Herbal

By Lune Ames, Jennifer Kabat, Marlene McCarty

Black cohosh

Actaea racemosa

In the 1870s the standard treatment for severe menstrual cramps was surgery to remove the ovaries. Forty percent of all patients died, and women, skeptical of male doctors, began concocting herbal remedies. In her Massachusetts home in 1873, Lydia Pinkham combined wild roots and herbs – black cohosh, a main ingredient – to help women control their reproductive health. Black cohosh promotes menstruation, soothes menstrual pain and eases menopause. The Haudenosaunee and Cherokee, having long known the benefits of this buttercup species, likely introduced it to European colonists. An Algonquian term, cohosh means “rough” for the herb’s dark, knotted rhizome. These underground stems contain compounds (triterpene glycosides and fukinolic acid) with estrogen-like effects. A few drops under the tongue relax uterine muscles and induce abortion.

Nicknamed bugbane, bugwort, black baneberry, black snakeroot and rheumatism weed, this herb is also lethal. Its analgesic salicylates cause everything from vomiting and tinnitus to hyperthermia and organ failure. Wild harvested, black cohosh is so popular it is considered “at-risk” across the United States and endangered in Illinois and Massachusetts. Though an age-old remedy for dangerous ailments and treatments, now the endangered plant itself needs protection.

Castor bean

Ricinus communis

April 2013, Washington DC, tensions were running high. Four letters containing highly toxic ricin were intercepted at mail facilities, addressed to President Obama, Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assassination occurs by toxalbumin poisoning: multiorgan failure for which there is no anti-dote. Ricin, from the castor bean, is considered a bioterrorism agent.

The slavers’ run began in West Africa, stopped in the West Indies then ended in South Carolina introducing African plants along the way. The African custom of ornamenting the body with necklaces and bracelets of beads was a means of transport bringing castor beans to the Americas. From prickly pods Ricinus communis have a warty appendage, the caruncle, which promotes dispersal of the seed by ants. Seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs dating to 4000 B.C. The oil was said to embody virtues. Biblically, kik, ancient Egyptian for Ricinus, was permitted in sabbath lamps. Palma Christi, has religious implications. Today, ordering these toxic seeds might alarm the authorities.

Rosary pea

Abrus precatorius

In 2014, British woman Kuntal Patel laced her abusive mother’s Diet Coke with abrin, a lethal toxin that she bought on the dark web with Bitcoin. Abrin, from rosary pea, and a similar toxin ricin, from castor bean, are both considered bioterrorism agents. They assassinate by toxalbumin poisoning: multiorgan failure for which there is no antidote – at least none yet revealed to the public.

Both plants are native to the Eastern hemisphere: rosary pea from India and Asia, and castor bean from East Africa, India and the Mediterranean. Most rosary pea seeds are red and black like ladybugs and come from legume pods. The black and white ones are mistaken for castor bean seeds, which come from prickly pods. Both have been used for millennia in traditional medicine, from ancient Egyptian medical treatises in 1550 BCE up to the present day in parts of Africa, India and China.

Before scientists isolated the toxins in castor bean and rosary pea, women knew their uterine effects. Recommended by the 4th-century Greek midwife Aspasia and used in South Africa and by the Navajo, castor bean oil, roots and seeds (without the deadly hull) have prevented and ended pregnancies. Women in parts of Africa and India have used rosary pea roots and powdered seeds as an oral contraceptive and abortifacient. But today, ordering these toxic seeds might alarm the authorities.

Chaste tree

Vitex agnus-castus

Chaste tree is an antidote to toxic masculinity. For thousands of years, priests and monks prevented erections by eating its leaves, flowers and berries, dubbing it the monk’s pepper. As chastisement for unrestrained teen hormones, Spartans flogged adolescent boys with chaste tree twigs. The shrub’s potency is in its volatile oils, which stimulate the pituitary gland to increase progesterone, thereby suppressing the male libido.

A member of the verbena family, chaste tree is called vitex, wild lavender, chasteberry, Abraham’s balm, cloister pepper and hemp tree. Originating in the Mediterranean and Asia, this herb is not only a libido inhibitor, but also stops sperm from implanting. By regulating estrogen, progesterone and prolactin, chaste tree inhibits conception and causes abortion. Women have long used the aromatic shrub to control fertility. In the ancient festival of Demeter, women lounged on chaste tree branches. How fitting that a symbol of female sexuality quells unrestrained virility.

Cleavers

(Galium aparine)

The galium aparine’s ability to cleave onto itself makes it ideal bedding material. Its clinging hairs cause the branches to stick together, thus ensuring a lofty mattress. One of a half dozen plants known as bedstraws, the stem’s tiny teeth easily latch onto clothing and fur, thus “cleavers.”

