Wild strawberries (wažúšteča, wažíšteča, or Fragaria vesca) in July, growing in an oak forest on Standing Rock. While most of the prairie is too dry for strawberry plants to survive, they can still be found in the small oak forests that grow on some of the wetter hillsides.
Wild strawberries (sometimes known as “alpine strawberries,” despite the fact that they often grow far from any mountain range) are extremely small, usually under 1 cm². These wild strawberry plants on the prairie don’t produce abundant berries, but the few berries that they do produce are so much sweeter and more flavorful than any strawberry you’ll ever find at a grocery store or farmer’s market.
Once you’ve tried these, it’s hard to go back to the store-bought kind. Luckily, you can also grow these alpine strawberries in your garden. They’re a bit tricky to start from seed, but it’s possible if you’re patient and keep the seeds moist during germination. Alternatively, some nurseries sell alpine strawberry plants. We had a few alpine strawberry plants in our garden when I was a child, and picking and eating them was a favorite memory. (Okay, technically it was my mother’s garden, and I definitely should have left more of them for her…sorry about that, Mom!) I would highly recommend including these in any garden, regardless of your age.
Many people discard the greens around the edge of the berry. But these greens, as well as the leaves, have a lot of medicinal properties. Like other members of the rose family (yes, strawberries and roses are cousins!), the greens and leaves can be dried and made into a tea to alleviate diarrhea, nausea, and upset stomachs. They also are anti-inflammatory and rich in antioxidants. You can also eat them raw, especially the parts attached to the fruit (I usually do)! They have a pretty mild flavor, especially when they come from a source that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticide.
If you can resist the temptation to eat them all fresh, these wažúšteča fruits are also excellent dried. They make an amazing addition to either meat or corn wasná.
If you haven’t spent much time on the prairies of North Dakota, you might be surprised to learn that we have five cactus species that are indigenous to the area. I believe that this one is either Opuntia polyacantha or Opuntia cymochila, a Prickly Pear species.
The Lakota names I’ve heard for Prickly Pear are Uŋkčéla blaská (Flat Cactus) and Uŋȟčéla-tȟáŋka (Big Cactus). (Uŋčéla is a generic word for all kinds of cactus.)
Despite the intense winters of the Northern Great Plains, cacti are abundant here, especially in dry areas. When you see them in the winter, they look shriveled up and dead, but they spring back to life when the weather warms up.
While the cacti species produce beautiful flowers in early summer, the fruits that they produce (uŋkčéla-tȟašpú) are pretty dry, and I don’t know anybody who eats them. However, they are an important food source for wildlife. The cactus pads themselves are a traditional food, though, and can be a good food source if you know how to remove the glochids and prepare them.
When I was looking into the cactus species of North Dakota, I found through this Minot Daily News article that North Dakota hosts North America’s third-largest collection of cacti at the Peace Gardens. It’s definitely worth a visit the next time I use that border crossing!
Last summer (2023), a rare thing happened — the Wípazukȟa (Amelanchier alnifolia — called Juneberry, Saskatoon Berry, and Serviceberry in English) actually started ripening in late June.
One of the Lakota names for the moon/month that occurs around what the Roman calendar calls June is Wípazukha-Wašté-Wi, the Moon When The Juneberries are Good (ripe). I’ve written about this in earlier posts, but in recent years, due to climate change, the Juneberries are often small and green in June, and don’t ripen until July or even August.
So Summer 2023 was a rare time that the ripening of the Juneberries was actually somewhat in sync with the traditional calendar. I say “somewhat” because I took these pictures in the last week of June and, as you can see, most of the berries aren’t quite ripe yet. When they are fully ripe, the pink color goes away, and they are a shade of dark purple/blue/black.
