Lawrence's Herb Blog

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A SOUTHWEST TRAVELOGUE: AN HERBALIST’S JOURNEY

Monday, June 19th, 2000

...Left on the final field trip, first stop: Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stayed overnight with Jeanie, our friend who’s a psych nurse. We had an illuminating discussion about heroin usage in Albuquerque. She recently participated in a study that discovered heroin abuse was a family tradition, passed on from father to son, sister to brother, in the Mexican and Mexican-American population. The usual routes of addiction from dealer to new user and from user to acquaintance were not as common among urban Latinos living in Albuquerque, a surprising finding, and one that posed new challenges for accepted methods of harm reduction intervention.

We stopped along the way to Santa Fe to pick Syrian Rue (Peganum harmalum) at Shotgun Park outside Medgin, N.M. True to its name, the “park” was simply an unwanted stretch of desert that served as a meeting place for the locals to practice their marksmanship. This sequestering of firearm enthusiasts to a designated area was a welcome contrast to the foreign country we had just left, Arizona, where it seems as if there are maybe one or two no-fire zones in the entire state -- Hippie Harry’s Health Food Store in Jerome and inside Petey the Pacifist’s Yurt somewhere in Sedona. Apparently the rest of the Grand Canyon State is on permanent open season.

W and I went off in separate directions, each of us hoping to find nice stands of Syrian Rue that we could pick to dry and for tincturing. It didn’t take long. The plants I found were lucky enough to be along a water course temporarily created by a jammed-open water pump. They were big and juicy, fat, turgid creatures greedily sucking down all the free liquid they could get their roots on. (Perhaps it was their higher-than-usual water content that would cause our entire Peganum harvest to turn moldy days later while traveling in Colorado.) I wasn’t sure if leaving the H2O on 24/7 was a local tradition, a wildlife enhancement technique, or wasteful idiocy, so I didn’t try shutting it off. I merely followed the artificial stream’s short course while I checked out possible gathering potential. The precious fluid rapidly disappeared underground some fifty yards from the source.

Many of the plants were past blooming, but very few had any mature seedheads, which are generally considered to be the most “potent” part of the plant. I was going to have to settle for some foliage only, but that was totally okay by me since I was jazzed just to be out here in the high desert with a mysterious herb I had never seen before. Wildcrafting the legendary “Soma”in New Mexico with W, if only my Oregon herbal buddies could see me now.

The stand seemed very extensive; I had already walked through several scattered plant populations on my journey to the weird waterway, where there were easily enough unpicked specimens for me to collect all that I would need -- especially if I counted on W finding her own pickable site. Wildcrafting, after practicing it for several years, becomes second nature. Eventually, if you are a sensitive gatherer and you learn your trade well, you don’t need counting hoops, or any other gnat’s ass scientific methodology to help you determine what is the proper amount to be wildcrafting at your chosen place. Like any scientist or creative person who has reached the top of her field (no pun intended,) you will be answering a great deal of your questions about how best to pick or why not to pick based on past experience (wisdom) and intuition.

After thanking the plants and the spirits, I made an offering of tobacco. Then I unsheathed my trusty Felco #9 (for Lefties) and, clippers in hand, went hunting for my first victim. Who would like to sacrifice some of themselves for me and my fellow apes, that we might take in some of your grace and beauty and become one with your knowledge? I silently asked, as my sharpened eyes roved like wolves.

I found some well-developed, though still green seedpods and clipped off a few, hopeful that they would still have enough juju to mature into either a potent smoke admixture or viable seeds. The many I left behind would brown under the sun into plump little hot cross buns, their pastry-like tops would unseal in the wind, and another generation of well-baked, bitter embryos would disperse like brave gypsy children.

It was these distinctive yet familiar seedheads that were responsible for this magical plant’s western world common name of Syrian Rue. Garden Rue (Ruta graveolens) also called the “Herb O’ Grace” has very similar seedheads, and is nearby on the evolutionary scale though it has different uses, and is a European native. The “Syrian” part comes from their general place of origin or discovery -- at least by a European botanist -- in the Syrian Desert of the Middle East. The plant has a history of human use by different cultures in northern India, Afghanistan and southern Russia that in some cases may date back several thousand years. Syrian Rue, however, is in a different but evolutionarily close family, the Zygophyllaceae or Caltrop Family, whose important (to herbalists) North American relative is Chaparral, or Creosote Bush (Larrea tridentata). Garden Rue is the name giver to its own family Rutaceae, sometimes known as the Citrus Family, after a popular Garden Rue family member, one of which was sitting in your glass all ready to drink the last time you poured yourself some orange juice.