Before the Christian Church assimilated local myths and customs into one dominant Christian mythology, medieval birth was an Earth-Mother ritual. The midwife would prepare a bed of fragrant flowers and herbs woven into a base of cleavers to ensure a good birth and plentiful flow of milk. The earthy aromas pulled the laboring mother under to her earth goddess. Europe was awash in a multitude of them: Frau Holle (Germanic), Freya (Norse), Huldra (Scandinavian) and countless others. Dedicated to such goddesses, the childbed provided support, protection and a sense of security. Cleavers calms inflammation of the nerves, lymph, and urinary tract by flushing out toxins, decreasing congestion and reducing swelling.

At the time, midwives and wise-women (witches) were the local health practitioners, keepers of a subcultural knowledge of plant medicine. In 742CE the Synod of Liftinae attempted to obliterate all pagan customs, forbidding the ritual of the goddess and childbed. However, women dissented. They found ways to keep their connection to the earth and plants by claiming their bedstraw was created from the same herbs used for Jesus in the Bethlehem manger. The childbed became known as Our Lady’s Bedstraw, Mary’s Bed or The Virgin’s Bedstraw.

Thirty to sixty thousand Europeans were burned at the stake for witchcraft between the 15th and 18th centuries. The vast majority of them female. Witch healers, midwives and herbalists were the unlicensed doctors of Western history, often the only healthcare for folk bitterly afflicted by poverty and disease. The witch-craze was a campaign of terror by the church and ruling class against female peasants who represented a political, religious and sexual threat. The medieval church came to control medical education and practice. Then, as today, control of medicine determined who would get care, who could afford care, who would live and who would die. Medical science did not increase women’s chances of survival in childbirth until the 20th century. More recently Western medicine has not proved a boon for women’s health in the US. Along with Serbia we are the only developed nations seeing increasing maternal mortality rates. Over the last two decades they’ve been rising, particularly for black Americans who die three times as often as white women in childbirth.

While cleavers cannot fix a health crisis, its promises of care and safety are still profound. Humans have not been the only species to use cleavers. In spring, when a doe gives birth, she also prefers cleavers’ lush, billowy growth. It makes a comfortable bed and its fragrance disguises deer scent protecting both mother and fawn from predators. First Nation hunters adopted it too as protection, using bedstraw on their clothing to mask human scent. Some Southeastern First Nations considered cleavers to be “Deer Medicine.”

Common milkweed

(Asclepias syriaca)

The female monarch butterfly lays her eggs exclusively on milkweed. The plant is the only food the caterpillars will eat. Immune to the plant’s toxic, sticky, white sap, they accumulate the poison in their bodies, protecting them from predators. Over the last two decades though, the Eastern monarch population has plummeted by 90% due to mega-farm herbicide spraying and development. Together they’ve destroyed some 165 million acres of milkweed breeding habitat in the United States. The only species of butterfly to make a round-trip migration akin to birds, it flies up to 3000 miles to twelve mountaintops in Mexico. Along the entire migration route, milkweed has disappeared. In Mexico, logging and avocado crops threaten their habitat. In January 2020 Mexican monarch conservationist, Homero Gómez González went missing. His body was found two weeks later, a further setback to the butterfly’s preservation.

During World War II, milkweed was adopted for the war effort. “Pick a Weed Save a Life” became the milkweed’s motto. Posters boasted its benefits as the tufted seeds were used to stuff life preservers. An entire industry sprang up in one Michigan county where children harvested the seedpods. Just under two pounds of milkweed down could keep a 150-pound person afloat.

First Nations peoples have used milkweed for millennia. Centuries before the Swedish botanist Linnaeus named the milkweed genus for the Greek god of medicine, more than 500 unique names already existed for the plant in the Americas. From the Mayan site of Copan in Honduras to ancient Mound Builders sites in the north, archeologists have found milkweed. In present-day Ohio remnants of a milkweed fiber fishing net were found at a prehistoric site dating to 300 BCE. Mound Builders used the rot-resistant fibers for weaving mats, tying moccasins, stringing pearls, hunting lures, and making flutes and bird whistles as well as a red dye. Milkweed’s powerful plant medicine has been used for centuries. The Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw and Chitimacha inhaled the vapors to relieve asthma and respiratory ailments.

Rappahannock and Schaghticoke tribes pounded the roots as a remedy for snakebites, bee stings and spider bites. Contraceptives have combined milkweed roots with jack in the pulpit.

