What is a Herbarium and what is it for: Jamestown's famous weed

Today for my blog post I figured I would do a traditional blog post (for this blog, anyway) along with a "Part 2" that talks a bit about what a Herbarium is and what use it has to science. I've been talking a bit in recent blogs about my personal herbarium that I'm making with my Garden List species, and I've also done a few for the Herbarium at Western of species I've found on campus that only recently appeared. I'm a creature of habit and tend to walk the same path to go to the same place; because I happen to pay attention to the "green stuff" covering the ground, I usually notice when something weird pops up that wasn't there before. I'll talk a bit about one of my favourite weedy plants, which also happens to be my very first plant collection in the herbarium! Sandra, who I featured in a sneaky picture in a previous blog post HERE, is the Herbarium Assistant and Acting Herbarium Curator until the position is filled and she found it hysterical how excited I was about collecting and pressing my very first Herbarium specimen. Since then...I'm hooked. Anyone want a plant collection pressed and dried? I'm your girl. Even better (because it's more fun), want a pressed and dried collection glued and mounted on herbarium paper? Let me know.

Here we go! My favourite weed. :)

Species name: Datura stramonium

Common name: Jimson weed, Jamestown weed, devil's cucumber, datura

Location: UWO Campus

Jimsonweed (or Jimson weed...same plant, along with about 20 other common names this plant has) is my favourite weedy species that we have here in North America. Not just because of it's many common names (HOW AWESOME is the name "devil's cucumber"?!), but because of the rich history it has in the making of the identity of North America today. Without this plant, I doubt anyone living in the United States or Canada would have the same kind of "national identity" that we have today. This plant is widely believed to have originated in North America, but was spread across the globe very early for its recreational uses and so that's difficult to confirm. Since I really like this plant, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say it's native to North America...because I can :) It can be weedy and spread quite quickly, so if you do decide to plant it you'll want to make sure you dead-head the flowers before the seed pods form (or, if you like the appearance of the seed pods make sure you pick them off the plant before they crack open and disperse their seeds).

Jimsonweed is in the nightshade family (Solanaceae), which is the same plant family that we find the edible food crops potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, as well as some ornamental species like henbane, mandrake, belladonna, and deadly nightshade (which, contrary to its common name is actually one of the plants that's least likely to kill you in this family, unless you're a small child or a beloved family pet). Like many of the species listed above, this plant is deadly poisonous. And when I say deadly, I mean deadly. Consuming the seeds from one seed pod would be enough to cause catastrophic organ failure in an adult human which would very quickly lead to death. Should you decide to only consume a few seeds, maybe 25 or so, it would also lead to catastrophic organ failure. This circumstance, however, results in a very slow, very painful death as your body slowly shuts down. Consuming only a small number of the seeds of this plant *may* result in a hallucinogenic trip, but it has equal likelihood in resulting in nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and you wishing that the world would end right then and there (but you'll live). A few years ago there was a string of deaths of high school students in the United States, and it turns out that they all died from consuming Jimsonweed seeds. One of their friends had read on the internet that they're a free way of getting high, so they all ate them. Kids, don't believe everything you read on the internet! This plant is not worth it...trust me. Jimsonweed is fun to look at (how awesome are those seed pods?!), the flowers have an absolutely wonderful aroma, and they provide some nice fall colour to a garden. But don't, under any circumstances, eat it. Ever!

