Posted by Marc Williams, Plants and Healers International Executive Director
Feeling very fortunate to have finally had some time in the flesh with the incomparable Andy Firk! Andy hung out with good mutual friend Frank Cook back in the day. The occasion of our experience together was focused around the wonder that is bamboo.
Andy Firk demonstrating features of Dendrocalamus asper
The venue was Tropical Bamboo Nursery and Gardens outside of Palm Beach, FL. This is Andy’s favorite bamboo nursery in Florida featuring over 250 spp. and it is easy to see why. Not only is the diversity breathtaking but the whole place is layed out like a botanical gardens with signage and all. We covered a plethora of uses including construction, crafts, edibility, medicinality, wind breaks, animal forage and aesthetics.
A number of structures onsite feature species of Guadua angustifolia which is native to central and south America. This is a favorite bamboo used to make structures at festivals like Burning Man and Envision by groups like Bamboo DNA along with Dendrocalamus asper. This Bamboo is naturally rot resistant but Andy shared various methods to enhance this feature from using methods such as borax, neem and soaking in water to remove starch. He also described how in some locales they even soak it in urine or motor oil!
When Frank Cook passed on back in 2009, he left us with several boxes worth of treasures. Several books, some finished, some unfinished, from illustrated children’s books, to his “Plants and Healers Series” i.e. (Peru and Ecuador and India and Nepal). There is a stack of journals full of notes, scribbles, poems, shopping lists and itineraries. He also left footprints; places to go places to see! 6 continents and over 25 countries. He led trips of 7 or 8 lucky travelers to Costa Rica, Peru, India and Africa (a tradition that PHI is beginning to offer! See the following link for more information on a trip to Costa Rica coming in March 2016 with ones to Asheville, NC and Peru coming later in the year.
Last but not least is the cache of meads, beers and medicines he created, but never consumed! How many of us have a treasured bottle or two in our collection that Frank gifted us? Perhaps it is a Sam’s Knob Blueberry Mead (careful when you open those! After it sprays everywhere, you are likely to only have half-a-bottle left!!). Or maybe it is a Chaga-Reishi, or one of the ones he made with bread yeast (how do you say yuck with emoticons?)! Out here in Nevada City, California, I have been fortunate enough to stumble upon one of his primary brewing locations, the homestead of PHI board members Paul Harton and Jill Mahanna. This is one of the few places that any substantial quantity of Frank’s medicinal brews reside. These three friends used to brew beer and mead back in North Carolina and carried their love for the art out to Northern California, where they would fill vessels with medicinal roots and herbs, a jug of honey and some yeast (wild, bread or otherwise!) and let it ferment into something delicious and nutritious! For those of us that have had the joy of poking around Frank’s old mead stash, one of the things we see the most of is labeled, “The Pearl Harbor Porter.”
On Monday November 30th Chris Jacobs led a group of healers from Blue Ridge Healers Without Borders the Asheville chapter of Herbalists Without Borders to Cherokee, NC. The group offered Acupuncture, Massage, Cupping and Herbal Medicine. Nettles tea was available for everyone to drink. A few custom herbal tea’s and tinctures were made up for … Read more
Mushrooms have come into full focus for Marc and I in Asheville the past few weeks. Frank Cook also studied mushrooms extensively, learning from folks from coast to coasts like Christopher Hobbs, Daniel Nicholson, Alan Muskat, and Greenlight. My “mycofascination” began in earnest with the Green Scene, and the conversation about plants is incomplete without a discussion about fungi (and, to be honest, everything, but for the sake of this blog I’ll focus on fungi). A number of types of fungi exist, including endo-, ecto-mycorhizal fungi (fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plant roots externally and internally, respectively), and saprophytic fungi (fungi that feed off of dead wood), and this friendly (and sometimes not so friendly) kingdom of decomposers help the world turn in a big way.
In late September, Marc and I had the privilege of attending two talks with Paul Stamets, founder and president of Fungi Perfecti, internationally renowned mycological researcher, and author of several books. The first talk, held at the Warren Wilson College Presbyterian Church, was a paradigm shifting evening during which Stamets reviewed some of the most cutting edge research he and other mycologists have been conducting over the past few decades. I have previously been blown away by findings Stamets has outlined in his talks, and it appears that mycological research has continued to yield incredible results. From turkey tail’s (Trametes versicolor) cancer fighting properties and synergistic effects with chemotherapy drugs, molds growing inside the reactor room at Chernobyl, Lions Mane’s (Hericium sp.) potential for helping with Parkinson’s disease, to mycoremediation of water, this talk was endlessly fascinating.
Stamets ended his talk at Warren Wilson by discussing his research with bees. He picked up this thread the ensuing Saturday at Haywood Community College at Our Planet in Balance: Bees, Fungi and Man, a symposium sponsered by the Center for Honeybee Research. It appears that saprophytic, polypore fungi could be the key to boosting honeybee’s immune systems so they can tolerate the challenges they are facing with insecticides, introduced pests, movement and congregation in commercial honey production, among various other issues. So for all of you health practitioners, researchers, and nature aficionados out there, check out some mycological research in your field! You may just pick up the scent on a trail to a big discovery, and will at minimum find some new tools for your practice.
All of this mushroom talk inspired the author of this post to pick up some light reading…
The group at the head of the medicinal plant trail at the UPS Sanctuary.
October 1 and 2nd was the First Annual International United Plant Savers “Nurturing Your Botanical Sanctuary, Sacred Conservation” at the United Plant Savers Botanical Sanctuary and Goldenseal Sanctuary in Rutland, Ohio. This workshop brought together landowners and ecological experts from around the US, Polynesia and Canada. Some states represented included Indiana, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.
One thing that struck me about the workshop, and the place itself, was the idea of “sanctuary.” When I stepped onto the land, I noticed a calmness about the place. Though the need to provide sanctuaries for medicinal plants is pressing, there was no urgency about the place. Environmentalists often feel anxiety about various environmental issues, but something about the land at UPS seemed to clear this unease. I came to realize this feeling could possibly be attributed to the history of the land and one of its most unique attributes: a few decades ago, the land was the antithesis of a sanctuary.
This is Andy’s favorite bamboo nursery in Florida featuring over 250 spp. and it is easy to see why. Not only is the diversity breathtaking but the whole place is layed out like a botanical gardens with signage and all. We covered a plethora of uses including construction, crafts, edibility, medicinality, wind breaks, animal forage and aesthetics.
A number of structures onsite feature species of Guadua angustifolia which is native to central and south America. This is a favorite bamboo used to make structures at festivals like Burning Man and Envision by groups like Bamboo DNA along with Dendrocalamus asper. This Bamboo is naturally rot resistant but Andy shared various methods to enhance this feature from using methods such as borax, neem and soaking in water to remove starch. He also described how in some locales they even soak it in urine or motor oil!