Different species of the asclepias genus worldwide exhibit similar medicinal properties. The roots of asclepias tomentosa and the milkweed tree asclepias procera contain potent abortifacients. From the Sudan and the African peoples of Sukuma, Mkalama, and the Maasai to Ghana, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as well as North America, women and healers have recognized the milkweed plant as a powerful natural gift permitting women to control their own bodies.

Cotton

Gossypium hirsutum

Mary Gaffney, an enslaved Texan woman born in 1846, chewed cotton root to keep from bearing children. “Maser was going to raise him a lot more slaves, but still I cheated Maser, I never did have any slaves to grow and Maser he wondered what was the matter.” Freed at twenty, she and her husband went on to have five children. After the US withdrew from the international slave trade in 1808, slavery continued only by enforced reproduction. Black women and girls, familiar with the Gossypium species in Africa, used cotton root to prevent pregnancy. On one Tennessee plantation, black women gave birth to only two infants over a twenty-five-year span.

Cotton is medicinal. Its roots, leaves and seeds treat pain, urinary problems and menstrual disorders, whereas its oil is a male contraceptive in Chinese medicine. Gossypol, the toxic principle of the seeds, decreases sperm production and induces abortion. Enslaved men in the South may have also used the root for birth control. Though cotton was a crop of oppression, African Americans transformed it into resistance. In the late 19th century, black cotton farmers and sharecroppers formed the Colored Farmers’ Alliance (CFA) to dismantle railroads, merchants, brokers and banks that charged exorbitant fees and interest rates. Disenfranchised by segregation, the CFA organized strikes and trainings to promote economic self-sufficiency and wrest control of “king cotton.”

Curly dock

(Rumex crispus)

To conceive a child, tie Rumex crispus seeds to your left arm. Or, finding yourself lovelorn, dig a root and dress it as the one you fancy. Carry this doll for one month. After the month chop the root into bits and boil it. When the potion cools, use it to wash your entire body, and the object of your desire will be drawn to you forever. Or, in this age of economic contraction you might wash your coins in the potion to attract money to your wallet.

Now as 30.5 million people across the US are on unemployment and income disappears, dock is here to help—not just as magic, but food. Its wavy lance-shaped leaves, seeds, stems and roots are all edible. Thanks to a high level of iron, the root can even treat anemia. More nutritious than carrots or spinach, the leaves are high in beta-carotene, vitamin C and zinc. The young, tender leaves can be eaten raw as a salad, and the larger ones, like other bitter greens, can be sautéed. A relative of buckwheat, curly dock seeds are ground into flour or roasted for a drink similar to coffee. For centuries people have been consuming dock. The Tollund Man preserved in a peat-bog (400 BCE Denmark) had eaten a dock-seed gruel as his last meal. There are eighteen species of docks in the US, and curly dock is one of the five most common plants in the world. Across the US, docks grow in the waste places—along roadsides and sidewalks. They are here to free us from industrial, factory farming and are more nutritious than most food in the grocery stores.

Though beneficial to humans, Rumex crispus is toxic to livestock and can cause sudden death, coma, miscarriage, tremors, salivation, and weakness.

Deadly nightshade

Atropa belladonna

In 14th-century Ireland, Dame Alice Kyteler and her servant Petronilla de Meath used belladonna to grease “a staffe, upon which [they] ambled and galloped through thick and thin.” The poison made them “fly.” Alice was Ireland’s first person to be condemned as a witch, and Petronilla was the first to be executed as one. The bishop accused them of heresy, a frequent charge after England’s invasion (with papal approval) to spread Christianity. Three centuries later in Italy, six hundred women used a belladonna-based potion, Aqua Tofana, to kill their husbands and escape Christianity’s cruel institution of marriage. They were perhaps inspired by the ancient Roman “matron poisoners,” the 366 noblewomen who besieged the city with belladonna by poisoning their own domineering kin, the all-male ruling class.

Common names include devil’s berries, death cherries, beautiful death, devil’s herb, great morel, dwayberry and dwale. A member of the nightshade family from Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, belladonna can intoxicate and kill but also heal. Once used as an anesthetic, its alkaloids are still medicinal: belladonna supplements line store shelves to treat fevers, dry eyes, earaches, inflammation and anxiety. The bell-shaped flowers and black berries were useful in warfare, too. In the American Civil War, medical wagons and hospitals treated various ailments with the deadly nightshade. Two centuries before Dame Alice, Macbeth of Scotland (1005-1057) dispatched his foes with it. He gave belladonna-tainted liquor to the invading Danish army, killing the enemy in their sleep.