There have been a few years in the recent past where there was no Juneberry crop at all. Late frosts killed the flowers, resulting in no surviving berries, or insects ate the berries before they were ripe. This is concerning because not only are wípazukȟa an important food source (for both people and local wildlife), but they are also used to make certain traditional foods that are an important part of Očhéthi Šakówiŋ ceremonies. While there are store-bought alternatives that people often substitute, the links between a healthy wípazukȟa/Juneberry crop and a traditional Očhéthi Šakówiŋ way of life are strong. An environmental threat to the Juneberries is also a threat to the traditions of the Indigenous people who share this landscape with these plants.
Over the ~10 years that I have been observing the Juneberry crops in the region, I haven’t really seen much consistency. The last crop I saw that was abundant enough that people could possibly save enough berries to last awhile was in 2018. Some years, you get a few berries. Other years, there are none at all. A few hundred miles north in Canada, the crops are still consistently abundant. I have no predictions for what next year’s crop will look like in Dakhóta Makhóčhe, but I hope that we see more abundant harvests in the future.
Even in years where there are not enough berries to harvest, the leaves of this plant are a great medicine. They taste good, and I have been taught that they can also help with digestive issues. (I recently learned that the leaves are mildly cyanogenic, so if you are not working with an experienced herbalist, I would exercise some caution with this one.)
If you’re fortunate enough to harvest, wípazukȟa, there are several ways to make your harvest last longer: freezing, canning, and drying. I personally prefer drying them, because they last a long time and don’t require any additional resources. Plus, dried wípazukȟa are a perfect addition to corn or meat wasná (pemmican).
Last October when I was visiting some relatives, I felt my phone sliding out of my pocket. Before I could turn around, I heard a giggle, and little footsteps running away.
My first-grader niece decided to “borrow” my phone, and took several thousand pictures. Many of them were blurry, or of her making silly faces, but she got a nice clear shot of two of my favorite medicinal weeds here:
The plant on top, with the rounded leaves, is Common Mallow (Malva neglecta). The one with the serrated leaves is Dandelion / waȟčázi (Taraxacum officinale).
Common Mallow is one of my favorite, under-appreciated “weeds.” It is a native to Eurasia, but has spread all over the world. It frequently shows up uninvited in gardens, roadsides, cracks in the sidewalk, and many other disturbed areas. Common Mallow is often hated by gardeners, but it has some amazing medicinal qualities.
When you prepare it as a cold infusion (chopping the leaves, roots, seeds and flowers up, and putting them in cold water to steep for 4-6 hours or over night, ideally in the fridge), the mixture becomes a bit gelatinous or slimy. Herbalists describe this sliminess as “demulcence,” and would call Common Mallow a demulcent herb.
Demulcent herbs are a great group of plants to know about — when consumed internally, they can provide a cooling gel coating that coats inflamed areas, particularly mucus membranes. If you have a cough, dry throat, or another kind of dry or inflammatory condition, demulcent herbs can be quite soothing. You can use either dried or fresh Mallow for this. And you can use either one, some, or all of the parts I mentioned above — roots, seeds, flowers, and leaves. If you dry them, you can grind them up, and then run them through a strainer to filter out the woody chunks that aren’t great to have in tea.
There’s another species of Mallow that is much more widely known. A European species of mallow, Althaea officinalis (Marsh Mallow), is quite popular in herbal medicine. (The original marshmallows were derived from this plant.) In its native range in Europe, it grows wild in some marshes — hence the name, Marsh Mallow.
Marsh Mallow (Althaea officinalis) in bloom, from Creative Commons:
Over here in North America, some herbalists grow Althaea officinalis in their gardens. People often use Marsh Mallow powder in herbal teas, because it has the demulcent qualities I described above. I personally have never bought it, though, because I’ve always found abundant sources of Common Mallow available for free. The medicinal actions of the two herbs are quite similar. Common Mallow is a garden weed that grows abundantly across diverse habitats in North America, and most gardeners will be happy to let you take off their hands.