So why did I say above that this plant is probably the single most important plant species for the development of the identity of North America as it is today? Well...it comes from this plant's other major common name, the Jamestown weed. This name comes from Jamestown, Virginia, which was the site of Bacon's Rebellion. Long before Europeans sailed across the ocean blue to settle in what is now the United States, there were people already living there. In fact, there were a lot of people. About 14,000 people lived in and around Jamestown in the early 1600s when the first wave of settlers arrived. The local people were used to the types of harsh conditions to be expected in the winter months, but the Europeans were not so lucky. Many of them died, and it is widely speculated that the few that remained turned to cannibalism in order to survive. During the second wave of settlement, the "new Americans" were smarter: use the locals to build us shelters and show us how to gather food, and kill them if they refuse. There were many clashes between groups, resulting in hundreds of deaths. Nathanial Bacon decided he had had enough of the British fighting with the local people, and started an uprising. Governor William Berkeley had started teaming up with the local people to start building a nation. This angered some of the early settlers, since these same people were responsible for the deaths of many of their friends and family (it swings both ways, but I guess that wasn't the point). Bacon gathered people (estimates are between 300 and 500 people) to fight against Berkeley, eventually driving him out of Virginia and back to Britain. One of the major turning points in the rebellion was when British soldiers started flipping sides and fighting against their countrymen and their own Governor...all because they had been drugged. Bacon observed the local people preparing tea made out of a benign green plant (likely some kind of mint or other species which has a strong flavour, since Jimsonweed is reported to not taste very good) and sprinkled with 2 or 3 of the seeds of the Devil Plant. He prepared this same tea to offer to the freezing British soldiers, who promptly hallucinated for two weeks and became violently ill. While hallucinating, the soldiers were manipulated into amusing Bacon and his supporters, and once the drug's effects wore off they returned to normal, confused as to where the time had gone. When they were ostracized by their fellow soldiers for the actions performed while "under the influence," they decided to flip sides and help drive Governor Berkeley out of their new settlement. Berkeley retreated across the river, but with Bacon's death in 1676 a new leader of the Rebellion took over: John Ingram. Unfortunately, Ingram wasn't a very smart man. He decided to start a fight against the Pamunkey people, which were loyal supporters of Berkeley and even supplied him with warrior fighters. Between the British and the Pamunkey, the Rebellion was defeated and the rebels were driven out of the new settlement. The "good guys" had won. It has been speculated that if the British soldiers drugged with Jimsonweed hadn't flipped sides, Ingram never would have had enough supporters to wager a war against the Pamunkey people. Without this pivotal attack, Berkeley might have decided the war wasn't worth it and retreated back to Britain. What would this side of the world look like if this had of happened? It's impossible to speculate, but I bet it would be very different than what it is today. All thanks to a plant.

Jamestown, Virginia actually has an incredibly fascinating history in the early settlement of North America, and the independence of the United States. If you'd like to read more about the waves of settlement, the clashes that occurred, and the REAL story of Pocahontas (yes, that happened in Jamestown, too!) you can read more on the Wikipedia page HERE.

This plant isn't all bad. The active ingredients leading to hallucinations (and ultimately death) are alkaloids called atropine and scopolamine. Some of you might recognize these two compounds, as atropine is one of the most successful drug compounds used in treating severe asthma. In large amounts, atropine causes the paralysis of the lung tissue and the dilation of the bronchioles which increases air flow. In smaller amounts the paralysis occurs to a much smaller extent allowing the patient to still be able to breathe, but dilates the bronchioles to increase air flow. Scopolamine is also a very important drug in modern medicine; it's used to treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease and is one of the most effective anti-tremor medications (in small concentrations, of course!). Datura itself (the combination of these two alkaloids) is used to treat morphine addiction. Because of the effects on the body that it has, there are certain conditions that it will aggravate like glaucoma or difficulty urinating. Glaucoma is caused by an increase in pressure of the fluid of the eye, which can be aggravated by atropine (which causes the dilation of blood vessels, which would increase blood flow to the eye and increase the pressure even more). One of the main effects of both atropine and scopolamine is the inhibition of the parasympathetic system, which is responsible for the regulation of urination. If you're already having trouble urinating, inhibiting this further could be disastrous. But, again, this plant WILL KILL YOU if you try to make some kind of medicinal concoction on your own. Prescribed drugs have these compounds in very small, controlled amounts. The plant does what it pleases. Don't be stupid.

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Now that you know why this plant is just so awesome, I figured I would talk a bit about this "Herbarium thing": what it is, what it's used for, why they're important, and what is stored in them.

