Green Pharmacy Authors Postscript
Author's Postscript
A Lifetime
of Loving Plants
I've been interested in plants for at least 62 of my 67 years. My interest comes from my mother, who loved plants and raised me to love them as she did.
Much of my early botanical interest is shrouded in the mists of memory. I recall only snippets: playing with white cousins and black neighbors in the woods and pastures along the Koosa River outside Birmingham, Alabama, near my grandfather Truss's farm; visiting Uncle Bill's nursery and skinny-dipping in the Cahaba River. Even though I was born and lived in the East Lake suburb of Birmingham, we frequently got out to see the country cousins, where we played in the countryside forests and fields.
Even in Birmingham, the forests were close by. We had chickens, a small vegetable garden and arbors bearing magnificent scuppernong grapes. My grandmother made delicious scuppernong juice, and I've had a lifelong love affair with scuppernong fruit (Vitis rotundifolia). If by some fluke this sinner makes it to heaven, I imagine I will be greeted just the other side of the Pearly Gates by my grandmother, offering me a tall chilled glass of scuppernong juice.
Learning to Eat "Weeds"
In Birmingham, lonely old Mr. Brooks lived across the street. He had no close friends or family, and he spent most of his time talking to his rabbits in their hutch--and to me. He took me for walks in the nearby woods, and he introduced me to the world of edible wild plants such as chestnuts and watercress. Since that time, I have always had a keen interest in edible plants. And walking in the woods is still my number one therapy for personal rejuvenation.
But in addition to plants, another interest also crept in. Starting at around age five, I sold magazines at Howard University (now Samford University), just a few blocks from home. We were pretty poor in those days, and the guys in the dorm would buy the magazines, more out of pity for scraggly me than because they wanted them.
In one dorm, there was a group of bluegrass musicians. I loved what they played, and country music seemed to go quite well with all the country plants that my momma and Mr. Brooks were teaching me to love. Botany and country music--they may not go hand-in-hand for many people, but they always
have for me.
Children's Garden of Delight
When I was seven, we were whisked away from the fields of Alabama to Durham, North Carolina, where my dad hoped to escape country poverty by getting into the insurance business. We were still poor, but I was happy, and so were my older brother, Ed, and my younger brother, Dan, just like poor children all around the world.
For a while we lived in a succession of low-rent apartments and bungalows. One apartment was a three-story tenement that bordered a vacant lot filled with honeysuckle. I have happy memories of my brothers and me tunneling through the honeysuckle vines and playing our games. One of the bungalows was close to the famous Duke Gardens of Duke University. Mother planted a small garden just outside our apartment, and I helped her tend the flowers. Jokingly, we called it Little Duke Gardens.
I should add that I am not related to the tobacco Dukes (Duke University was named for one member of this family) nor to the famous Doris Duke. I come from cotton-picking Dukes of Alabama, and I still have dozens of country cousins down there. Recently, one cousin told me that my great-great-grandfather Duke was an herbal doctor, so maybe herbs have always been in my blood.
From my mother's garden, I graduated to a part-time job helping out in a florist's greenhouse nearby, where I added a great deal to what I already knew about ornamental flowers.
When I was about nine, Dad's insurance business picked up, so we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and purchased a large house with a big yard. Mom and Dad and I planted our first vegetable garden, and my botanical horizons expanded to vegetables. Mom also put in a big batch of four-o'clocks, introducing me to what later became a great interest of mine, floral clocks.
The Call of the Wild
There were thick woods nearby, and I explored them endlessly, sometimes alone and sometimes with my friends, a rather gentle gang of boys. We roved the woods, staking out campsites and defending them from imaginary enemies.
One friend's dad had a farm a few miles out in the country. We used to go camping out there, setting up tents in the cold, whistling pines (even in winter), fishing in the farm pond and challenging each other to name all the wildflowers.
The worst thing I ever did there still haunts me. We'd watch frogs by the pond and see their throats swell up like balloons as they croaked. We had BB guns, and with the unconscious cruelty of boys, I aimed at one frog's balloon-throat and pulled the trigger. I hit the mark, deflating his song-making balloon. I have regretted it ever since. I don't suppose it killed him, but he never sang again, and the forest was the quieter for it. Since then, I have killed a few frogs and other animals, but only for food in the field. From that time on, I abandoned mutilation or killing for sport.
