In Appalachia, a Plan to Save Wild Ginseng
undark.org
undark.org
The cultural and medicinal history of ginseng around the globe is also fascinating. This is only tangentially related, but here's a slightly exaggerated account of the reverence which people used to view it with:
>The legends are quite marvelous. Ginseng hunters refer to the plant as chang-diang shen, “the root of lightning,” because it is believed that it appears only on the spot where a small mountain spring has been dried up by a lightning bolt. After a life of three hundred years the green juice turns white and the plant acquires a soul. It is then able to take on human form, but it never becomes truly human because ginseng does not know the meaning of selfishness.
>It is totally good, and will happily sacrifice itself to aid the pure in heart. In human form it can appear as a man or as a beautiful woman, but more often it takes the form of a child, plump and brown, with red cheeks and laughing eyes. Long ago, evil men discovered that a ginseng child can be captured by tying it with a red ribbon, and that is why the plant is now so hard to find, the hunters say. It has been forced to run away from evil men, and it is for that reason that ginseng hunting has become one of the most hazardous occupations upon the face of the earth.
>The ginseng hunter must display the purity of his intentions right from the start, so he carries no weapons. [...H]is quest takes him into the wildest mountains where no men have dared to pass before. Tigers and bears are his companions, and the hunter fears strange creatures that are even more dangerous than tigers—such as the tiny owls that will call him by name and lead him into the Forest of Oblivion from which no man returns, and the bandits that are more brutal than savage bears and who crouch beside the few paths in order to murder an unarmed hunter and steal his roots.
Hopefully things don't get that bad in the misty mountains. The book that's from, Bridge of Birds, is a uniquely charming (but not very subtle) picaresque.
The shape and form of ginseng ..a kind of homunculus..reminds me of another root with a likely sinister folk lore/mythology : Mandrake/Mandragora*
I have grown several mandrakes..mostly mandragora autumnalis. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I bottled the root in vodka. I have three more potted ones. They do seem to have a ‘plant spirit’.
For a while..when I was gardening more than farming, I was fascinated by what’s known as poison plants. They have fascinating mythologies and even more fascinating chemistry. Turns out a lot of them are medicinal as well. We extract medicine from atropa belladonna, digitalis, scopolamine, datura stramonium, henbane, aconite/henbane, the yew tree, hemlock and more. But fundamentally, they are all poisons. I like to imagine all plants as female archetypes. They cover the spectrum of maiden, mother and crone.
Before I got into farming, I tried my hand at art(badly). I found out that I lacked artistic discipline and firm strokes, but I was more comfortable with ‘colours’. It’s difficult to explain..each of the plant spirit had a different colour based on its qualities and nature. Cross referencing then with mythologies of the world, there is a rich collection of plant characters.
Thanks again.