A herbarium is like a library, but for dried plant material. When you walk into a herbarium (which is climate-controlled to prevent insect infestation, so usually kept around 15 C) the first thing that you'll notice are rows upon rows of cabinets. The cabinets contain stacks of sheets of card stock, on which is glued (or sewn, if you've got a really old collection) a plant collection. This collection is identified by species name, a location of where the collection was made (which now includes coordinates), any important information to go along with the collection, who made the collection, and a collection number (often called an accession number). Herbarium specimens are very similar to books: they have titles, authors, years of publication, and a brief description (like liner notes) of what can be found on the page. These specimens are then preserved for all of eternity, and databased so they can be accessed by researchers from other institutions. Some herbaria have thousands of collections (the Western Herbarium has about 60,000 collections), while others like the New York Botanical Gardens or the Paris Natural History Museum have millions of collections (about 10 million at NYBG, 8-9 million in Paris). Herbarium collections are invaluable to science since they show a snapshot of the plants living in an area in any given period of time. The herbarium collections at Western are "young" compared to other institutions since our oldest specimen is from the late 1800s. For my research, the oldest herbarium specimen I received on loan was from 1799, and many were from the 1820s and 1830s. There are some collections in Kew and in Paris from the 1500s! Herbarium specimens have been used in a wide variety of different types of biological studies, from studies about taxonomy (where you study old and new collections of species to look for new species "lost" in herbarium collections or to help you determine whether what you collected is a new species or not) to conservation biology. Herbarium specimens are actually becoming more and more crucial in conservation and restoration biology as habitats are becoming more and more degraded. What plant species used to be present in a given area, compared to what is there today? Can species that used to be present even be located in the same area now? Has the composition of which species are present completely changed? What does this mean? There have even been cases of determining that a plant species is now extinct in the wild based on herbarium collections. The species was collected from an area, described, and hasn't been seen since.

So how do we make a herbarium collection? I figured it was only fitting that my very first plant collection ever to be stored in a herbarium should be my favourite plant: Jimsonweed. When I found the plant growing on campus I carefully pulled it out of the ground to get the root ball intact, knocked off all of the extra dirt, and brought it in to Sandra in the herbarium for pressing. Here's what the plant looks like, in front of a standard piece of herbarium paper (11.5" x 16.5") for scale: 

Now, it should be obvious even to someone who's never made a herbarium collection before that this isn't going to work. Half the plant is missing; it's about 2 times bigger than the size of the paper. So what to do? Well...cut it. All of this preparation of a specimen needs to be done before it's dried, or else the dried plant will just shatter when you try to manipulate it later. I cut the bottom off right at the edge of the paper, and the bottom half became "sheet 2 of 2" for this collection. Next, the collection needs to go between pieces of newspaper and pressed out flat in a herbarium press, which then goes in the dryer to dry the specimen as much as possible (which can take up to a month, depending on how juicy the plant material is!). When a collection is pressed, maintaining the integrity of the plant is very important, because if someone wants to see your collection in 60 years they have to be able to determine what it even is. Showing the upper side and the lower side of leaves is important, but never the same leaf. Folding leaves when drying makes them very fragile and should be avoided when possible. The flowers of the plant, if present, should be kept as visible as possible and all other plant material should be pulled away. The seed pods, if present, should remain on the plant and should also be easily visible. Once all of the manipulation is done, put the newspaper-plant-sandwich into the press, the press into the drying oven, and forget about it for at least a week.

Once the press comes out of the oven, the sheets of newspaper can carefully be removed and opened. Sometimes tweezers can help to carefully pick the newspaper off of the plant material, since sometimes plants "juice" when they're squeezed into a tight location like the herbarium press. As long as the collection is dry, it's ready to be mounted on herbarium paper.

Grab yourself some 11.5" x 16.5" rag-bond acid-free paper and some acid-free glue. Contrary to what you might think, the less glue the better (learned that one the hard way once...). Decide which side is "up" and which side is "down" of your collection, and dab some glue in important places on the side that will be down. Important places would be at major intersections on the stem where pieces could break in two, along leaf petioles, or where the flower attaches to the stem. One thing you DON'T want to do is glue the entire flower to the paper, or the entire leaf. When someone else looks at your specimens they like to be able to see the underside of all of these things, so leave some space where they could carefully be pulled up off the paper to inspect the underside. When all of that is done, the specimen needs to be weighted down onto the paper. Herbarium presses might be able to squish things pretty well, but some plants are great resistors to the squishing. No matter what you do, you just can't get them quite flat enough. Common washers and nuts can be used to weigh the plant material into the glue dabs until the glue dries enough that the plant can't escape it. Once it's all glued and weighted down, it looks like this:

Let the glue dry, and while you're waiting you can make yourself a label! The label needs to be laser-printed using acid-free ink on acid-free paper that is BRIGHT white (even brighter than normal printer paper) and needs to be formatted according to the herbarium that you're depositing your specimen into. This is what our herbarium labels look like, and all of the information that we put onto them:

(my collection is #53,018 in the herbarium! Woo!)

Now it's time to glue the label onto the herbarium paper. They always go in the bottom right corner, so hopefully you saved space for it there (again, learned this the hard way once, too...). Glue it on with acid-free, extra-tacky label glue (which, of course, is different than specimen glue...). Make sure the glue doesn't leak out the edges! If it does, wipe it off right away. We want these looking pretty:

And now you can do any finishing touches! You can see that there are four of the big nuts weighing something down above the label on the sheet on the left. When the seed pods of Jimsonweed are dried, they split open to release the seeds. We want to keep these! Any plant material that falls off of a pressed herbarium specimen is still important material. These go into a little paper envelope, which is glued directly above the label of the specimen (or on page 1 of 2, if there is more than 1 sheet that goes with a single collection).

Now you're done! I was so proud of this silly specimen. It's just a dried plant glued onto paper, but it was my first dried plant glued onto paper! And hopefully it will be useful to someone some day. Now I've got nearly 90 others courtesy of my Garden List and trust me...botanical craft time never gets old :)

A non-ephedrine Ephedra

Species name: Ephedra nevadensis

Common name: American ephedra

Location: UWO Greenhouse

This rather unassuming species is native to the deserts of North America, hence the Latin name (nevadensis should make you think of the US state Nevada). In a pot it grows to be a rather sad, straggly, sticky thing but in the wild it can be quite large, shrubby, and an important food source for many animals that live there. To me, this is one of the most fascinating plants in the greenhouse, right up there with whisk ferns (which don't look like ferns at all; you can read about them HERE). Ephedra, also sometimes called a gnetophyte depending on the species, is actually a closer relative to ginkgo trees (read about them HERE) and pine trees (read about white pine HERE) than flowering plants, or even club mosses (which it can look very similar to if you use your imagination). In the second image you can see some primitive cones if you look closely, and these are where the pollen and the ovules are produced to make new seeds. They are produced in the stem nodes, usually after new growth has appeared for that year. When a plant undergoes nodal growth, it will produce a bit of a branch and then once conditions are no longer favourable for growth it will produce a terminal bud. This bud will develop once conditions are favourable again and produce new growth and the bud scales will fall off, leaving a scar around the branch or stem which is called a node. This node is also where axial buds are produced, which end up growing into branches (or, in this case, cones).

North American ephedra has been used for centuries as a medicinal species by Native North Americans, and also as a food (although, I can't imagine it being very tasty or very nutritious). For farmers historically and currently in the southern United States desert areas, it is also a very important forage crop for cows, pigs, sheep, and goats.

Medicinally, this is not the same species as the psychoactive plant from which we get the drug ephedrine (but this is also a species of Ephedra, hence the name of the alkaloid). It was originally included in cold and flu medication because it is effective in drying mucous membranes (and so helping with your runny nose), soothing sore throats, and helping you sleep. There are other drugs that are now included in cold medication instead, because of the dirty little secret that ephedrine has. It causes a drastic increase in heart rate, which can have serious complications in some patients (especially those who already have high heart rate as a result of high blood pressure, or vice versa) and even death. In 2007 there was a huge spike in ephedra-related deaths in the United States, and so it was required by cold and flu medication manufacturers to remove products containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine off the shelves. High-performance athletes were also rumored to use ephedrine as a performance-enhancing drug. Recreationally, ephedrine is a precursor in the manufacture of methamphetamine, and so the sale of ephedrine-containing products was fuelling the underground (and illicit) drug market. There was the suggestion that because ephedrine was such an effective cold and flu medication that it should be a medication you need to request from a pharmacist (but could get without a prescription) in order to obtain, but that wouldn't necessarily stop the ease at which methamphetamine manufacturing labs could obtain it. It has also been used as a diet aid (along with other drugs like caffeine) because it increases body temperature and so should help burn more calories per hour when sedentary, but aside from being incredibly dangerous (death or severe illness requiring hospital stays have been reported in several hundred cases), it also doesn't actually do anything. Only a minor increase in fat burned over a placebo was ever recorded in scientific studies, and certainly not enough to warrant it being sold as a diet aid.

