All Creatures Great and Wall - Flora - Part 2

WILD LETTUCE

Google Image: Wild Lettuce

Another of the more interesting plants that few people know about is wild lettuce (Lactuca virosa). Related to the garden lettuce (L. sativa) that we is so familiar to us, it grows everywhere (like A. vulgaris it is a wayside plant), shooting up about mid-July and flowering by the end of the month. Although it can be blanched and eaten, only the freshest, newest and most tender leaves should be used, to avoid bitterness and the sharp spines that form around the edges and bottoms of the leaves as they mature.

More interestingly, from an entheogenic perspective, the plant's flower tips can be cut off, allowing the “milk” (the plant's latex, hence the genus name “Lactuca”) to seep out. It can be dabbed onto a small mirror, left to dry and then scraped up (opium-like—the plant is sometimes called, “lettuce opium”) to be smoked or eaten as a mild sedative and sleep aid. Though, unlike garden lettuce who's milk actually does contain small amounts of morphine, L. virosa contains only a mild sedative lactone called, sesquiterpene, along with many flavinoids and coumarins. However, sesquiterpene does have morphine-like attributes. For instance, it can be used for pain relief and to suppress coughing, but lacks morphine's negative attribute of causing constipation.

For the last several years before leaving my last apartment, I would cut down and dry whole plants - after removing the dry dandelion-like seeds clusters (they have feathery “parachutes) and younger, yellow flowers - and then crushed them up (the de-flowered plants), boil them in water, reducing the mixture until the water was almost gone. Then I would transfer the thick liquid to a glass baking dish where it would be allowed to completely evaporate all of the remaining water. This left a dry extract that could be scraped up and redissolved in water as a bedtime tea to aid sleep.

It really worked quite well (I used between 500 mg and 1,000 mg per dose). The leaves themselves can be dried and smoked in a joint for a similar mildly sedating effect—though honestly when I tried this I felt nothing. If all those street people so desperate for a cheap buzz understood just how close it was to them, growing along every roadside in every temperate-zoned city, in the form of lettuce opium, they would be amazed.

Supposedly, people used this plant when opium poppies were not available. It's effect is substantially weaker than opium though. And although the literature will occasionally state that its use is “addictive,” it would be highly unrealistic for such a thing to occur. I mean, how many people have you ever heard of being addicted to wild lettuce?

It should be mentioned in the spirit of full disclosure that heavy internal exposure to lactones has been shown in laboratory animals to be a carcinogen—poor things; surely there are better ways of spending university grant money... Yet, occasional use for limited periods has never been linked to any ill effects in human beings. In fact wild lettuce extract (according to Chevallier) can be given to children to lessen excitability. On the down-side there is anecdotal evidence that wild lettuce use lowers libido in adults.

MILK THISTLE

Google Images: Milk Thistle

When I first explored Thomas Wright Park there was a new milk thistle (Silybum marianum) plant coming up near the rose bushes seen in the video in Part 1. But when I returned a week later it had been cut down. Milk thistle is green with milky white patches and covered with very sharp spines. It's seed pod is purple, spherical and geodesically spiny.

Although I have never done this, the seeds can be crushed and their oil extracted for medicinal use, especially to protect the liver. German biologists in the 1700's discovered that administering a concoction of thistle seeds just before, or within 48 hours after, ingestion of death cap mushrooms would protect the liver enough to prevent fatal exposure. There has been a recent vogue for milk thistle seed oil in recent years. And it has shown great promise in treating liver-related illnesses and diseases like hepatitis and jaundice.

The plant can grow to be well over seven feet in height. I used to have one that grew up beside my front door at my last apartment each summer. I noticed that by about mid-season it would begin to dry out prematurely. It was also infested with tiny red ants. It wasn't so much their influence that sapped the plant of life, but rather the even-tinier aphids that that the ants protected and milked for the sweet honey that emerged out of the aphid's back-side. Milk thistle is quite beautiful and impressive in its severe and spiny way.

TEA AND SALAD

Earlier in the spring there are pink lilac flowers growing all over the place. Like the rose petals, they can be eaten fresh for a sweet treat or left to dry and steeped for tea. Lilac, rose and mint makes a very nice tea or can be added together in a fruit salad to give it color and a floral fragrance.

You can (and I do) gather rose petals, hips, oregano, parsley, sage and mint for a very interesting and tasty salad, for free. To add a savory element to the salad, if you are near the ocean, cup-up some clean sea water and sprinkle it on your salad as a dressing.

