Five Traditional Plant Medicines and How ey Might Work

Mule deer in yerba mansa | Photo: J.N. Stuart, some rights reserved

This article includes discussion of Native Californian peoples traditional use of plants as medicine. It is intended for cultural and environmental education purposes only, and should not be taken as medical advice.

Native people in California relied on whatever living things grew around them for food, fiber, for clothing and shelter. Their approach to medicine was no different. Based on millennia of experience and experimentation, knowledge handed down generation by generation woven seamlessly into culture, Native people had a pharmacopeia for many common illnesses and injuries in the form of the plants, animals, and fungi with which they shared the landscape.

In many cases, modern scientists have found biological and chemical properties inside these medicinal plants that may well account for the healing properties ascribed to them by Native healers. The canonical example is aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, originally derived from compounds found in willow bark. But other examples abound, from the eucalyptol in white sage (a topical anaesthetic used in many over-the-counter cough and cold medicines) to the ephedrine and related compounds found in joint-fir (Ephedra species).

Let's take a look at five different plants used by a number of California Native peoples. One is benign enough to be used for pleasure, another so dangerous you probably shouldn't touch it, and the other three somewhere in between.

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One of the overall differences between traditional Native medical practices and Western medicine is that practitioners of Traditional medicine often don't see their discipline as distinct from other parts of their culture, from cooking to music to architecture to literature. Pulling an individual plant out of that context, as Western science often does, and then analyzing that plant's biochemistry and pulling out individual substances to test for pharmacological activity, is a very different way to learn about how a plant works. We've learned a lot about plants that way. But we run the risk of missing the point when we analyze plants rather than placing them in context.

We also run the risk of appropriating hard-won knowledge for our own profit. When pharmaceutical companies, for example, examine the constituents of traditional medicines, whether from the rainforest or the tundra, and synthesize analogous chemicals for use as drugs, they profit from the hard-won, long-preserved knowledge of the traditional peoples who discovered those plants' properties.

With all that said, the five plants covered here have been extensively studied, so discussing them won't likely contribute to further appropriation. So at the risk of missing the larger cultural point by talking about plant chemistry, let's dive in.

Yerba mansa | Photo: Elaine with gray cats, some rights reserved

Yerba Mansa (Anemopsis californica)

An attractive plant that grows in wet soil throughout the southern two thirds of California, yerba mansa is found along seeps and wet places elsewhere in the Southwest as well, from Texas to Baja California. When in flower, it's hard to mistake yerba mansa for anything else: its striking white, sunflower-like blooms are held four or five inches above a spreading mat of flat, gray-green leaves with a waxy coating.

Yerba mansa was and is held in high regard by many Native peoples in California and elsewhere. Mexican curanderos regard the plant as something like a cure-all; Spanish settlers in present-day Mexico and Texas adopted its use from local Native people as early as the 17th Century.

California Native peoples from the coastal Chumash to the desert Shoshone have used yerba mansa as an anaesthetic and antiseptic for a very long time. Its dried roots, ground into a powder, are used to relieve sore throats in much the same way as the eastern North American plant goldenseal. As wild goldenseal is endangered due to overharvesting, some have suggested that yerba mansa, which is easily cultivated, might offer a more ecologically benign herbal throat medicine.

The leaves also play a role in traditional herbal medicine, with an infusion often used externally on small wounds as an antiseptic. An infusion of the roots is more widely used. The first person who thought of using yerba mansa as a medicine was likely following her nose: the roots have a strong smell containing notes of camphor and eucalyptus.

Among the chemical constituents found in yerba mansa is methyl eugenol, commonly used to impart a clove-like flavor to processed foods. Methyl eugenol acts as an antispasmodic and anaesthetic, which likely explains at least some of yerba mansa's persistent popularity as an herbal medicine.

A note of caution, however: methyl eugenol is a known mutagen, and a likely carcinogen in humans.

Creosote in bloom | Photo: Col Ford and Natasha de Vere, some rights reserved

Creosote (Larrea tridentata)

Here's another medicinal plant that is both widely used and worthy of some caution. Creosote, often called chaparral by herbalists, is likely the most common woody plant in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. In many places in the hot desert lowlands, especially in summer when the spring annuals have died back, creosote might be the only vascular plant growing for hundreds of feet in any direction.

More from tending the wild

Oneness With That Place: A Chat with Native Herbalist Sage LaPena

Every Plant That Exists Has Meaning: Traditional Ecological Medicine

Plant Medicine: Grow Your Own Chia

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Sniff creosote leaves on one of those hot summer days and you won't be surprised that people have thought to use it as a plant medicine. The leaves' pu

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