Plant Walk #5: Grindelia, Stinging Nettle, Bristlecone Pine, Quaking Aspen

Hey y’all, I’m sitting here on a cold morning in Northern California, cooking breakfast in my camper. Sweet Potatoes with fresh onions and fresh eggs from my friend’s chicken herd. It’s the same herd I’ll be giving my compost to later today. I’m trying out my first Steem post on an iPad with a keyboard, a new addition to my digital nomad set up. Well, I’ve had the iPad for awhile but no keyboard. My computer often dies and I can’t recharge it on my solar set up (for now, changing that soon with an inverter!)

It’s been a second since I’ve ve written a steem post and I wanted to do another plant walk. Something not so darn long as my latest posts sharing my old plant profile blog entries!

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This is Grindelia. Grindelia spp. It grows wild on the west coast of California and in the interior Rockies.

This photo in fact was taken in Idaho. I may have mentioned Grindelia on here before but I’ll mention it again. The flowers, especially at the stage pictured, are incredibly sticky and resinous. If you pick them, your hands will be inevitably covered in clear to white sap-like goo. A tincture of the flowers is best used as an expectorant and for dry coughs. It is also super helpful for asthma, and once was a major herb used in mainstream pharmacy until the 1950s an 60s. Weird, why stop then? The way that the pharmaceutical industry has brainwashed us into forgetting plants or seeing their use as bogus is unfathomable to me. As humans, we have co-evolved with plants. Theres no other way it happened. I love studying history for this reason. Some folks have asked for podcast recommendations, and while I will do a post on that in the future, at this moment I am reminded of really GOOD one- Hardcore History by Dan Carlin.

Grindelia is also great topically in a salve for wound healing. Ive never used it that way but I’d be. Curious to try it! Like other resinous things (including the marijuana flowers I have been handling lately here in norther California), they are best extracted in oil, fat or alcohol.

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Most folks know Stinging nettle!

There are a few different species out there but any can be used. I personally love nettle tea as a strong infusion, allowed to soak for awhile. I suppose that is called ‘decoction.’ I often battle anemic tendencies and nettle tea along with eating organ meats helps me. I know that might feel wrong to vegans, but I did that for 5 years and no matter how much plant based iron I tried to get, nothing was enough to keep my iron levels at a healthy place. Nettle tea is also a diuretic, increasing urination, especially important when needing to release certain things- like in the case of UTIs. It’s full of minerals, and to me is basically like taking a multi-vitamin.

(for some reason steempeak stopped letting me do formatting at this point, not allowing me to scroll up to alter text as header, italics etc. )

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Bristlecone Pine.

I visited these ancient trees several times over the years in Nevada. This photo was taken in Great Basin National Park. They thrive off of harsh climates and actually don’t do as well at lower elevations. They are a part of a remnant ecology high up on the mountains in the Great Basin Desert that are left over from when the Great Basin was a sea with water and the Sierra mountain range was not as high, which now blocks moisture from the ocean. You can feel how ancient they are when you walk through them, some over 7000 years old. I wouldn’t use them for medicine, but they do use their own thick sap to protect themselves from the elements.

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Quaking Aspen.

Actually, Quaking Aspens are actually older than Bristlecone, but they don’t ‘seem’ this way because of their size. Aspens grow clonally, and usually a whole forest is a few different organisms. Even if a fire knocks back a grove, the rootstock will survive and sprout more trees. Aspens are related to Cottonwoods, and their bark is similarly pain-relieving but generally I dont harvest their buds for medicine like Cottonwood. They are super important ecologically and fire suppression has not helped them thrive lately.

On my blog, http://www.ofsedgeandsalt.com I have written extensive plant profiles on the Populus genus, a post on Bristlecone, and many others.

I hope you enjoyed this little mini plant walk. I wish I could have made the formatting better but alas, the use of steempeak on iPad seems to not allow me to scroll up after highlighting text in order to shift the size. I’m so used to the ease of blogging on squarespace!

Grateful for plants, and grateful for steem in the age of crypto currency.