I missed out on Cub Scouts, but I joined the Boy Scouts at the Tabernacle Baptist Church near my home. The rituals and uniform didn't do much for me, but I was very turned on by the camping trips and made as many as I could over the years, learning the forest and its plants even better. Mother made me a sleeping bag that was waterproofed by ironing on paraffin. It weighed a ton, but it kept me dry and warm. I also went on many non-Scout camping trips.
The Forest as Temple
By high school, music and puppy love started competing with the forest for my attention. Even as early as the sixth grade, I was singing country songs. My girlfriend, Greta Lewis, was involved in my Baptist church. Her parents didn't like me, but they tolerated me because of my church connection.
And then, all at once, I experienced a loss much greater than I had when I learned that there was no Santa Claus. Faced with the infinity of the universe, I lost faith in a theocratic God. That doomed Greta and me. But I believed deeply in the forest, in its infinite beauty and healing power. The forest became my temple, my theology. It's been my salvation ever since.
My older brother had a friend who was well-known around Raleigh as a wild mushroom hunter (mycologist), and we often went into the woods with him, trying to name all the plants. He and my brother both had part-time jobs at Crabtree (now Umstead) State Park, and I had become enamored of that wild place, with its miles of secret waterways. I spent seemingly endless hours canoeing through Umstead, silently observing the animals and birds; they apparently assumed that I was just another log--albeit oddly shaped--floating down the creeks.
Another neighbor was a forester who became impressed with my budding knowledge of field botany. Eventually, he got me my first summer job at Umstead Park, where they actually paid me to do all the things I loved to do: hike, camp, canoe and take stock of the plants and animals with the help of my trusty tree books, bird books and flower books. I got pretty good at living off the land.
Meanwhile, I started playing the guitar, and it wasn't long before the guitar became as close a friend as the forest. I never felt alone in the forest or with my guitar. I was always listening to country music and trying to play it. I had a pretty good ear and could pick up songs quickly. I knew where all the country music was on the radio and listened at all hours.
Tenth grade at Hugh Morson High found me in Miss Beddingfield's biology class. She was famous for making everyone in the class collect and identify 40 flowers. I collected over 100 and became legendary in my class as a result.
Music Beckons
Meanwhile, two beautiful brunettes arrived at school. They were part of the Saylor Sisters, a country vocal group that I'd heard on the radio. One of the sisters, Jeannie, offered to teach me to play the bass fiddle so that I could accompany them when they sang. Only I didn't have a bass. Of course, I would have done anything to spend time with her, so I leaned on my dad and he split the cost of a bass with me--$50 apiece, which was a lot of money in the 1940s. In fact, it was all I had. Buying my bass left me penniless but happy.
Jeannie taught me to play, and the next thing I knew, I was playing bass, but not for the Saylor Sisters. Instead I joined up with Homer A. Brierhopper and the Dixie Dudes, a local band I'd heard on the radio that played country schoolhouses throughout North Carolina. This was during World War II, and most of the good local musicians were in the Army, so old Homer turned to me.
I even cut a 78-rpm record with the band in Nashville. For a 16-year-old boy to make a record in Nashville, well, that was really something. I must admit that it gave me a swelled head, even if I was just a fill-in player for band members who were fighting the war. Then came gigs with the Woody Hayes orchestra for big money--$5 a night--and later other jobs at local nightclubs.
During my last two years of high school, I was just about making a living as a bass player, and even Dad had to admit that buying the bass had been a good investment.
Reluctant Academic
Dad wanted me to go to college, but I believed that music would support me well. So I kept playing nightclub gigs. But to appease my father, I enrolled at North Carolina State. The trouble was, with all of my time spent playing music and hiking in the woods, I didn't do much schoolwork. I dropped out right before I would have flunked out.
Dad was worried, but I wasn't. With my music money, I bought a motorbike and wheeled through the back roads of North Carolina, camping all over the place and putting together mental pictures of the ecosystems of the interesting state of North Carolina.