One thing to be aware of is that because Mallows form a protective coating over your mucus membranes, demulcent herbs also prevent your digestive system from fully absorbing medication. So if you need to take a pill of some kind, I’ve been advised to wait at least 1 hour between taking your pill and taking a demulcent herb — either before or after. So if you needed to take your pill at noon, you could drink your mallow cold infusion at before 11am or after 1pm. If you drank your mallow cold infusion too close to when you would be taking your pill, your medication might not be fully absorbed.
Many people have written extensively about the virtues of dandelions, so I will not write too much here and now. But I do want to mention that Dandelion is an excellent salad green, as well as a liver detox herb. Windsor University research (Ontario, Canada) has shown that dandelion root powder can kill human cancer cells (there’s a writeup in Oncotarget, a cancer journal, here.)
I probably wouldn’t eat these particular plants in my niece’s picture, because (as you can see from the feet and concrete) they are in a high-foot-traffic area, so they probably aren’t the cleanest. If I didn’t have access to cleaner herbs, though, these could be carefully washed and then used. However, if they were in an urban area, such as a sidewalk next to a busy road, I would worry that they had absorbed too many heavy chemicals from pollution. Regardless, though, my niece’s photography experiments gave me the opportunity to talk about two of my favorite weeds, so I thank her for that!
(The small plants in the background are too out-of-focus for me to identify…and also, I have no idea whose feet she caught on camera here!)
Edible wild greens are one great thing about spring. A lot of plants, both natives and immigrant plants, produce tender, edible shoots in early spring. Many of these same plants, later in the season, will become too bitter for most people’s palettes. But when they first emerge (likely April/May, depending on your location, but also depending on the weather any given year), they are often very good to eat.
You don’t necessarily need to venture too far from your home in order to find edible spring greens to harvest. If you have your own yard, and/or access to an area nearby that has not been doused with heavy chemicals, many great edible spring greens can be found in lawns.
Here are some goldenrod shoots growing in the grass: And some salad I picked, which was a mix of spring greens, mostly dandelions and goldenrod:You can eat this raw (by itself or with your favorite salad dressing, or incorporate it into a dish. I like using raw spring greens in spring rolls, which are surprisingly easy to make if you can get the ingredients. You can also include them in stir fries, sautés, and even soup or spaghetti sauce.
Make sure that you WASH YOUR GREENS before eating them!!! Even if they are grown without pesticide or herbicide, there can still be dirt, insects, microbes, or other things we wouldn’t want to eat, lurking on the leaves.
There are many delicious edible spring greens, both indigenous and immigrant plants, many of which are widely hated as “weeds,” that make great additions to spring salads. I am not going to list them all here, but there are many other websites that are entirely devoted to this purpose.
When they are first learning about medicinal plants, a lot of people only recognize them when they look exactly the way they look when they are most commonly harvested.
While it usually makes sense to wait until the proper time to harvest a plant, sometimes emergency situations (such as an illness, and lack of access to other medicine) can mean that we have to harvest a plant during “off” times. So, I believe it’s important to come to recognize how a plant looks during all seasons when it’s growing, not just during its usual harvest time.
In the case of Waȟpé Waštémna, (aka Monarda fistulosa, Beebalm, Horsemint, Wild Bergamot, Elk Medicine, Wild Oregano, and many other names), people can often recognize it when its distinctive flowers, which range in color from white to magenta to red or purple, are out — but not when it’s young and first emerging in early summer.
This plant is in the mint family, which means that it has square stems, and leaves that grow in pairs, often forming a right angle with the previous pair of leaves, like a plus (+) sign. They are often slightly elongated, and usually have serrated edges.
Perhaps the easiest way to identify it at this stage, if you are not sure, is to gently rub the leaf and smell it. It has a very distinctive smell, and there are no other plants that smell alike that you’d find growing wild in Dakhóta Thamakhóčhe.
This is what waštémna (a common name for this plant in Dakota/Lakota country) looks like in June. This is about a month before the flowers come out, and therefore a month before the point when people usually harvest it. It’s just a couple inches tall at this point, but if you look closely in the tall prairie grass during this season, in the areas where this plant usually rows, you can often find these young plants getting started on their growing season.
