to mulch and plant arugula. Mind you, this is the desert. We don’t even know if they have water. This is an area this person has barely gone to. What does food forest exactly mean in this case? What if there is already a food forest there of Cholla fruit, Pricky Pear and Saguaro cactus, Mesquite, Barrel Cactus and the plants already there need help and tending? Would they bulldoze it to plant comfrey and apple trees?
I haven’t made it a service for me to consult folks on their land projects formally (though I get asked occasionally by folks who ‘get’ my work) because often people claim they already know what they are doing especially if they have a few permaculture design trainings under their belt or watched some youtube videos, and I don’t fit in a neat ‘Perma-bro’ box doing permaculture design consultations in the framework of the mass modern PDC industrial complex, which utilizes a hybrid of indigenous knowledge and some made up stuff that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t but really depends on the place. I certainly could tell people what’s going on on their property in a wide array of places due to all of my traveling botanizing and plant geeking over the last decade mostly across the U.S., but more than likely I would tell people to do things they might not want to do, something not so grandiose, but also not in a framework of the other side of the created duality ‘no-touch’ wilderness myth type ethics. I guess I’m jealous of the land access for one thing in a world where private land ownership is everything and getting harder and harder acquire due to the business of short term rentals driving up prices all over, and yet restoration or rather properly caring for ecosystems is virtually impossible without whole ecosystems being worked with at once. With fences and politics in our way, we can food forest all we want on our little plot but the neighbors could be bulldozing, poisoning and pillaging, overgrazing and mining and we often can’t do anything about it. I’m jealous that whoever this person is, who has no connection to this land and its systems, could just buy it and impose this grand idea that probably won’t work, has not the purest of intentions and is already an expert without time spent seeing, noticing and learning. Sometimes I think, if only I had a chance and others to do it with. Even though in a way I have inherited wealth from my upbringing in the south, my family hasn’t given be access to family land, instead they sold it. It isn’t guaranteed that land like that actually gets passed through generational hands. I often wonder if I am not always taken seriously because I am socialized as a woman in this culture doing work folks socialized as men historically had more access to or are seen as belonging in— or is it because I don’t fit into a mold of this currently wild plant and permaculture trend where everyone is an expert overnight? And it’s all about what you can ‘forage’ in the ‘wild’ and what design you can implement on your new plot? Because I haven’t made a neat and clean business about it? I don’t know. I do have to say, when I did my PDC at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in northern California, my design group incorporated mostly local indigenous first food plants and Oak Savannahs in the design, and we just so happen to be doing the design training FOR an intertribal non-profit that was gifted land ‘back’ for them to tend.
It just surprises me that some people can be taken seriously and not know what they are talking about because they have the charisma to do so, and the app to back them up.
A few months ago I also saw someone on Instagram, a well to do ‘foraging teacher’ shooting a video with Cook Pine Araucaria columnaris, a cone-bearing trees not in the Pine family at all but in the Araucariaceae family, predominately a southern hemisphere conifer family and sometimes used as an ornamental in the northern hemisphere in certain contexts. I recognize this plant easily too because my dad and my grandparents were horticulturists and landscape artists who ran a nursery business from the 1960’s to early 2000’s where I grew up in south-central Virginia, and baby ‘Cook Pines’ were often sold by them as little baby Christmas trees one could have in their house in a sunny spot. I even lived with one in my bathroom in my childhood home with a skylight. In this video, someone had planted a Cook Pine outside (so named from the dude, Captain Cook, who was a part of the colonization of Hawai’i and the south Pacific, and this tree was spread all over the world from its ‘original’ range, except of course, original ranges are contentious subjects) in a yard where it probably wouldn’t end up living very long and he was sitting there talking about it like it was a Pinus Pine and made no mention that it isn’t related to the Pine we know of in North America, Pinus in the Pinaceae plant family. He had a commanding presence, had over 20 students watching him in the video and lots of comments in the thread responding to the video