Stop touching me!

Species name: Mimosa pudica

Common name: sensitive plant

Location: UWO Greenhouse

The sensitive plant is native to Central and South America, where it is so common you might mistake it for grass in some areas if you're not paying attention. It has been introduced to other continents around the world, and it has become invasive in Australia, South Africa, Tanzania, and many islands in the South Pacific (along with other continental countries in Asia). It has also been introduced to many countries other than just South Africa and Tanzania in Africa, but it does not seem to become invasive there. When I was in Panama, the hotel I was staying at looked out over the Chagres River (the main river feeding the Panama Canal), and between the hotel and the river was a big flood-plain covered in what I thought was grass. I went and took a walk one day and you could literally see where I had wandered around, since all of the leaves were closing behind me as I walked. It was a neat experience!

The sensitive plant is called the sensitive plant for a reason; it is sensitive to light, temperature, electrical charge, and touch. It is not just a common garden plant in some areas for these reasons; it has become one of the most widely sold tropical indoor plant species in recent years. When touched, the leaves of the plant very quickly close; the difference in time between the photo with the leaflets fully open and them fully closed was only a few seconds. After a couple of minutes the leaves open back up again. This is accomplished through the rapid movement of water out (in the case of the leaflets closing) or in (in the case of the leaflets opening again) to the plant cells. The plants, like animals for generating never impulses which result in movement of muscles, have the ability to rapidly pump potassium ions into the the spaces between cells, causing a change in osmolarity of the cells. Normally the osmolarity of the cell is slightly higher than the osmolarity of the space outside the cells; this ensures water is constantly being diffused into the cell, keeping it turgid (which would result in crisp lettuce instead of floppy, gross lettuce). When potassium is pumped into the spaces between cells, water moves across the cell membrane and the cell wall into the intercellular spaces to try to equalize the osmotic pressure. This causes water to escape rapidly from the cells, the cells collapse, and the leaflets close. Once the potassium is gradually cleared away from the intercellular spaces, the water is free to diffuse back into the cells, and the leaflets gradually open back up again.

Being able to open and close your leaves is a great response to have, but only if you can use it properly and with purpose. Pumping potassium into a space that usually has very little takes quite a bit of energy, and using all this energy for no reason probably isn't smart if you want to survive. So what would possess a plant to close its leaves in response to touch? What would the point of that be? Well, you can see some clues in the bottom photograph. The varieties of plants grown in greenhouses for sale as tropical indoor plants have been bred to have lost their spines. Wild varieties of the sensitive plant have tiny spines all along the underside of their leaves, and all along the petiole of the leaf. When the leaflets close, they expose these spines to whatever has cause the leaf closure, and this is hopefully an effective defence for the plant. Normally this works well; the sensitive plant has become so abundant in pastures because cows refuse to eat it (the spines mixed with the fact that it is mildly irritating to the gastrointestinal system of cows, sheep, horses and pigs) and insects stay away from it. When I was walking through the Mimosa field, I was happy I was wearing shoes! My toes would have been very unhappy if I wasn't.

The sensitive plant was once planted on purpose in areas of Africa, Asia and Australia (and the reason why it has become so invasive). Because it is part of the bean or legume family, it has nitrogen-fixing bacteria nodules along its roots. These nodules, containing the bacterium Rhizobium, convert atmospheric nitrogen (a form of nitrogen plants cannot use) into a biologically-active form of nitrogen. This is great for agriculture soils, since traditional crops like corn, wheat and rice all deplete the soil of nitrogen very quickly. If you can rotate your crops with a legume, you can put the nitrogen back into the soil for the next growing season. When the plant has the ability to escape and grow in the wild on their own, and has no known herbivores that will target it, it becomes dangerous to the environment. Eradication programs are now in place in Australia, where the sensitive plant has become especially problematic.