Then I got a phone call from Johnny Satterfield at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill. He had a big band and had heard that I was pretty good on jazz bass. He wanted to add a second bass to his band. So off I went to Chapel Hill to audition. Johnny was a great admirer of Duke Ellington, and I think my name turned him on as much as my bass playing. He smiled broadly as my bassline danced around his piano fingering. He wanted me for the band and said he'd hire me, but only if I enrolled in UNC as a music major.
I didn't have much use for the music program at UNC, but one of my first electives was general botany. In short order, I switched my major to botany, making it my vocation and music my avocation. Dad was pleased. This time around, firmly entrenched in botany, I earned A's and Bs. And when it came time to make a career choice, I enrolled in graduate school at UNC.
Getting Intimate with Plants
In graduate school, I soon teamed up with a professor, Al Radford, who specialized in aquatic plants. He knew that he and I were about the only people in the department who loved to wade waist-deep in blackwater swamps in search of rare aquatic plants. He took me under his wing, and I wound up writing my Master's thesis on a semi-aquatic plant, Ludwigia, that grew in roadside ditches.
I'll never forget the time that I was knee-deep in a roadside marsh looking for Ludwigia when some musicians I knew drove by. They stopped, amazed that I was wading in the muck, and asked if was all right. I told them that I was as happy as a clam. They drove off, probably convinced that I was crazy.
Another botany grad student was a petite, brown-eyed brunette who more than turned my head. I was interested in Peggy-Ann Wetmore Kessler from the moment I laid eyes on her. A graduate of Maryville College in the mountains of Tennessee, Peggy was working on her Master's at the time I met her.
Peggy earned her Master's degree, but she ended up spending more time as an illustrator than as a botanist. She worked part-time, illustrating several botany books produced by our professors, and to this day, she still illustrates. The illustrations that appear throughout this book are hers.
Together Peggy and I shared a love for botany, the outdoors and jazz. After we met, we spent many a weekend bouncing from botanizing around Carolina beaches and forests to jazz jam sessions and then back to the woods and beaches. It wasn't long before we were in love.
First Government Work: Germ Warfare
I completed my Master's degree in botany in 1955, and within a few days found myself drafted into the U.S. Army. At first the Army had no use for the fact that I was a botanist, but eventually, after a few hellish months under a sergeant who hated college graduates, especially those with Master's degrees, I wound up at Fort Dietrick, Maryland. There I joined many others with Master's and Ph.D.'s in the biological sciences who were hard at work trying to develop protection from biological warfare agents.
Germ warfare wasn't exactly a great love of mine, but otherwise, Fort
Dietrick was terrific. My civilian boss was not very demanding. He had me culturing various fungi on different media to see how well they stood up in storage. He never told me why I was culturing fungi, but it didn't take long to figure out that we were reciprocating, looking for biological agents that could destroy enemy food crops.
When I was off duty, I hiked the nearby Catoctin Mountains, where I tried to draw the wildflowers as well as Peggy could--but I couldn't. (Ironically, my son, his Cherokee wife and my Cherokee grandchildren live there now.) I also went to town, nearby Frederick, where I played guitar and wound up teaching it. Before long, I put together a small jazz combo, the Dizzy Duke Group, that played at the NCO and Officers' clubs.
Peggy visited as often as we could work it out, and we spent some delightful times in a friend's cabin up on Yellow Creek, where she drew the flowers.
I wound up having such a fine time at Fort Dietrick that when my hitch ended, I was almost sorry to leave. But I wanted to get my Ph.D. in botany, and even though I never fought in Korea, I qualified for the Korean GI Bill. So I bought a big black Buick and returned to UNC, where I worked on my degree, had a teaching assistantship and rejoined my jazz-playing buddies.
Two of my professors were involved in a very ambitious project to obtain at least one specimen of every plant species in every county of the Carolinas in order to better map the distribution of those species. I signed on and so did Peggy, as the illustrator. So we two lovebirds spent a lot of time together at the university, in the field and at jazz jam sessions.
First Look at Latin America
I had a problem. By now I was academically inbred: I'd taken all my degrees at the same university with the same professors, which limited my education and my network for future employment.
As I completed my Ph.D. coursework, my adviser set me up with two pro-
jects that got me out of UNC. One was an expedition to collect botanical specimens in Mexico, Costa Rica and Guatemala, and the other was a 6- to 12-month job at the noted Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, helping survey the medicinal plants of Panama and Peru.