Waȟčázi iyéčheča, aka Salsify, aka Tragopogon dubius, seen on Pine Ridge Reservation (near Kyle, SD) in June.
The Lakota name of this plant, waȟčázi iyéčheča, basically means that it looks like a dandelion. Later in the summer, when you see what looks like a giant dandelion with a fuzzy ball of seeds waiting for the wind to blow them away to their new homes, you’re most likely seeing this plant.
I don’t know much about the English common name of this plant, salsify, but the Oxford English dictionary tells me that it comes from a 400-year-old Italian word whose meaning has been lost to time. That makes sense — this plant is indigenous to the Mediterranean. It was originally brought here by European immigrants as a food plant, but thanks to those seeds that blow wherever the wind takes them, they quickly escaped the newcomers’ gardens and eventually became part of the prairie ecosystem (and just about every other ecosystem in North America).
Its scientific name, Tragopogon dubius, I know a bit more about. Tragopogon, the genus name, means “goat’s beard.” The epithet (second part of the scientific name), “dubius,” means “doubtful” — but I do not have any insight into why it has this name. I’ve very occasionally heard this plant referred to as Goat’s Beard.
Another name I commonly hear for this plant is Oyster Root. This is because the root, which is the part of this plant most commonly used for food, is said to taste like an oyster. (Having tried a decent amount of both salsify roots and actual oysters, I just don’t taste the resemblance.)
When I first started learning about the edible roots, I tried harvesting them by pulling up plants that looked like the one in my picture above, and cooking and eating the roots. But I quickly ran into problems, when my knife could not slice all the way through these roots — they had a core that was extremely woody. No amount of cooking would soften the center and make it edible. My final results did not look (or taste) anything like the soft, succulent salsify I saw featured on manycookingwebsites. (I realize that there are over 150 Tragopogon species, with 3 growing across North America, so that may be part of the difference in quality of our finished dishes.)
When I consulted with more experienced foragers, they explained that if you wait until you can see the flower, you’re too late: the root is softest and most edible in early spring, when the shoots first emerge. Later in the season, when the flower comes out, the root becomes too woody to eat.
The only problem with this is that in early spring, the ideal time to harvest these roots, Salsify plants are often hard to tell apart from the shoots of other new plants. It takes some experience to get to the point where you can positively identify Salsify in its earliest stages.
However, since Salsify lives multiple years (I’m not sure exactly how long; I could only find data on false/black Salsify, a completely different species, being biennial), you can study a plant, get to know what it looks like throughout the season, mark the spot where it grows, and then come back to harvest in early spring of the following year.
Salsify season is upon us! I’m not sure when exactly it’ll emerge in 2024, given our chaotic weather, but it should be soon…or, depending on where you live, it may already be popping up.
Last July, I saw this impressive Waȟpé Tȟáŋka (Burdock/Arctium minus) plant growing out of a truck that had obviously been parked a long time in a back lane in Winnipeg.
Burdock is native to Eurasia. Montana State University Extension Office says it was introduced in the 1600s, and is now in almost every US state and Canadian province. The Lakota name, Waȟpé Tȟáŋka, is pretty straightforward — Big Leaf.
I first became familiar with burdock root decades ago as “Gobo,” the name it goes by in Japanese cuisine (you can find a popular recipe and some more info here), but I eventually became curious about this plant with big, fuzzy leaves that I was seeing all over, and came to realize that it was the same plant. The sources I’ve read say that it was accidentally introduced to North America centuries ago.
In general, the part people work with the most in herbal medicine is the root, which has amazing blood-purifying properties, and stimulates the liver to produce more bile to flush out toxins. It also contains some important vitamins and minerals. People drink burdock root tea for a variety of medical conditions, from fairly minor complaints, to more serious things like Lyme Disease. (I’ll do another post about burdock as medicine in the future.) You can get fresh Burdock root in many Asian grocery stores in North America, but if you have a safe place to harvest, you can often find it for free.