The toxin in the leaves of this plant, called mimosine (an alkaloid), is toxic to a few species of insects and so has been looked at in recent years as a natural insecticide. I'm not sure where the research stands on this, but it is produced in such small quantities in the plant that a method of synthesizing mimosine in the lab would have to be accomplished before it had any real industrial applications. Extracts from the leaves containing mimosine have also been shown to be a natural anti-venom to the deadly toxic monocled cobra snake, and so there may also be a medicinal application for this plant.

A Northern coffee relative

Species name: Cephalanthus occidentalis

Common name: buttonbush

Location: Ontario

Buttonbush is a native plant to North America from southern Ontario all the way south to Mexico. There are two, perhaps three, clear distinct populations of buttonbush. One population occupies a range extending almost completely down the eastern seaboard of North America, from Ontario east to Nova Scotia all the way south to Texas and east to Florida. A second population occupies the fragment of the native range in Mexico (these two populations don't overlap in area, but can very easily still interbreed). A third population exists to the west of the Rocky Mountains in California. The fact that the native range is now so fragmented suggests this species was at one point much more abundant than it now is. It also suggests that those two populations (the Mexico/eastern North America population and the California population) are now undergoing the process of speciation because of the huge geographic distance that is between them.

My blog readers in warmer climates (or those who have been to warmer climates and have gone out and appreciated some of the local species grown for agricultural purposes; Ethiopia, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominican, Mexico, Venezuela, South Africa...) might recognize some features of this plant while finding others completely foreign and not looking like they belong (a somewhat similar story to the oak-leaved hydrangea, which you can read all about HERE). The leaves of this plant look strangely similar to those of the coffee tree, while the flowers (and later, the fruit) look completely different. Well, you're on the right track! This is one of the northernmost species of the Rubiaceae, or the coffee family. Other important species in this family are the madder plant (a very important plant in the natural dye industry; the dye obtained from the madder plant is a brilliant red), cinchona (important for the alkaloid extract quinine, important in the treatment and prevention of malaria), and woodruff (important in the production of coumarin, and profiled on my blog HERE).

Like many native North American plants, the buttonbush has a historical medicinal use for Native North Americans. The bark of the plant was used like a tea (and sometimes chewed when it was young and fresh) to treat diarrhea, rheumatism, headache, fever, toothaches, and (of all things) venereal disease. Whether or not it is medicinally valuable against many of these conditions remains to be seen, but it is useful on the skin to relieve itch and various skin rashes. One of the types of rashes that it is most effective against is the skin rash associated with an allergy to the essential oils of the poison ivy plant. Conveniently enough, where the buttonbush is most common is where there is usually a high density of poison ivy plants. It's nice that natural remedies to some of nature's most toxic plants grow right beside the offenders!

Most medicinal effects this plant may or may not have have been abandoned since this plant is actually quite toxic. It contains a chemical called cephalathin, which causes vomiting and, in severe cases, can cause convulsions and paralysis. Consumption of this plant is highly discouraged, even though many other species rely on it for food (birds, bees, deer, rabbits, waterfowl, and shore birds).

Spiraea: one of the top potential invasive species

Species name: Spiraea japonica

Common name: Japanese spiraea

Location: Ontario

This species or ornamental plant is native to Japan (as the name suggests; but also China and Korea) but has been naturalized in North America and parts of Europe. This plant is normally kept under control in gardens, but has the potential to become invasive if left unchecked. It prefers riparian or boggy habitats, so the first place you'll notice this plant popping up if becoming invasive in an area is along roadside ditches. It's unfortunate that this is yet another species of potentially invasive plants that prefers moist habitats since our bogs, swamps and marshlands are already under such large threats by invasives already.

