Mardi 16 avril | Asako Kitaori & Dion Workman | Walking on Boundaries
SOLIDARE
The blooming wild cherries signal other plants to wake from their winter slumbers. The leaves which will grow and green by summer are now an array of different colored shoots, making of the mountains an amazing palette. Every rain draws plants up and up into the air. Uguisu (Japanese Bush Warbler) youngsters are trying to learn their songs (confusion and uncertainty slowly transforming into confident exuberance). Bees and wasps are out house hunting.
The chabo are munching on chickweed and rape flowers while Taro, the dog, excavates mole tunnels. And we busy ourselves gathering plants. It is an especially good time for tender young leaves and flowers. In our salad, there is dandelion, chickweed, seri (Japanese parsley), mitsuba (Japanese hornwort), watercress, nobiru (Chinese garlic), borage, wild mustard, false strawberry leaves, wood sorrel, to name a few.
Yomena, a kind of chrysanthemum (all chrysanthemums are edible and share a distinctive smell), mixed with rice releases an invigorating smell when opening the pot. This year the shidoke communities in the forest are thick and lush. These vibrant green plants have a lovely crisp texture with just a hint of bitterness. Over a week we will harvest a year's supply of bamboo shoots.
These are wild plants, some growing in great abundance and usually referred to as weeds. The human psyche has become very strange indeed. The difference between crop and weed is really a matter of control. Weeds being the plants that persistently remind us of the tenuous and temporary nature of our control over our surroundings. The more abundantly they grow the greater our unease.
When I was growing up, goldenrod was creating its flashy yellow flowers all over Japan. Whilst in the US goldenrod has mistakenly been blamed for causing hay fever in Japan a rumor circulated that their pollen caused asthma. We kids were holding our breath and running past the goldenrod communities one after another, while grownups were busy cutting them down. The economy was growing around that time and there were so many factories belching out thick smoke everywhere. Goldenrod was multiplying around the factories, sidewalks, parking lots. Now I know goldenrod as a great medicinal plant, an anti-inflammatory, particularly effective in the treatment of chronic sore throats. Did we really believe it was goldenrod that was making the air unbreathable? Was the abundant goldenrod not, rather, a natural response to a rapidly deteriorating environment? The genus to which the various goldenrod species belong is called Solidago and is derived from the Latin verb solidare, “to make whole.” The air quality has improved somewhat due to regulations for factories and cars and I no longer see so much goldenrod about.
Itadori (Japanese knotweed), is one of our favorite spring vegetables and one of the most virulently hated plants in the US at present. The Japanese name can be translated as “pain remover” and it has long been considered an important healing ally. It heals the Earth too. Itadori has an amazing capacity to remove toxins from the soil and can grow in places contaminated beyond the threshold of most other life forms. Interestingly, considering the vehemence with which this plant has been attacked in the US, it has turned out to be one of the most important herbs for curing Lyme disease, a disease which has rampaged through the northeastern United States over the past couple of decades. When maps charting the spread of Lyme disease and the spread of Japanese knotweed across the US are overlaid an uncanny correspondence is revealed. Japanese knotweed would appear to be traveling about six months to one year in advance of Lyme disease. The cure is present, abundantly, by the time the disease arrives.
Harvesting wild plants for food takes a little longer than plucking carrots from neat rows in a vegetable patch or walking to the local grocery but this is time spent breathing fresh air, soaking in the calm of the forest, maybe stopping a while to watch the play of light on the surface of a mountain stream. The plants unfurl mysteries that we may never fully comprehend but it is enough to know their names, to know a little of what they can do, how they can be used. There is no need to control them.
[For previous Walking on Boundaries, click on January, February or March]