Another way to work with this plant is to use its big leaves instead of plastic wrap, as a more sustainable insulating wrap for a poultice made with another plant. I’ve also heard that the young leaves and shoots are edible, though I’ve never tried them.
However, this plant is growing from under a parked vehicle. As you probably know, vehicles, especially those that are not well-maintained and stay parked in the same place for awhile, often leach toxic chemicals into the ground around them. So I did not harvest from this particular plant…I just appreciated it for its resilience.
The time when most people harvest Waȟpé Waštémna (Monarda fistulosa, aka Beebalm, aka Wild Bergamot, aka Horse Mint, aka Elk Medicine) is in July, when the flowers are in full bloom.
If you harvest carefully, the plant will have the ability, and enough time, to grow a second flowerhead and produce seeds before the cold season comes.
I took this picture in late July 2023, for a class I was teaching on harvesting medicinal plants:
As you can see, I am cutting above a node (a place where the stem branches out, splitting into a pair of small opposite leaves and branches).
When harvested this way, these stems branching out of the waštémna plant will grow big, eventually each terminating in at least one flowerhead. And when this is done with enough time before the frost comes, the plant will have enough time to go to seed, ensuring its survival with a new generation of baby plants next year.
If you tend to the plants well enough, you might even be able to get a second (smaller) harvest in the same year. I have done this successfully over the years with waštémna plants, both in wild spots I tend to and in my own garden.
A note on harvesting:
Never take all of the waštémna plants that are in flower in a given area. If you do this, you may be preventing the plant from producing any offspring that will germinate the following spring, which would be medicine for you and others in future years/generations. Different people follow different teachings on how much it is ok to harvest.
I’ve heard people say you can harvest 1 out of every 5 plants, but others will say 1 in 10, or 1 in 20. But everyone agrees that clear-cutting an area of medicinal plants is not a responsible or sustainable practice.
I recently visited a Whole Foods location that was shutting down. I normally try to avoid Whole Foods because of their anti-union stance and other ethically questionable practices, but they had a 50% off sale on all their remaining products, so I went to check out their herbal supplements section.
This cough syrup from Italy was one of the more interesting products I found:
I noticed the label right away, because I’d never seen a commercial product with pteíčhiyuȟa (Curlycup Gumweed, aka Grindelia squarrosa) in it.
I’ve been working with this plant for years, mostly making it into a tincture to help people with breathing issues (due to its high resin content, it needs to be extracted into alcohol or fat, as the medicine is not water-soluble). In this mixture, it looks like they extracted it into honey, something that I have never tried but may experiment with in the future.
They were also working with a different species than the one I know, Grindelia camporum. At first, I was wondering if this was a European species (since the cough syrup is from Italy), but then I remembered that Grindelia is only native to Turtle Island/the Americas.
Investigating a little further, I found that this is a North American species — but that G. camporum, as well as several other Grindelia species, have been catalogued by the European Medicines Agency, which provides a monograph and some other details on this site. (Don’t expect too much — it’s pretty sparse, and provides some inaccurate information on extraction methods.) So, I guess that G. camporum is yet another indigenous North American medicinal plant that Europeans have “discovered.” (I don’t see a problem with people from other places cultivating medicinally useful plants in their own homelands. However, there are always questions of biocolonialism to contend with.)
Plantain (Plantago lanceolata), an European medicinal plant that is well-established in North America, is also advertised on the label. I know that Plantago species are commonly used in traditional cough medicines in Europe. (There are over 200 Plantago species that grow the world, but P. major and P. lanceolata are the ones I’ve most commonly seen in herbal medicine.) But this was the first time I’d seen it combined with Grindelia.
The label also advertised Eucalyptus globulus, a species native to Tasmania and the southeastern Australian mainland. This is another medicinal plant that is commonly used in breathing medicines.