Eastern cottonwood

Populus deltoides

A 1933 study of willow revealed to science something women have known for ages: plants share similar hormones as animals and humans. Willow contains estriol, an estrogen that interferes with ovulation and implantation, and other trees in the Salicaceae, or willow, family have similar effects. Little is documented about the other willows – cottonwood, poplar and aspen – but early 20th-century medical texts dismissed the use of cottonwood for abortions, which suggests that women had been using it. The Lenape, Blackfoot and Cree used Salicaceae to prevent pregnancy and ease menstruation or childbirth. In the antebellum South, African women employed eastern cottonwood as birth control, giving them, instead of owners, control over their bodies.

Also known as necklace poplar, two eastern cottonwoods flank Silo City’s Deliverance Garden in Buffalo, New York. They are recognizable by their cottony strands. Flower clusters, or catkins, split open to release numerous stringy seeds – as many as 40 million seeds each summer. The deep-fissured bark protects the tree from forest fires and, like other members of the willow family, contains salicylates to ease pain and inflammation and treat worms, sores and snakebites. Ancient uses of Salicaceae included a 6th-century Roman contraceptive where men drank the burnt testicles of castrated mules with a willow decoction. Reports of its success are unknown.

Evening primrose

Oenothera biennis

Another plant in the female reproductive healthcare arsenal, Oenothera biennis is employed by American midwives during the last month of pregnancy to stimulate cervical ripening. Therapeutically taken for relief of premenstrual discomfort including tension and bloating, this night-blooming plant alleviates breast pain (mastalgia).

Evening star, sundrop, weedy evening primrose, German rampion, king's cure-all, the plant is native to eastern and central North America. The Cherokee, Haudenosaunee, Ojibwe and Potawatomi would eat it. The nutty-flavored roots can be consumed raw or cooked like potatoes. The flowers themselves are edible and sweet. The Cherokee heated the plant's root and applied it to hemorrhoids. The Haudenosaunee used it in as a skin salve. The leaves are rich in quercetin, with the highest amount in any plant, making it a powerful antihistamine, anti-cancer and anti-estrogenic. Its psychoactive seeds have been found in Puerto Rican ancient ceremonial sites where they were used for ritual purposes.

Evening primrose immigrated to Europe in the early 17th century where it flourished in cottage gardens with its flashy yellow flowers bursting into bloom at sunset. Placing the flower, symbol of safety and protection, on a doorstep encouraged faeries to bless the house. Consuming the mildly narcotic blossoms allowed one to see the faeries. Tasting like ham, it also earned the name hogweed (not to be confused with the toxic giant hogweed from the parsley/parsnip/Queen Anne’s lace family). Evening primrose was soon Christianized and dedicated to the patron saint of pigs, St. Anthony. Despite richly layered lore, it took decades for the Europeans to recognize the flower’s strong medicinal properties.

Jimson weed

Datura stramonium

Datura felled three armies. The trumpet-shaped flowers turned Odysseus’s men into pigs, and centuries later subdued the starving Roman army with mass hallucinations. During Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 in colonial Virginia, the weed bewitched hungry British soldiers sent to suppress the uprising. Jamestown colonists spread the word about the psychedelic stupor. One soldier “would blow up a Feather in the Air” and another “dart Straws at it with much Fury,” so naming it jimson weed for Jamestown.

Invasive, it is found along roadsides and in fields, and its nicknames, too, are widespread: devil’s snare, thorn apple, apple of Peru, stramonium, hell’s bells, locoweed, devil’s trumpet, moonflower, stinkweed, prickly burr, devil’s cucumber…. The leaves’ pungent odor serves as a warning while the flowers’ sweet aroma entices. The plant (especially its seeds in their prickly pods) causes alkaloid intoxication with deadly symptoms: “hot as a hare, red as a beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter.” Its genus Datura is Latin for “send to die,” which proved too true in colonial Massachusetts. Amidst the colony’s political instability, jimson weed intoxicated pubescent girls, who howled like dogs and encountered apparitions. The Salem teenagers catalyzed such a threat to Puritan decency that, despite knowing the weed’s role in Algonquian puberty rituals, male authorities hanged fourteen women.

Monkshood

Aconitum

Rubbed on the vulva by riding a broomstick, aconite was a heart-racing ingredient in witches’ flying ointments. Women reclaimed the vulvic gesture from Roman men. They once rubbed aconite on the inner lips of their sleeping wives, who died within hours, dubbing it “women-killer.” Dosage is key. Women in 19th-century India escaped forced marriages by using aconite to murder their husbands. The women evaded prosecution by saying they used it as an aphrodisiac, which was common practice.