Since I profiled how to identify a plant as being a member of the mint family, Spiraea is a good example of how to identify a plant in the rose family. Members of the rose family have typical 5-petaled flowers, and the petals are roundish at the edges and narrow towards the interior of the flower to make a star-shape in the middle when the flower is fully open. The female parts of the flowers are very difficult to see, but the male parts are numerous (more often than not, more than 12 stamens). Spiraea in general is not a good example of this, but the leaves of the rose family also more often than not have something called a stipule at the bottom, which is like a "mini leaf" at the base of the leaf's petiole where it attaches to the stem. There are other families of plants that have stipules, but only this family has the characteristic 5-petaled flower (usually pink or white, but not always) with many male parts and stipules.

The arrow in red points to the stipule at the base of the petiole of a compound leaf in the rose family (from Wikipedia)

The roots of Spiraea plants have been used for hundreds of years in Traditional Chinese Medicine as an anti-inflammatory tea. Recently, a couple of researchers from China looked at whether or not root extract from Spiraea has biologically active chemicals, and they found five new alkaloids in the roots that do show anti-inflammatory effects in mice. The kinds of effects this could have on humans and the diseases it could be useful to help treat are numerous and scientific investigations are ongoing.

The bitter bane of dogs

Species name: Amsonia tabernaemontana

Common name: Eastern bluestar, blue dogbane

Location: Ontario

Every year this plant flowers in the back yard, I think to myself "we should rip this out." It just keeps getting bigger and more unruly. It can't possibly be a native plant! Well, apparently it is. And a native plant that's not known to be especially vigorous even in its native range, let alone slightly north of its range. I guess it can stay!

The Eastern bluestar is native to the Northeastern United States, and likely into Canada, too (but like political boundaries, the range of this species appears to end at the border...). This plant was voted in 2008 as being one of the top 10 most sustainable plants by the Phipps Conservatory due to its non-invasive habit and its ability to resist insect predation and fungal/bacterial diseases. As evidence by its growth abilities when being ignored in my back yard, it doesn't need any kind of supplemental fertilization, and the plant actually looks better in low nutrient soil (in nutrient-rich soil the plant becomes very spindly and is unable to remain upright on its own). It is also incredibly drought-tolerant which is good for warm, dry Ontario summers.

When the stems of bluestar are broken, a milky sap is exuded. Those with sensitive skin should use gloves when handling portions of broken stems; the sap contains a bitter alkaloid that can cause skin rashes, blistering and burning. If you're going to pick these plants to use in a flower arrangement, you can decrease the chance of skin irritation by very briefly burning the ends of the stems to prevent the exuding of the sap. Keep in mind that this would also seal off the stem to the possibility of pulling water into the stem; flowers won't last long after this is done. The alkaloids in the plant also mean it should never be consumed, and caution should be exerted if planting this plant in a garden exposed to small children (their skin is more sensitive).

Thou shalt forget me not!

Species name: Myosotis sp.

Common name: forget-me-not

Location: Nova Scotia

One of the amazing aspects of the Acadia University campus is their arboretum and medicinal plants garden. Tanya and I spent a good couple of hours wandering around a relatively small corner of campus looking at their pond system (with bog, swamp and marsh areas that they had created), their native plant area, and their medicinal plant garden. The medicinal plant section was by far my favourite because it had so many unusual plants, most of which were historically used in native medicine or once used for extracts to treat a specific disease. They even had a wormwood plant, since that was once originally used to treat malaria!

The forget-me-nots were growing around one of the ponds, which leads me to believe this could possibly be the "true" forget-me-not, or Myosotis scorpioides (native to Africa), but there aren't enough identifying features in the photo to be able to tell for sure. The genus Myosotis contains about 50 different species, and almost all of them have the potential to become invasive under the right conditions. Forget-me-nots are popular garden plants in North America, since they are such an effective ground cover, especially in shady areas (which should lead you to believe even more strongly that they're invasive!). I remember planting the "mini kind", as I used to call them when I was 4 or 5, with my mom in our garden at the old house. More than 20 years later we were still pulling the stragglers out of the garden! Since the plants themselves were so short, it leads me to believe it was probably Myosotis alpestris that we were planting, or the Alpine forget-me-not which is the state flower of Alaska. For anyone that's counting petals, this plant is indeed a dicot!

