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Faculty Essay

New Article: The Most Important Plants Shall Remain Unnamed by Chris Chisholm. This article is also reprinted at Seattle Backpackers magazine, October 2010 issue. Also check out our other articles available in the Ethnobotany series, Survival series, Wildlife series, and Earth Skills Education series.

The Most Important Plants Shall Remain Unnamed

The Teacher, from the Gaian Tarot. "Our Crazy Saint is surrounded by five green allies, potent medicinal herbs that many would pass by as weeds. Is it crazy to take as your teacher Dandelion, Stinging Nettle, Garlic, yarrow and Comfry? And what lessons are taught by Western Red Cedar?"

When I was growing up, and well into my 20s, my eyes would glaze-over when anyone started naming plants, or whenever I was taken on a "drag and brag" plant walk. I wanted to know the plant names, but for some reason, they would not stick in my mind.

One day, someone told me a story about a plant, but she didn't mention the name, and I was hooked, wanting to know more. It was an approach to learning plants that seemed backward to my western, lineal mind. What I discovered, despite good grades throughout my school years, was that I learned best through stories and experience. I needed to genuinely interact with a plant before I would ever be able to remember its name.

What's a name anyway? Just because you know a name doesn't mean you know a plant, or a person for that matter. Names are a good way for humans to communicate with one another about something, but interestingly, names can also get in the way of a learning, of really knowing about something or someone.

Some people do learn cognitively, needing a name to hook any knowledge onto. So if that's you, just keep on learning in the way that has been successful. But if you are like me, then we need to experience something deeper about a plant before building a memory box for it.

After a few years of learning, I began to teach about the plants I'd worked with, and what I found is that if I mention a plant's name too soon, students feel like they are done with the plant. They think they know it, and want to move on. You can see this best in children, but also in most adults: if you show them a plant and tell them its name before working with it, most people become immediately disinterested, or their eyes glaze-over with TMI syndrome, aka Too Much Information.

How to Easily Identify & Remember Plants

Douglas Fir Cone. Notice the "mouse tails" which make for a great identification story. "One day, there was a forest fire. The mice were scared. They asked Doug, a tree with Furrowed Bark, to allow them to climb high into its furry branches. But the fire was tremendous, so without permission, they climbed into his cones, where they are stuck to this day.

Try this the next time you come across a plant: Tell yourself, or your students, a story about it, using its characteristics to make up an origin, and choosing your own descriptive name (like Thorny Pink Flower Plant That Draws Blood from Those In Love:) until its lesson is revealed. That way, the plant comes alive in the minds of those listening.

Another idea that works for me and my students to remember a plant is to draw it with colored pencils, prominently title it (with your descriptive made-up name, or its real name if that works for you), and post it on your refrigerator. Remember, this is refrigerator art, so it doesn't need to look good; it just needs to display identifying characteristics. Something else that has worked well for me and my students lately is to photograph a plant and post it to a blog site, researching its characteristics and writing about those in the caption.

Teachers who who want to convey to students the importance of a plant should try introducing the plant by using it, describing its qualities while respectfully harvesting and processing it into food, medicine, fire, shelter, or craft. When the inevitable question comes up as to a plant's name, then I shift student dependence away from me and toward their field guides. I show them how to use their guide books, and keep things interesting by asking, for instance, how many petals the flower has, or what the shape of the stem is. Five petals? Maybe it's a violet. Square stem? The mint family!

The point of helping people learn to identify plants on their own is so that they can do it anytime, anywhere, without the dependence of a teacher. Fortunately, in the rocky mountains, northwestern states, southwestern provinces, we have a plant guide series published by Lone Pine which is excellent for identifying plants based on family characteristics. It has color pictures, black silhouettes, ethnobotanical uses and excellent descriptions.

For everyone else throughout North America, it's critical to get Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel which includes great ethnobotanical descriptions, and teaches the reader about plant identification through taxometric classification. For younger students, he has a story book called Shanlaya's Quest which details the characteristics of plant families inside a context of story.