Also called monkshood for its hooded purple flowers, the genus Aconitum is a member of the buttercup family and includes over 200 species, all of which contain aconitine. The toxin causes arrhythmias, with symptoms mimicking those of a rabid dog. Death can occur in as little as two hours. From the Greek akoniton, for “dart” or “javelin,” aconite has been used for poisoning arrows and warfare. Natives of Nepal used Himalayan monkshood to stop the invading British army by poisoning their wells. In Jean Genet’s transgressive 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers, the queer Parisian boy Culafroy discovered that deadly aconite doubles as a hallucinogenic after sneaking into a moonlit garden to eat its leaves. By day he was a shy, outcast schoolboy, but using monkshood each night, the “Renaissance would take possession of him through the mouth.” Culafroy would escape into opulence. The dose determines if one meets death or takes flight.

Motherwort

Leonurus cardiaca

“Grannie” was the name bestowed on women healers and midwives by African Americans, Native Americans and settlers alike, and grannies all turned to the herb still often simply called “mother,” that is, motherwort. It is so powerful that by 1200 CE, it had spread from Asia to Europe and then onto England, where it was used by and for women. It also traveled to Africa where Zulu, Shona, Xhosa, Lunyaneka and Sotho peoples knew it as an abortifacient. Just how it got to the Americas is unknown, but many women probably carried it—and its secrets. Here information about it spread among “grannies.”

Southern plantations used enslaved women’s pregnancies as an economic imperative. It was the way the Master increased his “holdings,” and rape was condoned to ensure births. Secrecy surrounded all herbs —like motherwort—with abortive properties. Its active ingredients, leonurine and stachydrine, promote uterine contractions, which could cause abortion – and ease birth pains. The plant has many other healing properties as well, in menopause, with PMS, and as a heart regulator. But, in the early US, where female reproduction was subject to the Master’s strict patriarchal control and abuse, “mother” was a tool to fight enslavement. Oppression breeds rebellion.

Mugwort

Artemisia vulgaris

In 21st-century America, drinking mugwort tea to terminate a pregnancy is grounds for jail time. Seven states have outlawed self-managed abortion, and 40 laws nationwide could criminalize it. In 2004, a South Carolinian migrant mother of three was sentenced to jail for taking an abortifacient. Even an herbal abortion using mugwort – one of an estimated 525 abortifacient plants worldwide – could be a punishable crime. But the herb grows along roadsides and wastelands. Considered invasive, it spreads via rhizomes.

Mugwort, sometimes an umbrella term for similar Artemisia species, is native to Europe, Asia and North Africa. The pointed, sage-scented leaves contain eucalyptol, which targets umbilical cells and causes the uterine lining to shed. Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Indian medicine have used it for reproductive health. For over 10,000 years, the Chumash have used California mugwort, what they call molush, to promote menstruation and regulate hormonal flux in menopause. Mugwort is considered safer than traditional hormone replacement therapy. This bitter herb is popular in cooking (especially mugwort soup), though it contains thujone, a lethal psychoactive convulsant. Inhaling what Russians call zabytko, meaning “forgetfulness,” induces lucid dreaming. Placing the stalks under a pillow while sleeping intoxicates the mind and memory. The herb also heals the body. In Chinese medicine, moxibustion – mugwort heat therapy – treats colds, inflammation and spasms. Still burned as incense in pagan rituals, mugwort was invoked in the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm: “Remember, Mugwort, what you revealed, / what you established at the mighty proclamation.” Spreading head to toe and body to mind, mugwort’s powers are rhizomatic, too.

Oregano or Marjoram

Origanum vulgare

For centuries the classification Origanum vulgare has been interchangeably identified as either oregano or marjoram. From North Africa to Greece and Portugal to the North American colonies, this plant’s ability to interfere with fertility has long been acknowledged. The first century Greek physician Dioscorides recommended it in his five-volume herbal medicine encyclopedia for birth control as well as an emmenagogue and abortifacient. Due to vigorous antibacterial and antifungal properties as well as its use as a painkiller and anti-inflammatory, medieval midwives incorporated oreganum vulgare into Our Lady’s Bedstraw [see cleavers]. Under the guise of protection from bad witches, spirits and demons, the plant’s aromatic oils induced calm in both mother and child.

Carried to the Americas, oregano thrived in the South. There, African midwives and spiritual healers recognized its properties as similar to African gossypium (cotton) [see cotton]. These healers, known in the colonies as “grannies,” would surreptitiously aid women eager to undermine the reproductive wishes of their master. Like motherwort and pennyroyal, oregano is in the mint family, and the plant is a powerful microbial. It also increases blood flow to reproductive organs, stimulating a menstrual cycle and miscarriage.

