THE path OF PLANTS by ANN Armbrecht
“For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as of something to be rediscovered, reawakened. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes.” —Roberto Calasso
When you think about medicine, what comes to mind? Perhaps you consider plants. But have you ever thought about where the plants used in our tea and essential oils come from? Does it matter how they are cultivated and how they make their way to us?
Ann Armbrecht, an anthropologist and writer, delves into the connections between culture and the environment. Her journey began with ethnographic research in the upper Arun Valley, Nepal, which led her to explore the world of herbal medicine. She followed the path of herbs through the supply chain, seeking to unravel and share the stories of the people and places that contribute to the everyday products we consume.
In her latest book, "The Business of Botanicals," Armbrecht demonstrates that medicine is not merely a product but a complex process. In this excerpt from her book she delves into the significance of diversity, the wild, regeneration, and introduces the concept of charawa.
Viriditas (Latin, literally "greenness," formerly translated as "viridity") is a word meaning vitality, fecundity, lushness, verdure, or growth.
Jeff Bodony questioned what to my eye were vibrant fields of Echinacea purpurea growing beneath the snow-covered Cascade mountains at Trout Lake Farm, which we had visited earlier that week. Jeff and his wife, Lizzie Matteson, own thirty-six acres of land at the end of a long, winding dirt road in the mountains between Applegate Valley and Eugene. They tend half of those thirty-six acres, which they call a forest garden, as polyculture, a mix of trees, vegetables, and medicinal plants. They grow the medicinal plants for a botanical company that produces extracts for naturopathy. They call their forest garden farm Viriditas Wild Gardens, named after Hildegard von Bingen’s concept of the “greening power of nature.” Von Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess of the twelfth century, and viriditas reflects her idea that the healing power of God resides in everything green. Healing is achieved by tending that aliveness, an aliveness that is most directly experienced in the natural world.
Vitex Chaste Tree at Viriditas. Photo by Ann Armbrecht.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky on the day my husband Terry, my son Bryce, and I visited Viriditas, and that, it seemed, was how conditions had been most days of that hot, dry summer. Jeff and Lizzie were concerned about the lack of rain. They pointed out plants they were trying to keep alive by irrigating with the limited water available on their hill because of the drought, and other plants left to struggle on their own. They especially talked about soil—about how the quality of the soil affects the quality of the plants and, so, the medicine. They also explained that the methods used to grow plants, in turn, have an impact on the soil. It’s a relationship, Jeff said. Neither can be considered in isolation. He and Lizzie are trying to grow medicinal plants in ways that imitate how those plants grow in the wild, while still allowing for harvesting in a semi- efficient manner, at least efficient enough to make farming economically viable. This was the most biodiverse farm Terry and I had visited, and as Jeff and Lizzie showed us around, they acknowledged that much of their approach to forest gardening is experimental.
viriditas reflects her idea that the healing power of God resides in everything green
In nature, plants connect with one another through their root systems and the mycorrhizal networks in soil, in intricate relationships confirmed by recent scientific findings. But those kinds of relationships can’t be maintained in a monoculture.
“A ten-acre plot of echinacea is no different than a one-thousand-acre field of corn,” he said. In both cases, there is only one species present. But diversity is important, because each species of plant feeds a different part of the soil biology. “Where you grow a diversity of species, you have all these organisms being fed,” he said, “and this amazing dance of life forms underground.” That dance provides vitality and energy and power to the plants. “So you’re raising a different quality of plant material.” I understood Jeff to mean these plants were healthier, more vibrant, more filled with viriditas. Their approach to growing herbs is about feeding and tending that aliveness, which calls, first of all, for recognizing the value of that aliveness and being able to sense its presence.
Jeff is opinionated and confident. He has covered the wall above the desk in their living room, which also serves as their office, with quotations printed in large type, by everyone from former CIA director William Casey to Edward Abbey to James Hansen and Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” There are several by Wendell Berry. One from Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be deemed sane in an insane society.” And one by D. H. Lawrence: “This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots. We are cut off from the earth and the sun and the stars.”