Between the Grindelia, Plantago, and Eucalyptus, there are medicinal plants native to at least 3 continents represented in this cough syrup.
Moving on to the back of the box:
I noticed a few more herbs that weren’t listed on the front.
“Helichrysum flowering tops extract” is one ingredient listed. However, there are over 1600 Helichrysum species at most, and 600+ at bare minimum, depending how you count them. How is it legal for them to not specify which species they are using?!
Next, they list Star Anise (Illicum verum), a small tree from Vietnam and South China whose seed pods are a wonderful antiviral medicine. (That brings the number of continents represented in this formula up to 4: North America, Europe, Australia, & Asia.) However, in this recipe, they included it as an essential oil.
Reading further down the ingredient list, they have a total of 3 essential oils listed: Star Anise, Eucalyptus, and Lemon Peel essential oils. This is a huge red flag for me, because despite what essential oil multi-level marketing companies will tell you, no essential oils are generally regarded as safe for internal use. They are highly concentrated plant medicines, and many of them can cause serious health issues if taken internally.
While many health agencies around the world have warned consumers against all internal use of essential oils, the government of Western Australia explains it in some of the clearest, most accessible language, on this website: “There have been claims made by companies producing essential oil products and their distributors that essential oils are ‘natural’ and therefore are ‘safe to consume’. Essential oils are not safe to consume and can cause significant poisoning even if small amounts are ingested.“
Eucalyptus essential oil is especially concerning to see as an ingredient in a product meant to be taken internally. It is widely known to be toxic, and even fatal, if ingested. Mount Sinai hospital warns, “DO NOT take eucalyptus oil orally (by mouth) except under your doctor’s supervision due to toxicity.” This 2015 article from Toxicology International journal on Eucalyptus essential oil poisoning describes what happens in detail. Here’s how WebMD sums it up: “But it is unsafe to take pure eucalyptus oil by mouth. Taking only 3.5 mL (less than one teaspoon) of the pure oil can be fatal. Eucalyptus oil can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Eucalyptus poisoning can cause stomach pain, dizziness, muscle weakness, feelings of suffocation, drowsiness, seizures, and coma.” Yes, I realize that the quantities included in this 5.4-ounce/160mL bottle are probably far less than the quantity that would kill someone. However, why would you include a substance known to be toxic in a medicine? I cannot imagine any benefits that would justify this.
Finally, at the end, they say that they included “lemon fruit juice (to preserve freshness).” I was pretty surprised to see this included, as citrus juices are contraindicated for cough, because the citric acid can aggravate a cough and make it worse. Why would you include this in a cough formula?! There are plenty of other ways to preserve freshness that wouldn’t make a cough worse.
Well, this piece was not intended to be a take-down. When I first saw this product, I took pictures because I was excited to share images of a commercial product that includes one of my favorite traditional medicines. Unfortunately, when I looked into it, I saw enough red flags that I would not consider taking this medicine. Plus, even at 50% off ($14 before tax), I could make a cough syrup much more cheaply at home. (I did not wind up buying this product.)
Nevertheless, there are still some positives that came out of my looking into this product: 1) It’s pretty exciting to see people recognizing the medicinal value of the Gumweeds/Grindelia species, and working with them as breathing medicines. 2) I learned about a Gumweed species I hadn’t known about before, G. camporum. So, Gaia Herbs/Whole Foods, thank you for that! 3) I have never tried extracting Grindelia into honey, and this product gave me the idea to try that. Next summer, I’ll give it a try and report back.
And some salad I picked, which was a mix of spring greens, mostly dandelions and goldenrod:
You can eat this raw (by itself or with your favorite salad dressing, or incorporate it into a dish. I like using raw spring greens in spring rolls, which are surprisingly easy to make if you can get the ingredients. You can also include them in stir fries, sautés, and even soup or spaghetti sauce.
Plant Stories 