Recent research has revealed oreganum vulgare’s antigonadotropic properties. The herb inhibits both women’s ovulation in women and men’s sperm production. Antigonadotropins are used to treat hormonally sensitive cancers, delay precocious puberty, puberty in transgender youth, and treat estrogen-associated conditions such as abnormally heavy menstrual flow or endometriosis.

Queen Anne’s lace

Daucus carota

For centuries, women have passed on contraceptive knowledge of Queen Anne’s lace. They still do, especially in regions like Appalachia where reproductive rights are under attack. In North Carolina, a woman kept a mason jar of its seeds to take after intercourse, which worked for ten years until she only once forgot and got pregnant. Queen Anne’s lace is a progesterone inhibitor, working like the birth control pill and morning-after pill. Swallowing one spoonful of seeds causes a “slippery” uterus, so a fertilized egg can’t implant. Hippocrates wrote the earliest account of it as birth control nearly 2,500 years ago.

The tiny, white flowers gather like a parasol. Together with the leaves, they resemble relatives in the parsley family: wild parsnip, parsley and deadly hemlock, many of which are poisonous. A tiny red dot at the bloom’s center helps distinguish it and gives rise to its name. Native to Europe and Asia, the plant is linked to Queen Anne of England (1655-1714), who, legend has it, pricked her finger while sewing the finest lace. Others say Saint Anne, patron saint of lace makers, inspired the name.

European colonists brought the edible wild carrot with them to America, perhaps for women to control their fertility. The wind carried its seeds, overtaking grasslands and prairies as a ubiquitous weed, though knowledge of its contraceptive properties is not as widespread. Now, with the reinstated Title X restrictions of 2019, keeping contraceptive plant knowledge alive is not simply oral history; it is revolt.

Pokeweed

Phytolacca americana

Enslaved by the Mitchell family of Virginia, Delphy, a dairymaid and known conjuror was sentenced to death on June 10, 1816 by the Louisa County Court. She had been charged with “feloniously preparing and administering poison” with intent to kill Isabella Mitchell, her mistress. Delphy ground glass and boiled a decoction of pokeroot then mixed the two. Slave healers were familiar with the African pokeweed variety, Phytolacca dodecandra, understanding its dangers and curative properties. All parts of the pokeweed contain phytolaccine and are poisonous, triggering convulsions, bloody diarrhea and vomiting, or death from respiratory paralysis. In her bid for freedom, Delphy was aided by the enslaved house servants, who served Mistress Mitchell the poisonous mixture in her coffee. She suffered violent bowel spasms with excruciating stomach pains. Her son fell ill, and the pigs, fed the leftover coffee, died. Publicly claiming her mistress would be in the ground by the end of summer, Delphy, no doubt, aroused suspicion and eventual arrest.

In the early colonies information was shared between enslaved Africans and First Nation tribes. “Poke” comes from the Algonquian word pokan, meaning bloody. Both cultures knew it as a powerful medicine, hallucinogen, abortifacient, and food. Despite pokeweed’s toxicity, the tender young leaves can be cooked, parboiled two to three times, as the Appalachian specialty, poke sallet. High in vitamin A, C, iron and calcium, the dish has been an important food and an early spring tonic for poor rural people.

Phytolacca americana has numerous uses specific to women. Its tinctures are used for breast tenderness, menstrual pain and to treat endometriosis, while the berry can stimulate the uterus to induce miscarriage or abortion. Pokeweed’s mitogen shows potential too fighting cancer, even HIV as an antiviral.

Roman chamomile

Chamaemelum nobile

Covid 19, economic shutdown, food insecurity, civil unrest, police terror…, Americans are anxious. For relaxation chamomile may be the most widely used herb in the western world. Full of esters and the phenolic flavonoid called apigenin, which binds to brain receptors decreasing anxiety, the plant can be helpful in soothing bodily systems, calming the mind, aiding in the release of anger and irritability and as a mild tranquilizer. This may be the plant most needed by all of us.

Chamomile's properties are profound. It’s been found effective against generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and in the treatment of diabetes. The plants anti-inflammatory, analgesic, and disinfectant properties have been applied to urinary infections, hypertension, high blood pressure, ulcers, diaper rash, earache, sore nipples, toothache, neuralgia, boils, skin eruptions, sore eyes, toothache and earache. Chamaemelum nobile is a known abortifacient, uterotonic and emmenagogue. In gratitude for its multitude of healing properties, Egyptians devoted it to their sun god, Ra. The plant’s oil was used in the Egyptian mummification process. In German chamomile has been called alles zutraut, meaning “capable of anything”

Humans benefit from chamomile’s medicinal qualities – and so do other plants. Roman chamomile restores health to any sickly plant growing nearby. An infusion of chamomile sprayed on other plants prevents and kills fungal infections. Seeds soaked in chamomile infusion will grow strong and fungus-free. Since the 1600s Roman chamomile has been known as a plant physician.

