UW Medicinal Herb Garden Blog

The great variety of plants in the Medicinal Herb Garden attracts a wide range of pollinators, mostly insects but also two species of hummingbirds. Throughout the year there are Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna). How such a small bird survives our winters is a cause for wonder. To see them in the Medicinal Herb Garden, linger by the Agastache mexicana, Monarda didyma, Penstemon barbatus, Leonotis nepetifolia, Lonicera ciliosa or Lobelia cardinalis. Do an image search for these plants and you’ll get an idea of what attracts hummingbirds.   They seem to be everywhere at once in flower season (the peak here is June-September). If you’re lucky, you might even see a rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) passing through from its winter home in Mexico. A few times I’ve seen one in the garden, usually in May. The distinctive thrum of their wings, louder than the Anna’s, is what alerts me to them. Keep your eyes and ears open.

But enough about hummingbirds. It’s the bees that need our help. We have the flowers they seek in our gardens. But we can help make their visits more productive and less stressful and even provide homes for some of them. The more time they spend traveling and recovering from their travels, the less time they spend pollinating.

Across the street from the Medicinal Herb Garden, UW entomologist, Evan Sugden has several colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera). In the summer, Evan teaches a class on beekeeping. What a great, practical way for students to learn about entomology. Hats off to Evan Sugden! His honeybees have a hive to return to (colony collapse disorder aside) every day and pollen and nectar from the flowers for food. But they need water. Luckily there are safe watering holes near the hives. A water source for bees should have places for them to safely perch while drinking. A dish or birdbath with islands of rocks or pieces of wood or anything else they can cling to is ideal. Put one in your garden to help your neighborhood bees of all kinds.

Honeybees are welcome in and essential to the Medicinal Herb Garden, but there are also  many different solitary bees all around, though they often go unnoticed. Some solitary bees nest in wood or pithy stems, some nest in the soil, under bare ground, and others nest in small cavities in the ground or wherever works. These solitary, native bees are what  Buchmann and Nabhan wrote about in their classic book, The Forgotten Pollinators. They are unsung heroes and they’re pulling their weight as pollinators while the honeybees struggle with so many health problems. Let’s give them a leg up!

If you’re interested in enhancing pollinator habitat in your yard, check out these links:

http://www.xerces.org/enhancing-habitat-for-native-bees/

http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/gardening.shtml

Stay tuned. Later this spring, I’ll interview Evan Sugden to get his thoughts about bees and other pollinators.

Bee hive with extra insulation, for Evan’s honeybees across the street from the garden

Wood-nesting bee house on the edge of the garden

Bundle of pithy stems wired to a tree in Cascara Circle, for wood-nesting bees.

Last year’s dead growth of pithy stems, broken up and left to protect the soil and provide habitat for  solitary bees and other insects as well as shade-loving earthworms. Unless a plant is diseased, I break and drop the previous year’s stems in the bed each spring. This is Inula helenium (elecampane), an important lung plant. Can you spot the first leaves emerging through the jumble of decaying stems?

pollinators, yes

no history without them

 think long about that

See you in the garden

In 18 years at the Medicinal Herb Garden, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with medical practitioners and medical researchers from China, Taiwan, Japan and India. The one thing they have in common is surprise when they learn that the plants in our garden are not being studied by any of our own medical researchers.

An Indian researcher spending a year in Seattle about 14 years ago, studied all of the Artemisia species in the garden, to measure how much artemisinin, a drug used to treat malaria, could be obtained from each species .  Because of her research, I got so excited that, in the last few years, I’ve tripled the number of Artemisia species in the garden. Unfortunately no one else has come along to study them, or any other plants.

There are so many medicinal plants in one place on the campus of one of the greatest science research universities on the planet, yet no one is studying them. A malaria researcher who sometimes passes through the garden, has explained to me that his lab is involved in big projects and all of his people are working overtime and he has grant proposals to write etc. Fair enough. That is the way the system works and it is quite effective in many ways.

But new models are emerging in this amazing age of crowdfunding. Often, small projects like the Indian researcher’s comparative study of Artemisias, can be run inexpensively. I recently read an inspiring story about former UW students Cindy Wu and Denny Luan. Their startup, called Experiment (formerly Microryza), was born of frustration. While an undergraduate, Wu was nearly stifled in her attempt to obtain funding for her research project. Why? Because she and her colleagues were, in Wu’s words, “22-year-olds with no track record.”

Wu and Luan decided to form a crowdfunding platform to redress this funding bias. Most of the project proposals received by Experiment have very modest funding needs. Of the dozens I looked at on the Experiment website, most required less than $5,000. If any young researchers with great ideas and no funding happen to read this, I hope they will take advantage of the opportunities offered by Experiment and hopefully, turn their attention to the plants in our medicinal garden. Sometimes, like seeds, great things come in small packages.

this day, transplanting

very gently, that’s the way

long life to them all

See you in the garden.

As the days lengthen and the soil warms, change becomes noticeable in the Medicinal Herb Garden. Let’s take a virtual walk through and see for ourselves. In the bog at Cascara Circle on the western edge of the garden, the skunk cabbage is opening.

Lysichiton americanus (skunk cabbage)

most western site of new fragmented fruit forest

Lo and behold, the fruit forest from across the street magically migrated up to the slowly disappearing lawn, west of Cascara Circle. The log-bordered path will allow people to harvest fruit without stepping all over the plants.

In section B, to the east, yellow gentian has suddenly emerged. At this stage, it reminds me of our native Veratrum viride (false hellebore) when it first comes up in the mountains.

Gentiana lutea (yellow gentian)

This goji bush is indomitable. It gets powdery mildew every spring and last year I had to cut it back hard in May, yet it rebounded and produced an abundance of fruit in the fall. The berries are a sweet treat all winter. Everyone should have a goji bush.

Lycium chinense (goji/gou qi zi(fruit), di gu pi(root bark))

If you’ve not seen a plant with black nectar…you have now! This honey flower from South Africa(yes, it is hardy here) has black nectar that is sweet and plentiful. And the foliage, when crushed, smells like peanut butter. It has traditionally been used for various skin conditions among other things.

Melianthus comosus (honey flower) Why don’t you have one?

Mayapple is a woodland plant from the eastern half of Canada and the USA. The ripe fruit is edible and tastes(to me) like a cross between banana and pineapple, a bit like paw paw. It just popped up in the garden last week.

Podophyllum peltatum (mayapple)

It’s been so rainy lately, the rainiest March on record, so they say. But it’s warm and sunny today after a frost last night. Let’s make a final stop at the western American drylands. Though they are not the giants of eastern Washington, these big sagebrush plants have held their own in our wet winters. The sotol and the soaptree yucca appear to be indestructible. My kind of plants!

Yucca elata (soaptree yucca), Artemisia tridentata (big sagebrush), Dasylirion wheeleri (common sotol)

spring frost this morning

today is almost April

the weather just that

See you in the garden.