As I snipped, I paused now and again to sip some water. A few of Peganum’s five petaled flowers remained, stuck on the blue-green foliage like windblown tissues. Most of the plants were knee-high or a bit taller and about one to two feet in diameter, although a few happy homesteaders must have been drinking at the still for more than one season because they were twice as large as their jolly neighbors. Round, bushy foreigners, drunk on pure agua. I could almost hear the sucking and slurping going on as they laughed and shouted to each other in their various native tongues, “Oh, but we don’t get to indulge like this at home, hey?” and, “Drink up friends! Who knows when those fools will remember to turn off the tap!” and then, “Ah, yes! We love America!”

W had wandered away over a clump of low, sandy hills, partially held in place by some type of tough grass. We had the whole place to ourselves, nobody gets around the desert without a combustion vehicle of some kind and there were no other cars in the parking lot. Still, we kept our ears open for the sounds of gunfire since the targets and ranges were rather ill-defined and in case of an accident, no doubt we would be the first to be blamed. “Well, gol’, Sheriff, them folks musta been high on sumpin’, they had whole bagsa them crazy stinkweeds and kept walking plum into the path of several of my bullets, uh-huh, yessiree.” This would not be the safest place to be picking, even after donning some Kevlar and reviewing one’s life insurance policy. But, we were told this was the place to go to get it. Maybe “it” was really something else? Perhaps this was how Michael weeded out his more careless or annoying students? Come to think of it, how come we were the only ones here? Why weren’t we running into our fellow Southwest School of Botanical Medicine alumni?

Needless to say I was both pleased and relieved when W and I were reunited after being apart for over an hour. Time flows differently in the desert, and so does hot lead. She showed me her day’s catch and said that she wasn’t finding anything great. I contritely nodded my head over her merely adequate harvest and then rather cheekily told her about discovering my succulent stand. The glare in her eyes as I related my tale was obviously from more than sun overexposure, but, as she usually does in these situations, she bravely shrugged and said something like, “that figures, you always find better stands!” Then I have to remind her about all the plants she’s skunked me on (one or two,) until she feels better, and less like pouting. “Don’t patronize me!” Believe me, depressed herbalists are very resistant to treatment.

As we traipsed back to our truck W said that the plants smelled good to her, like a strong, sort of toasted sesame oil. Maybe on a suitably hot and windless day you could locate them by scent alone, I replied. So what was it that Michael said these were good for, she asked, some kind of psychoactive, right? We reviewed the lecture:

Mood elevator, anti-anxiety, slight CNS lifter. Although overrated as an “underground” psychotropic, that didn’t stop people from dosing themselves with the stuff. He had told us it was for agitated, hot-depressed constitutional types, that it wasn’t as helpful for people who were mostly okay but wanted a shift.

People had tried it with some success for TMJ and bruxisim. He had heard of positive results for one bi-polar individual’s manic stage. Kind of prozac-like in energy, the plant contains harmine and harmalol which each have apparently opposite effects on seratonin.

The caution was that it was for temporary upset states, probably an acute phase or crisis. Chronic use or high doses tends to leave behind a feeling of exhaustion and brain chemical derangement. Always desirable states in the mentally ill and those too mentally ill to admit that they’re mentally ill.

Our Herbal Guru also mentioned that, due to its toxic effects on sheep, The New Mexico Department of Agriculture had devised a wonderful plan for ridding the state of this pestilent horde. In New Mex, Sheep is Queen, so Rue Must Die. The good news was that the eradication programs met with some success. The bad news was that because of Peganum’s preference for disturbed areas, like roadsides and highways, every time the plant got mowed down during routine maintenance, enough of the seeds got caught in the tines so that they got a free ride to the next town. “Many thanks!” says the newcomer. “#*$@!!!” says the sheep rancher. “Urp, eeek, blech!” say the sheep, as another woolly wanderer gets wasted by Syrian Rue’s weedy wiles.