Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants

The forest bottomland is not just for bathing in nature; you can actually dine there. Our indigenous predecessors did. They viewed plants and other species as equals with much to teach us. Indigenous people foraged for edible and medicinal wild plants which they cultivated from seed as they migrated. Many of those plants are still available just outside the levee you crossed coming to the Buckeye Trail or in the sunlit spots on the trail.

Here’s a sampler menu:

• Dewberry (Rubus flagellaris). A tasty berry and its leaves in the early spring can be dried for tea. Also, young tender shoots in the early spring can be peeled and eaten raw. The scraped and dried summer root was used by Native Americans in a bitter-tasting tea for children with bowel trouble.
• Curly Dock (Rumex crispus) root was used for the treatment of skin disease.
• Cleaver (Bedstraw) (Galium aparine) can be made into a tea from dried stems and leaves and is used as a diuretic or as a lymph cleanser. Young shoots can be added to salads and eaten raw but have a more desirable texture for eating when boiled first.
• Mustang grapes (Vitis mustangensis) need a lot of sugar to make the tart fruit into jelly, preserves, and wine.
• Common hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) and sugarberry (Celtis laevigata). Hackberry tree fruit is edible. The Dakota were known to pound up the hard stone and the fruit of the hackberry to use as a seasoning for meat.
• Wild onion (Allium canadense). All wild onion is safe to eat if it smells like onions. Onion flowers are delicious on the grill.

For more information and cautions, see___________________.

1. 1. Be Nature-Safe (the Buckeye Way)
   2. Circles
   3. Edible and Medicinal Plants
   4. Indigenous People of the Trinity Basin
   5. Luxuriant Confusion
   6. The Joy of Forest Bathing
   7. Trees