“We have all of our relations around here,” Jeff said. “That’s another piece of it, when you talk about the energetics of the land. Trout Lake Farm is great. They grow all that great stuff. But here—it’s like everyone is here. The eagles are here. They come to eat the bass out of the pond. The ground squirrels and the skunks and foxes, some coyotes, bears, cougars are here. The plants know this is a more intact, integrated ecosystem. I’m sure they know it. Because you can just walk around and see how happy they are.” It is possible to measure marker compounds in medicinal herbs, and this provides some indication of the quality of a plant. But a chemical assay can’t measure the qualities Jeff and Lizzie are planting for—vibrancy, vitality, the aliveness of the plants, the greenness of God.
Once an object becomes an item of commerce, Jeff added, “There is a shift in consciousness. You lose the viriditas piece. And losing that is probably the most dangerous part, because it allows our egos to believe we are the ones running the show.” Most I met in the industry didn’t agree with this conclusion. In any case Jeff and Lizzie were trying to show that it is possible to grow plants for the herbal industry that still hold the aliveness at the heart of herbal medicine.
Wall of quotations at Viriditas. Photo by Ann Armbrecht.
Jeff Bodony. Photo by Ann Armbrecht.
Herbs are wild by nature. We know many of them as weeds—dandelion, chickweed, mullein, burdock—that most gardeners try to remove from their gardens. A dozen or so different species might grow intermingled in a ten-foot-square patch of ground. The biggest challenge to growing them in this way, as Jeff and Lizzie have found, is the cost of production. Ultimately, herbs must be carefully separated by species so that the end consumer can trust that the plant they purchase is, in fact, the correct medicine. No one wants lobelia, an herb that induces vomiting, mixed in with their peppermint. So the question becomes, how can one grow medicinal herbs in a diverse permaculture model and then harvest them in a way that guards against contamination? Is the cost of doing that justifiable? And, as importantly, will consumers be willing to pay?
The answer hinges in part on whether the difference in quality between herbs grown via permaculture and herbs grown in a monoculture is something real or is just a matter of opinion.
“The medicine of plants is also the medicine of place”
Lizzie
“The medicine of plants is also the medicine of place,” Lizzie said as we walked through their forest garden. I have heard this said before by others, but at Viriditas Gardens I grasped more deeply what it meant in practice, how in the act of taking a remedy concocted from a plant harvested on that land, I was ingesting that entire web of connections. Was it possible to taste or sense the medicine of a place? I wondered. What would it take to be able to do so? The priests and shamans in Hedangna also have the ability to see charawa, which is an essence in grain imbued by the ancestors that makes the grain last much longer than the physical substance otherwise should. Charawa echoes what Lizzie describes as the medicine of place, that unseen web that when enlivened through prayer translates into the material world. Like the laral value of an object, this unseen quality is strengthened by the offerings we make, offerings expressed in our care and attention. This first requires that we deem this web of relationships, from mycorrhizal networks to Hildegard’s viriditas, worthy and recognize that it needs our care. Not seeing this invisible dimension, the priests and shamans say, makes humans selfish. Because we cannot see this web of reciprocity on which our life depends, we do not understand our role in that web and our responsibility for the part we play. As Jeff said, we begin to believe we are in charge.
“We are all here,” Jeff said, gesturing across the landscape. The web of life in the field vibrates with aliveness, and that is the essence of viriditas. It isn’t magic. It is simply paying attention.
Poisoning Pests, Poisoning Ourselves
During my travels as a Fulbright scholar, I visited a farm that grew Gloriosa superba, commonly known as flame lily or gloriosa lily, with Dr. B. Meena (referred to as Meena), an agronomist from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, with which I was affiliated. The university is in Coimbatore, a busy manufacturing town in South India. Gloriosa seeds are extracted and the extract is exported to Europe, where it is used to treat gout.
Bala Kumarn, a farmer and trader, dressed in a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and dark slacks, greeted us and offered us each a coconut with a straw, a welcome drink after the hot drive in the university jeep with no air-conditioning. Dark crimson gloriosa berries were spread out in a large cement-drying yard in front of his two-story, pale yellow home, also made of cement. We finished our drinks and Bala led us into a small, separate building next to his house. Metal shelves filled with plastic containers lined one side of the room. The container labels were printed in Hindi but the skull and crossbones signs didn’t need translation. Scattered across the floor on the other side of the room were various attachments and sprayers for applying the contents of these containers on the fields.