It was hard leaving Peggy at UNC, but off I went with all sorts of camping gear and my best guitar. Our little group drove to Mexico in my adviser's station wagon; we were on a National Science Foundation Grant to study the chromosomes of the carrot family (Umbelliferae, or umbels for short).
We criss-crossed Mexico for two months, seeing all sorts of habitats and many umbels that were all but unknown outside Mexico. The itinerary was arranged so that we could catch as many species as possible when they were in bud. We collected the buds and popped them into chemicals that would preserve them until we got back to the lab to count their chromosomes.
We also collected many flowers, flattening them to preserve them. The Mexicans we met along the way were only too happy to tell us gringos the local lore about the plants we were collecting, including their medical uses. I didn't realize it at the time, but on that trip the seeds of medical botany were planted in my mind.
Unfortunately, my Spanish was too poor to catch most of what our hosts said. But slowly it improved, and at night in our modest hotel courtyards, my guitar opened doors and made communication easier. The other thing I didn't realize at the time was that I was falling in love with Latin America.
After several fascinating months in Mexico, we flew into Guatemala for a few days to find rare umbels near Lake Atitlan. Then it was on to Costa Rica, where we ferreted out yet more umbels on the flanks of some volcanoes. At every stop, my love for the region deepened.
Learning about Medicinal Plants
Emerging from my Central American reverie, I found myself at the Missouri Botanical Garden for what turned out to be a postdoctoral appointment, long before I knew what a postdoc was. At UNC, I'd learned the plants of the Carolinas. In Missouri, I was introduced to plants of the world.
Half of my job was to identify specimens of medicinal plants collected in Peru or, if they'd never been previously identified, to name them. I'd pick up a dry, flattened Peruvian specimen with some Indian or Spanish colloquial name and maybe some notes about the color of the flowers and fruits, and I'd have to figure out what it was. Being trained in the difficult and tedious science of taxonomy, I knew how to identify plants by the placement and shape of their leaves and ancillary organs; the nature of the floral parts; the size, shape and number of floral parts and seeds; and the presence or absence of thorns, saps and peculiar aromas.
I wrestled intermittently with one medicinal plant my whole three years in Missouri before becoming convinced that the species had never before been named. The Peruvians called it sanango, which became its generic name. Twenty-five years later in the Peruvian Amazon, I saw a shamanistic healer use sanango in a healing ceremony.
Some plants I knew well, some didn't take much work to identify, and some took months to pin down. Still others I never identified for sure, although I could usually place them in the right plant family. Months or years later, a specialist in that family would see the specimen and identify it or name it. There are still many species unknown to science and unnamed (at least in Latin) in tropical America. More than a dozen were named after me. It was challenging, fascinating work.
But St. Louis was large and lonely. Then Peggy came out. She took an apartment close to the botanical garden and got a job as a lab technician. That improved the local scene considerably.
Becoming a Specialist
The other half of my job was to help the director of the botanical garden compile a catalog of the flora of Panama. Again I looked only at dried specimens that other scientists had collected. I had to make sure that they were named correctly and list their local uses, telling subsequent scientists how to identify them and the illustrator how to draw them. To check one specimen, I often had to look at hundreds to make sure that the same species didn't have different scientific names elsewhere in Central and South America.
As tedious as it could be, I loved the work, although such floristic endeavors are not considered as prestigious among botanists as monographic work, in which the scientist concentrates on a small group of related plants, digs in and learns more about them than anyone else. The next thing you know, you're the world authority on them. I wrote a monograph on the weedy tropical chickweed, Drymaria, and Peggy illustrated it. Today, more than 30 years later, I'm still the world's leading expert on Drymaria. But I can't recall the last time anyone called on that particular expertise.
Peggy and I married in 1960 at the St. Louis courthouse. We bought a beat-up house on the Loutre River 80 miles out of St. Louis, where we took long weekends. Our son, John, was born in St. Louis on Christmas Eve, 1961, about a year after we married.
In St. Louis, I also continued playing music at various clubs, some jazz combo gigs and some accompanying work with jazz, blues and country singers. Some botanists still looked askance at my avocation, but somehow, the deeper I delved into botanical medicine with its earthy folk roots, the more comfortably it "fit" with the music I played, which also had deep roots in the same earthy folk experience.