Rue

Ruta graveolens

On their wedding day, Lithuanian brides receive a pot of rue from their mothers because of the herb’s contraceptive properties. European apothecaries once sold rue oil to “bringeth down the menses.” After colonists brought the herb to America, enslaved women used it. Their refusal to bear children hindered the economy of human capital, which depended on forced procreation. The name rue – from the Greek reuo, meaning “to set free” – suggests the plant’s power. Fern-like with yellow flowers, rue originates in the Balkan Peninsula. In gardens, the plant’s bitter scent deters unwanted insects and animals, though the shrub is more commonly found along roadsides and fields. Rutin is the glycoside responsible for its aroma and uterine effects. Rue can also be lethal – it’s all in the intention. As Ophelia proclaims, “There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me… O’ you must wear your rue with a difference.”

This herb of grace – or witchbane, herbygrass and mother of herbs – was a poison antidote and ingredient in Four Thieves Vinegar, which criminals used to stave off the black death while stealing from the sick. The European basilisk, the giant mythological serpent whose breath alone wilted plants and cracked stones, had no effect on rue – perhaps a hint at rue’s effect on men. It immobilizes sperm and decreases libido. A contraceptive for all genders – freeing, but toxic to unrestrained masculinity.

Tansy

Tanacetum vulgare

From the Greek word athanasia meaning immortality, tansy was one of the aromatic herbs gathered for use in Our Lady’s Bedstraw [see cleavers], the medieval site of childbirth and postpartum confinement. The midwife was aware of the plant’s powers concerning female reproduction. Tansy could stop heavy bleeding and drive out the afterbirth. Used to restore menstrual flow, it was also known for its ability to induce abortion. In later years, enslaved African women of the Antebellum South were familiar with tansy as a menstrual pain reliever.

Toxic to internal parasites, tansy tea has been prescribed for centuries to kill and expel worms. The plant’s volatile oil is high in thujone, a substance found in absinthe as well as mugwort [see mugwort]. Used to treat jaundice, tansy was called "yellow medicine” by the northern Cheyenne of Montana. In the wilds of the American continent, white settler colonialists wrapped corpses in tansy to retard decay. In the 19th century the plant became so common as a funeral wreath that people began to shun its flowers because of the associations with death. It’s a powerful insecticide though, and the leaves were used to ward off flies, ants and fleas from uncooked meat, keeping it fresh longer. Recent studies have found tansy’s oils to be strong tick and mosquito repellants. Tansy has also been called bitter buttons, golden buttons, and cow bitter. Whatever you call it, it can be deadly. Half an ounce of its oil will kill in a couple hours.

Tobacco

Nicotiana rustica

For thousands of years Native Americans have used traditional tobacco (rustica) as a medium of communication with the Creator. Its smoke carries prayers. The sacred plant blesses crops, binds agreements and welcomes guests. Ceremonial smoking of tobacco offers thanksgiving for the Creator’s gift. The Haudenosaunee use tobacco to communicate with medicinal plants. After offering prayers, they place the leaves on the healing herbs in order to share their intentions with the plants before gathering them.

After migrating from South America, the earliest pipe tobacco found in North America dates to 1658 BCE. Part of the nightshade family, tobacco induces hallucinations if enough is smoked or chewed. Tobacco is the name for several species, while tabacum is the tobacco industry’s chief commercial crop. A hybrid species, tabacum is lethal. Its industry was built by ruthless slave labor in America, and the plant’s products kill eight million people each year. The deadly toxin is nicotine. One teaspoon can kill a child. For an adult, 60 mg is lethal, although the body absorbs only 1 mg from a cigarette. Now “tobacco kills” campaigns abound.

The Chippewa are fighting the anti-tobacco movement by growing traditional tobacco (rustica). Until the Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, laws banned many Native American customs, including traditional uses of tobacco. But the Chippewa continued tobacco prayer rituals with a birch-bark basket of commercial cigarettes for offerings and ceremonies. The Haudenosaunee opted to roll their own cigarettes, tax-free. Each practice a way to keep tobacco sacred.

Water hemlock

Cicuta maculate

Water hemlock is a trickster: it looks like parsley, tastes like wild parsnip and smells like a carrot. As the deadliest plant in North America and member of the parsley family, the weed has poisoned children who used the red-spotted stems for whistles, peashooters and snorkels. One of its names is children’s bane; another is cowbane, (“bane” itself means “poison.”) The tuberous roots deceive animals, too. Just one bite can kill a cow. Each year water hemlock and other toxic weeds poison livestock across America.