The list of potential additives for this kind of salad goes on and on. If you have a clean source for dandelion greens they can be added too, but they should be blanched first to reduce the bitterness of the tannins which can upset the stomach in larger quantities. Last year I used to gather piles of dandelion greens , blanch them and boil them like spinach, seasoned with butter, lemon juice and salt and pepper. Chive beds can be found in old farm fields where they have been allowed to proliferate undisturbed.

On a recent walk through Mill Creek Park, I found other potential ingredients.

Clover flowers and greens can be used, violet flowers and greens and one of my favorites, sour grass. Sour grass can be identified by its rounded, up-pointed, arrow-like shape. Sometimes lately, when I don't get enough veggies during the week, I gather up a bunch of these herbs and flowers for a large salad in my grocery bag. At desperate times (like just recently as a matter of fact) a salad of sufficient size can satisfy hunger over most of the day.

Together with some discount french bread from Shaw’s ($0.75) and some free butter pads and strawberry jam packets from McDonald's, I separate the savory (oregano, sage, thyme, parsley, chives and sour grass—with a bit of sea watered added) from the sweet (mint, rose petals, lilac flowers, clover flowers and sometimes a big of wild apple), then make a salad of the former, eating it with bread and butter and put jam on some of the bread that I've saved, topping it off with sweet flower petals of the latter for dessert. It's a feast!

HUMAN NATURE

Nature provides abundant amounts of edible and medicinal alternatives to the mono-cultured supermarket items we are used to. It is true that supermarkets provide larger and more reliable sources of food from the plant kingdom than what is found in the gardens and parks of your local town or city. But, one must have money to buy these items. And unfortunately I do not have enough to consistently purchase healthy fruits and vegetables. So having knowledge about what IS offered for free by the plants Iwallk past every day has helped me when the stomach begins to rumble. I bagged about a pound of raspberries today to munch on my trip over the bridge to Portland.

Indeed even these naturalized and wild sources provide enough carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, antibacterials, and in some cases even better nutritional supplements than those offered by supermarket plants. But the craving for higher protein, salt, fat and oil sources leaves little doubt in the mind that the scavenging and gathering plant diet of the habitual wanderer is in need of further diversity in order to truly be complete.

Thankfully, I live near the ocean and kelp, shellfish and fish could theoretically provide what is lacking (assuming a fishing pole were available and Red Tide was out of season). And I grudgingly admit to a very culturally-bound desire for restaurant and other prepared food, especially as I smell it being cooked all around me every day. On days with no food, it is a real – no-joking – kind of torment.

In all fairness, I'm not so sure that when I've lifted myself off the street and re-entered society's kitchens and dining rooms that plucking rose petals, stealing parsley from town planters and chewing on oregano sprigs will be a part of my life anymore.

I do, however, foresee that in my later years (if get to them) I will look back on this time of nomadic travel and all the lessons it taught about the green, and often delicious, world around me as the most naturally “tuned-in” dietary period I had lived through. And because of what I have seen and experienced I now KNOW that the plants ARE our fellow creatures. Their agenda matches ours: to live...and also to let live.

Because of this enlightenment something even tells me that when I am old I will long to be back outside, journeying from town to town, literally surviving from hand to mouth, being present at every beautiful sunset, having the joy of resting beside duck ponds and deep-water inlets, feeling the cool shade of large trees—with their rustling leaves, being caught in the rainy fierceness of a thunderstorm, feeling the wind blow my shirt and hair at the edge of high bridges and cliff-tops...

Ironically, all of this is a blessing I certainly do not have the luxury of fully appreciating right now as Iwallk. But to not have been here—in the NOW, doing what I am doing (following my Father's voice when He says, “Go forward!”); feeling the raw, weathered and profound spirit nakedness of Nature as she teaches and guides me through her pulsing, buzzing, roaring...and whispering...sweetness—that I might learn how to transfer my soul to the outside of myself for all to see, would have been the first nail in my coffin and the final rejection of the very meaning of human existence as it was originally intended: to drink FULLY the cup of experience in this world.

* * *

No one's life is long. But I intend to make mine as wide as it can be. That way...maybe...in harmony, you will remember me...for, God-willing, MY life will be a song.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES

Booth, Martin, Cannabis: A History, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2004.

Booth, Martin, Opium: A History, St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 1999.

Chevallier, Andrew, Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine, DK, New York, 2000.

Novak, F. A., The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers, Crown Press,

New York, 1966, p. 395.

Sonday, Rebecca, Convolvulus arvensis (pdf), Plant Diversity Website, 2008.

Weier, T. Elliot, Stocking, C. Ralph, Barbour, Michel G., Botany: An

Introduction to Plant Biology, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1974,

pp. 644-670.