with ‘thanks brother for all your wisdom’ and ‘thanks for bringing the plant medicine back to us’ or ‘your expertise is healing us all,’ ‘you’re such a plant guru and are so connected’ type of stuff. No one had commented yet that he was sharing incorrect information about the plant in front of him that was obviously not a pine though he did mention it was a Cook Pine. He didn’t suss out for folks the common name of Pine or any more context of this plant and why it was here. He referred to it as a native plant of Virginia. Even then, in talking about Pine especially in Virginia, he never mentioned fire ecology, or closed cone Pines, or the desecration of the Pine savannas once found across the South. He never mentioned Longleaf Pine and its historical significance to indigenous peoples or as a keystone species of a whole ecosystem that is endangered from fire suppression, development, rising seawaters and salinating coastlines, and private land ownership that divides ecosystems and how their are managed into boxes that cannot be treated as a continuity. He didn’t mention anything about the prairie plants that hardly exist because of the loss of Pine dominated landscapes across the Piedmont and the South. He didn’t mention anything about the evolutionary strategy of Pines and other cone-bearing plants, nor relate it to Pines and cultural Pine relationships outside of the specific place he was teaching. He didn’t mention how to ID pines by cone, smell, fascicle bundles or bark. Anywho, despite confusing the common name with a relationship that wasn’t correct, he could have at least said more than Pine needles are good for having Vitamin C and you can eat the Pine nuts, though most pines have nuts that are hard to extract save for a few, no mention of that either.
There’s lots more common name examples that warrant people to investigate deeper and they often don’t much to everyone’s detriment. Box Elder (Maple family now Soapberry family) isn’t related to Elderberry (Honeysuckle family now moved to the Viburnum family). There is no ‘true’ Cedar in North America found naturally occurring even though plenty of trees are called Cedar after the resemblance to the Cedars of Lebanon which are in the Pine family, Cedrus genus, found in the middle east though most plants called Cedar in North American are in various genus’ in the Cupressaceae or Cypress plant family and people argue all the time about which of those Juniperus’, Thujas or Cupresses or Calocedrus’ are the ‘true’ ones without looking at the origins of the common name story. Alder-leaf Mountain Mahogany (Rose family) isn’t related to Alder (Birch family) . Indian Hemp (Apocynaceae) isn’t related to Hemp (Cannabaceae). Don’t get me started on Mahogany (Meliaceae, plant of the tropics), Mountain Mahogany. or Ironwood. You know how many very different plants get called Ironwood? It doesn’t mean they are related.
All this to say, take the time to research, learn, observe, and don’t rely on apps. Book are great but they also have wrong information. Take these things as cultural objects including these technologies for sharing information and make yourself a futurist anthropologist of it and also question old school anthropology while you’re there. I was pretty disappointed by a new Rocky Mountain plant book that came out mis-iding a wild Lycium as a rose bush or something, I can’t quite remember, but the photo was totally wrong and I was mortified. Books too can often just be regurgitated shit from wikipedi2 or other books, even the forest service’s websites or other ‘official’ website often just copy paste stuff from wikipedia or books that have been accepted as fully correct information. I always teach, like I have said, to also consider our methods of seeing or knowing or sharing information as potentially faulty and the language we use to be potentially bias, or full of loaded history that we must unpack alongside our investigations.
Do you have any examples of this you’d observed? Feel confused by?
Come to my only big ecology program of the season in person, in early August - August 2-8. I know its a big thing to come out for a 7 day class, but its the most in-depth immersive field ecology program I can offer right now packed with a week of learning. We still need a couple more folks to fill it. I’m always available via email and even potentially on the phone if you have any questions about it. It’s part naturalist training, part beginner-intermediate botany crash course, part critical ecology theory and practice, part wild-tending technique study, part immersion in landscape awareness.
see ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer and ‘Sand Talk’ by tyson yunkaporta
wikipedia is a pretty decent source these days because lots of folks who know things check information and keep it updated for the public. still there is incomplete data or things that get missed occasionally. I certainly use it as tool to check for updated plant families or to follow threads of research.
Great piece of writing.
Truth is a messy business.