Loving the Jungle
In 1961, the U.S. military offered me a consulting job accompanying Swamp Fox I, an expedition to the remote Darien Province of Panama and the so-called Darien Gap, the only remaining hole in the Inter-American Highway linking Alaska and Chile. Military vehicles were trying to open a road through this muddy rain forest, with little success. My job was to describe the different types of vegetation and identify which were best suited to supporting vehicular traffic. I jumped at the chance.
My first night in a palm-thatched shack in Darien, a big iguana dropped from the rafters right onto me, almost scaring me to death. The second night the roar of a distant howler monkey was equally alarming. But as always, the local people were gracious, and they were happy to tell me all they knew about the area's plants, including their medicinal uses.
My Spanish was still only rudimentary, but I kept working on it, and little by little, it got better. Ethnobotany, the study of how native peoples use their local plants, was still in its infancy at the time. In fact, the word ethnobotany didn't become widely used until some years later, but I was already hip-deep into it, literally, there in the bush of Darien.
I made several Swamp Fox trips to Panama, and I loved working with tropical plants in the wild. Compared with the wonder and adventure of my Darien expeditions, my work at the Missouri Botanical Garden, studying dead, dry specimens of the same plants, began to look pretty dull. I began to put out feelers for another job.
I wound up at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Station, the research heart of the USDA, in Beltsville, Maryland. I spent most of the rest of my career there, from 1963 to 1995.
Right away, I got involved in a Latin American project, this time a study
of succession--the natural changes in plant populations over time--in tropical Puerto Rico. I learned to identify tropical trees by their seeds and seedlings.
I was happy to learn to do this, but I wasn't happy with the reason behind the project, which was to check how herbicides (read "defoliants") might alter the normal succession of tree seedlings in tropical forests. I also spent some time as curator of the USDA seed collection.
Focusing on Medicinal Herbs
Two years into this USDA program, I got a call from the Battelle Memorial Institute, a research organization in Columbus, Ohio. Battelle had landed a big contract from the old Atomic Energy Commission for a feasibility study of a sea-level canal across Panama and Colombia. It may sound crazy now, but the idea was to use supposedly clean, low-power nuclear "devices" (bombs) to blast this canal through the rain forest to save ships the hassle of the locks in the Panama Canal.
Battelle needed a botanist on the team, and my future boss learned that I had a good deal of experience in Panama and with Panamanian flora. Once again, I jumped at the opportunity to go to Latin America.
I had no idea then, but the Battelle project changed my life. It marked my conversion from a botanist to an ethnobotanist focused on medicinal herbs.
The Battelle project was a dream come true for me, but it began as quite a nightmare for Peggy. We had a nearly four-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter, Celia, and here I wanted to pull up stakes and move us from Beltsville to Panama--in a howling snowstorm, no less. Somehow, though, we survived the trip, as well as six weeks in a fleabag hotel in the Panama Canal Zone.
We also survived gross culture shock and the six weeks and two lawyers it took to get through the formalities and free our earthly goods from customs and get them moved to our apartment in El Cangrejo, which was, by Panamanian standards, a well-to-do suburb of Panama City.
Living in Panama
At first I was unhappy that we were not allowed to live in the Canal Zone, which was very American. But as I was a private consultant not directly employed by the U.S. government, there was no housing for us in the zone. However, in short order, we changed our minds. The Canal Zone was like living in Florida. Where we were, we lived in Panama. When I'm in another country, I like to settle into the culture as much as possible, which is what we did.
Things in Panama were not easy for Peggy. She did not speak Spanish and had to cope with the many challenges of living in a foreign country, always with two small children in tow and often without her husband around for weeks on end. But despite all the headaches, she enjoyed one wonderful, unexpected perk. For the only time in her life, she had a live-in maid, Edith Bristan, the sister of my most important Panamanian rain forest guide, Narciso Bristan.
Almost all of the apartments in our suburb had maid's quarters, and incredibly, we could afford live-in help. So we asked Edith to move in. She was great with the kids and great company for Peggy. Being of that culture, she taught us all the little details of Panamanian life that would have taken years for us to learn on our own.