Which Plants to Learn First

Of course, no plant is more important than any other, just like no person's life should be more important than anyone else's. But all of us who publish books about plants make choices as to which plants to highlight, and which to leave out during the editing process. My choice of plants is a practical one, and I should have named this article "the plants which have the most critical ethnobotanical uses" if it weren't such a cumbersome statement.

Deciding which plants to study first is also critical for those of us who are trapped by linear thinking. Once we realize that there are thousands of plants to learn, we can become very discouraged, and turn our attention elsewhere. But if people knew that they only need to learn about 9 plants in order to gain 90% of benefits from the plant world, then that's an attainable challenge!

How can 9 lowly plants give a person more than half of everything they need? Bear with me. With what we in the field of earth skills education call the "order of survival" we describe our basic needs as air, warmth, water and food. The skills needed to acquire those basics include breathing, shelter, fire, tools, and hunting/gathering. So, which plants are critical to secure those basic needs? Ask yourself:

1. Which plants grow nearest to you?
2. Which plants have important nutritional value for you?
3. Which plants have important medicinal value for you?
4. Which plants have important utilitarian uses for you?

Those are the four criteria you can use to judge whether a particular plant you come across is worth prioritizing in your learning process. In fact, if you are truly an experiential learner, then go outside with your Lone Pine or Botany in a Day field guide and find a tree or other plant that appears to have grown naturally in your neighborhood. I say "naturally" because it is easiest to identify native plants with local field guides. Once you have identified the plant, apply the four questions above to assess whether it would be a priority to learn the plant in depth.

Some of the plants that I consider to be part of my Top 10 list for northern latitudes include grasses, pines, cattails, oaks, nettles, the rose family which includes many wild fruits and berries, a local wild edible root, plus a choice of seaweeds, bamboo, cacti, or palm depending on where a person lives, and the most prominent cedar, juniper or cypress tree in the area. Check out my articles on these plants by clicking on:

If Sedges have Edges, and Rushes are Round, Grasses are Hollow from Nose to the Gound
A Cattail Tale
Ouch! Stinging Nettles Taste Good!
Spruce, Firs, Larch & Hemlock are all Pines?
Why Has the Oak Fallen?
Rose and Other Tasty Berries
Secrets of Seaweed
American Ginseng
Gifts of the Cedar
Bamboo, Palm & Cactus

Also check out my Herbal First Aid article where I mention that the "fourth tenet of herbal medicine" is to learn the plants in your area, and to test them to see what works for you as an individual. It can be overwhelming to think about learning all the plants in your area, so do what I did: create your own "niche" to study. I chose to focus only on plants that were native or widely naturalized in my region, and more specifically, plant medicines that would be important for wilderness first aid.

Another idea for creating your own niche would be to focus on plants that grow wild in your neighborhood. For instance, one of the ten herbs Susun Weed chooses in her book Healing Wise is dandelion. Susan says that a "wise woman" only needs a repertoire of ten potent herbs in her cupboard. Dandelion is certainly one of those potent herbs, and no doubt it grows in your lawn. Perhaps you can limit your studies simply to plants growing in your yard.

However, it can be more difficult to identify yard weeds than native plants because field guides tend to focus on plants native to one region, while weeds in your yard may come from all corners of the globe. So to start, learn to identify plants by distinguishing their "family characteristics." Just identifying which family a plant belongs to is, in fact, your key, and if you take a day to learn this identification method, you're golden. The book Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel is where you should start, so check out my article on plant identification using Botany in a Day.

Employment: We only need instructors with experience running camps and teaching in the field of Earth Skills Education, including skills of the Naturalist, Tracker, Herbalist, Survival Scout, Primitive Artisan and Sustainable Pioneer. Apply to become an instructor through our Earth Skills Teaching Apprenticeship.