Unlike other spring wildflowers I've blogged about so far, forget-me-nots do not produce rhizomes for underground energy storage. Instead, they have a diffuse fibrous root system so they act as effective erosion-control plants by holding in the soil. This root system is also what allows them to invade riverbanks (also called the "riparian zone") and out-compete native plants. It also produces more seed at a much quicker rate than most of our native plants that grow along riverbanks, which helps contribute to their success as an invasive species.

The origins of the common name of this plant are quite diverse, but I'll share my two favourites. The one my grandma used to always tell me (she had a story for everything...true or not, they were always interesting!) was about a knight in shining armour that was walking by the river with his princess when he bent down to pick her some flowers. The weight of his armour pulled him into the river, but before he drowned he threw the flowers at the princess and yelled "forget me not!" The Freemasons also used this flower as a symbol in the 1920s to not forget the poor and desperate people in Germany. The flower still has tight ties with modern Masons, often being worn as a symbol that those that have died are gone but not forgotten.

Forget-me-nots have been used (and are actually becoming more popular) in herbal medicine around the world as a treatment for chronic nosebleeds and lung issues. I would strongly suggest against the use of this plant for these purposes, however, since they potentially contain high levels of chemicals called "hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids," which attack the liver and cause liver failure and can cause cancer. There is conflicting evidence on whether all species of this genus contain these alkaloids, but it's always better to be safe than sorry!

Lupine: the state flower of Texas

Species name: Lupinus sp.

Common name: Lupin, lupine

Location: Nova Scotia (second photo from Wikipedia showing the flowers of various ornamental species)

The lupine (or lupin, as this plant is referred to outside of North America) is native to a wide variety of locations from all continents. Now, various species can be found worldwide and only a few can be distinguished by leaf shape and leaf characteristics alone (this isn't one of them--hence "Lupinus sp."). Lupines are part of the bean family, and have characteristic bean flowers and also share the most sought-after characteristics of beans as agricultural crops: they have high concentrations of protein and oil in their seeds, and have symbiotic bacteria in their roots that fix nitrogen. This biologically-available nitrogen is then released to the plant in return for sugars and oxygen, where it can be used by the plant in photosynthesis to make more sugar (and in respiration to make energy). For this reason, lupines are very popular in some agricultural systems to be planted alongside crops that require large amounts of nitrogen fertilizers like corn and wheat. These types of plants are referred to as "green manure". There are about 280 species in the genus Lupinus, and the Texas Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) is the state flower of Texas.


Certain species of lupine can be eaten, but others are quite toxic. If you don't know what species is growing in your back yard, it is best not to try to consume it. Mediterranean dishes are ones that are most likely to contain lupine seeds: in Portugal and Spain they are consumed dry-roasted like peanuts with beer, in Lebanon they are served as a pre-dinner snack and called "Termos", in the Andes (OK, so not part of the Mediterranean) they are called "tarwi" and eaten like any other bean, in Germany they are often ground and used as a meat substitute. The "bitter" varieties of lupine have high concentrations of toxic alkaloids in their seeds which can cause a temporary paralysis in the lower limbs, muscle decay or atrophy of the buttocks (which can be permanent), and cell death in motor neurons (which would lead to permanent paralysis).


Like most plants that have very broad geographical ranges, there are ornamental species of lupine that have been introduced to North America over the years (accidental or on purpose) that have escaped and have become invasive. There are certain areas in the southern USA that are completely covered by lupines in roadside ditches and sometimes even growing up in the front lawn. While the flowers are incredibly attractive, if they're growing where you don't want them it's definitely not ideal. 


One last special characteristic to note about these plants is that they are an important food crop for the larvae (i.e. caterpillars) of some butterfly species, and the flowers can serve as important nectar sources for many pollinating insects (including some butterflies). If you are going to create a butterfly garden, adding lupines would be a great idea; just make sure you're planting native species that are food sources for the native butterflies that will be visiting your garden or you might be disappointed in the results!