By this time, after my Swamp Fox experiences, my Spanish was fairly decent, and one of my jobs was to talk with all the Panamanians, black, white and Indian, about what they ate from the local environment. Why? To put it crudely: If the United States dug that ditch using nuclear bombs, how long would we have to keep the locals from living their local lives--six days, six months, six years, six centuries or six millennia?
Of course, the Panamanians knew why we were there and were quick to ask how many canals the United States was planning to dig in the 50 states using nuclear weapons. They were always gracious, but their point was quite clear, and after my more than two-year stay in Panama, Uncle Sam decided that it was not feasible--biologically, geologically and politically--to build this canal with nuclear weapons.
Plants Yield Their Healing Secrets
The bomb business may have been the reason I was in Panama, but actually, it didn't intrude much on what I did from day to day. I spent most of my time traveling through the thick, lush rain forest of Darien, always by boat because there were no roads. Led by various Panamanian and Indian guides who became my friends, I visited the indigenous people of the forest. With camera and tape recorder, I documented how they lived and what they ate, always delving at length into the local medicinal herbs and how they were used. It was a fascinating two years, and I returned to the United States more convinced than ever that I would focus my career on herbal medicines.
Some experiences remain vivid in my memory, even after 30 years. On one trip into the bush, our group decided to climb Cerro Pirre, an enchanting 5,000-foot peak near the Colombian border. It was a slow, two-day, hand-over-hand climb through thick vegetation. Our Choco Indian porters handled the rigors much better than we gringos did.
We all wore high, thick boots to protect us from the many snakes, and I wished I had leather gloves as well because my hands got cut up something fierce by the vegetation, much of which I was collecting along the way. The first night, some of our guides went ahead to look for a good campsite, and when they found one, they built a fire whose smoke took us to them.
When we arrived at the little clearing they'd discovered, we saw not only the fire but also something right out of some Hollywood jungle movie--what looked like miniature human skulls on skewers. Our sharpshooting Choco porters had hunted up some meat, in this case white-faced monkeys.
After several days of little more than rice, beans and what the Choco and I could forage, I welcomed barbecued monkey, even though it felt a little cannibalistic to eat it. We got some rather grotesque pictures of the guides sucking the brains out of the monkey skulls.
A bigger surprise lay in store for us the next day. After climbing to the peak, we made it back down to the river, where some of our guides lived in a group of huts. It turned out that one of the monkeys we'd eaten had a baby, which our guide recovered on the way down. In the little village, one of the porters gave the baby monkey to his wife, who immediately offered her breast to the monkey to nurse. No one was surprised but me and my fellow gringos. I took a picture of that Choco mother nursing a monkey on one breast and her baby on the other. That picture was published in Economic Botany.
I thought about that scene years later, when Ebola virus was in the news and people were talking about how new viral diseases might move from monkeys to humans. The news media never mentioned nursing, but that's certainly one possible way.
Surviving in the Jungle
Being a botanist, I paid special attention to the unique plant spices of the tropics. In Panama, the culinary herb of choice in the bush was culantro, a close relative of coriander, which has the same chemistry and flavor. It really helped with some of those jungle meats.
One jungle meat, namely turtle, greatly increased my growing respect for herbal medicine. On one collecting trip, we camped on the banks of Rio Pirre, and our guides caught some turtles for stew. (They weren't considered endangered then.)
Soon after that meal, I developed a bad case of salmonella food poisoning. (Later I saw a scientific article documenting a high incidence of salmonella in turtle populations in Darien.) The diarrhea was violent and terrible, and I became so weak that I was unable to stand up, let alone work.
I invested several hundred dollars in mainstream Panamanian physicians and their U.S.-style pharmaceutical medicines. They helped a little, but I remained quite ill. Then a more herbally inclined Panamanian doctor gave me powdered carob, and it helped quite a bit. Thirty years later, in 1995, I read a study in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition showing that carob powder is highly effective as a treatment for infant diarrhea. I can personally attest that it works.
Forming Friendships among the Indians
Since boyhood romps in the North Carolina forests, I'd been interested in living off the land, and those skills came in handy in Panama. Once a few of us gringos and my guide-buddy Narciso Bristan (our maid's brother) spent several days deep in the bush and ran low on rations. We subsisted on the remai