Bala was unique, Meena had explained on our drive out, which is why they had arranged this visit. Most farmers just ask the shopkeepers for instructions on how much and how often to use the pesticides, the agronomist said, but this farmer worked closely with the agricultural university for guidance so that he applied only the amounts needed and at the proper times. He didn’t trust those selling pesticides to give good advice, he told Meena, because they benefited from selling more of any product and so they recommended using far more than was necessary. Watching him looking closely at his plants with Meena, I was impressed with the questions he asked and the ways he listened to Meena’s answers.
Dr. B. Meena (l) speaking with Bala Kumarn (r). Photo by Ann Armbrecht.
He led us across the gravel driveway to the fields where he grew gloriosa behind a chain-link fence. The flowers had to be hand-pollinated because, I was told, the butterflies that had pollinated them naturally had left the region because of spraying chemicals on other crops. I couldn’t find other confirmation of this, however. In any case, Bala hires 550 women to artificially pollinate the flowers. The women collect the pollen with a brush and dust it on the just-opened flowers to ensure maximum seed set over a period of three months. As we admired the stunning crimson and yellow flowers, staked to make pollination easier, my thoughts were haunted by the shelves full of chemicals. How could anything emblazoned with skulls and crossbones be considered acceptable to use on plants that would be sold as medicine? I asked Bala if any of the gloriosa he grew was certified organic. He became animated, gesturing with his hands, and asked, “What is the meaning of organic? I’m not against it. I just don’t know what it is.” He added that they now have developed pesticides and fertilizers that are very focused and specific and so not as damaging as they had been. And, he said, “So many people are into organic blindly. They don’t know the research.” He explained that they had done studies to see that the pesticides and fungicides used on gloriosa plants aren’t found in the seeds and that, in any case, repeating what Meena had said, he only applies what is needed.
Later on the car ride back, I asked Meena what she thought. She shrugged. “It depends on the mindset of individual farmers. Bala is a businessman and so his focus is on increasing his income, not on the public. If we heard from organic farmers, though, we would be convinced by what they said. Because for them, consumer safety is more important.”
“Pesticides are designed to kill,” film director and author Josh Tickell wrote in Kiss the Ground. In fact, Tickell pointed out, some pesticides contain chemicals originally created to kill humans. Tickell gives the example of IG Farben, the chemical company that produced the chemical weapons used in warfare and at Auschwitz (and owner of the patents for, among other products, Bayer Aspirin). After the war, IG Farben repurposed its deadliest chemicals, “right down to the use of Zyklon B—the deadly gas used to kill at least one million Jews,” as an insecticide on American farm fields. This bears repeating. The chemicals used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz have been repurposed to spray on fields where food is grown.
Most of the medicinal plants cultivated worldwide have been sprayed with an input that can cause deleterious health effects that people may be seeking to avoid by buying and ingesting products made with those plants. There are maximum levels of pesticide residue allowed on herbal products that reputable companies adhere to. While these levels address concerns about the safety of the finished product, they do not consider the impacts of the practices on the whole system, on the health of the farmers and farmworkers handling the fertilizers and pesticides, on the pollinators, on the water, the air, and the web of relations that Jeff and Lizzie nurture on their land. What blind spots prevent us from realizing that this disconnect makes no sense?
Much of Jeff and Lizzie’s vision for Viriditas Wild Gardens was not realistic in economic terms; nor did it offer a viable alternative in the current model of sourcing herbs on an international scale. The weeds in their gardens were out of control, and production was lower than they hoped. They were struggling to find a grower or farm manager to help share the work and the vision. The last I heard, they were trying to sell their farm. But the vision that inspired them, the importance of rebuilding and supporting the broader web of relations as a key part of healthy farming systems, is gaining traction in the regenerative agri-cultural movement that has flourished in the four years since I began the Sustainable Herbs Program. Regenerative agriculture is essentially the kind of organic farming that the early organic farmers have done from the outset, “a practice of agriculture that improves soil, plant, water, human and planetary health,” Tickell wrote in Kiss the Ground, his book that helped galvanize and give focus to efforts to build soils. Even though no one I met is able to completely apply the principles Jeff and Lizzie espouse, the herb farmers I visited in the US as well as Ben, Josef, Sebastian, and others sourcing herbs from around the world are all doing the best they can to balance the aliveness of plants at the heart of herbal medicine with the challenges of shepherding a viable business in a globalized world. They are working with the intelligence of nature, showing up and paying attention to what is called for, using business in the service of life, not the other way around.
This text is an excerpt from the book "The Business of Plants". You can read more about Ann's research at annarmbrecht.com.