Found in marshy meadows, fields and parking lots, water hemlock is native to North America. The Cicuta genus contains cicutoxin, which paralyzes the central nervous system, causing vomiting, diarrhea, kidney failure, heart irregularities, seizures and death. Muscle convulsions are severe enough to dislocate bones. The very toxin that kills also prolongs life, fighting cancer with antileukemia and antitumor properties. Native Americans have long harnessed water hemlock’s potency. The Klamath of the Pacific Northwest tipped their hunting arrows in its juice. The Haudenosaunee used hemlock as a narcotic and disinfectant and elder trees’ bark as its antidote. To become sterile, Cherokee women chewed on its roots for four days in a row. Not only a contraceptive, the parsley family has been used for centuries to stifle male desire and prevent erections. As Ovid wrote, “Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, / It mocked me, hung down the head and sunk.”

White snakeroot

Ageratina altissima

In the 1800s thousands of midwestern settlers including Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, fell ill or died from milk sickness. Symptoms included severe vomiting, tremors, liver failure, constipation, delirium and death. A fugitive from forced relocations of local tribes known only as medicine woman Aunt Shawnee informed the frontier doctor Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby that the colonizers were dying from milk tainted by the cattle’s consumption of white snakeroot. First Nation tribes familiar with the power and toxicity of ageratina altissima made poultices from the plant for snakebite, hence, white snakeroot. Dr. Bixby instructed the white settlers to remove snakeroot from the fields; however, she was ignored. The farmers and medical professionals paid her no heed. Tremetol, a complex alcohol, and glycosides in the plant poisoned anyone who drank the tainted milk, calves as well as humans. It took until 1928 before research confirmed the connection.

Deer avoid snakeroot; though its clusters of tiny white flowers offer nectar to a multitude of pollinators. Blooming in late summer and into the autumn, ageratina altissima is a boon to hungry bees, moths, and flies foraging before cold weather descends. After flowering, the fuzzy-tailed seeds are dispersed by wind. The plant also spreads by rhizomes. Where you see a plant, you may see a colony.

Snakeroot has had many uses in Native America including treatment for venereal disease and fevers. In the South enslaved Africans carried the heart-shaped snakeroot leaves in a mojo bag to ward off jinxing illnesses. When people had so little power over their lives and lived in constant danger of being brutalized, sold off, beaten, and separated from family members, such magic was a testimony to seeking any kind of control.

Yarrow

Achillea millefolium

Found in the “flower burial” at Shanidar Cave, a Neanderthal site in Kurdistan, (60,000 to 35,000 BCE), aromatic yarrow with its gentle essence of anise and licorice has long been a beneficial friend to hominids. At Shanidar, the plants at the site – from yarrow to ragwort and hollyhock– have long been known to have medicinal uses, suggesting that one of those buried was a medicine man, a doctor. If true, herbal plant medicine is older than homo sapiens. Today yarrow’s tiny white or pink flowers and feathery leaves are found around the world, testimony to the plant’s importance and reverence by many cultures. Reputedly, simply holding the energetic achillea millefolium grants psychic protection. Pressing it to the forehead cleanses the third eye and brings chakras into balance. Hebridean druids rubbed their eyes with a leaf of yarrow for second sight, clairvoyance. In the fen country of East Anglia, devil’s nettle, as it’s called, repelled evil spells. Sprinkling it at the door blocked the entrance of any witches. Dried heads and stalks are still integral to the Chinese divination ritual, I Ching, and in the American Southwest, Zuni peoples chewed blossoms and roots before fire-walking or fire-eating. The Ojibwe smoked its florets for ritual and ceremonial purposes. Considered “Life Medicine” by the Navajo, it was chewed for toothaches and made into infusions for earaches. For the Miwok and Pawnee it also served as a powerful painkiller.

DYarrow’s effects on blood are evidenced even in its name—achillea, for Achilles who carried it to Troy to treat his troops. Soldiers have used it up through the First World War to stop blood loss, and it’s also known as woundwort or staunchweed. Aided by anti-inflammatory and antiseptic oils, astringent tannins, resins, and silica, yarrow boosts tissue repair. Acting dually, it staunches the loss of blood and encourages blood flow to promote healing. The plant’s sterols act as hormones to help harmonize the menstrual cycles whether the flow be scanty or excessive.

Cows grazing in meadows and pastures where yarrow abounds are more docile. Though the plant flourishes in such idyllic landscapes, it thrives in wasteland locations where healing and balance are in desperate need.