Ijams Nature Center
Pronounces ‘Iams’, like the spendy cat food, and yes, I found that hysterical as well.
Anyway, that’s where I went this weekend. on a lovely little wildflower walk called the Tour de Fleur. See, while I know a fair amount about herbs and such, I can’t recognize many of them in the wild. Such an obvious deficiency in my knowledge must be rectified! Also, pretty spring flowers.
I learned a bunch, and I even got to point out the mullein that the staff there had missed. Some of the plants I learned are edible, many of them have medicinal uses, and I think I’ll even recognize some of them next time. Plus, I got to meet a tiny owl and a friendly opossum!
Here’s some of what I learned, and what they’re good for:
Fleabane. It looks rather like a tiny daisy on a tall stalk. As the name suggests, it’s a flea repellent; local settlers (and presumably the local natives as well) used it to stuff beds, along with bedstraw, for its repellent properties. There’s some growing right down the street, and I’ll be picking some to make a flea-repelling tincture for the cats.
Made into a tea, it’s a gentle diuretic, and also useful for easing digestive ailments.
Bedstraw, or cleavers. The first couple people who picked some up grumbled that it was ‘sticky’; when it got to me I realized that they meant velcro-sticky, not icky-sticky. If you pick a bunch and pack a mattress with it (as the local settlers-et-cetera did), it sticks together well and doesn’t make a big divot under your butt, making a pretty comfortable bed — hence ‘bedstraw’. It’s long and skinny and has small white flowers and…well I can’t describe it well, but it’s kinda velcro-ey and will totally stick to the back of your shirt of someone puts it there. Which happened a lot on the walk.
It’s a good pot-herb, though you want to pick it when it’s young; and like fleabane, it’s a gentle diuretic.
Chickweed. This is one I actually use, though I hadn’t ever seen it in real life — or at least I hadn’t realized it! It’s lower-growing than fleabane or bedstraw, but it also has small white flowers, and I guess this is where I recommend that you don’t use this post as a guide to actually identifying anything whatsoever.
Mayapples -- leaves in the foreground, flower in the center
Also a pot-herb (and I’ll be cooking up a mess of greens later this week), useful for treating bug bites and eye irritations, and makes a nice poultice herb for just about anything you’ve got going with your skin. I recommended it to a couple other people on the walk, especially one lady who has a whole bunch growing in her yard and, I think, appreciates it a little more now.
Mayapple. A tallish stalk with a couple of many-lobed leaves sticking out the top, and a single white flower hanging underneath. Pretty! Apparently the fruit is edible, though they’re small so you’d need to find a whole crapton of em.
The root has many medicinal qualities, which I’m not going into here, because it’s one of those plants that will mess you RIGHT up if you use it wrong, which I totally would. I’ll stick to the fruit. If I can find more than one.
Red Dead Nettle. Part of the mint family. So called because unlike stinging nettle, it, well, doesn’t sting. And has a reddish or purplish tinge to the top leaves. Obviously a member of the mint family (opposite leaves & square stem). I’d seen it locally and wondered what it was, and I’m glad I know, because…
It’s yet another pot herb, and another gentle diuretic. Don’t worry, you can eat a whole saladful of these herbs with no dire effects; no worse than the peeing induced by a can of beer, to be indelicate. And they’re AMAZEBALLS nutritious.
Plus a bunch of stuff I can’t remember, including the stuff in the second picture.
A bunch of stuff I don't remember.
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Since we’re into the pictures now, and I know I won’t get away without showing you the tiny owl and the friendly possum, have some more:
Tiny owl!
She got hit by a car when she was just fledged, and lost an eye; since she can’t hunt she lives at the wildlife center and gets fed mice and things, I’m sure. She is SO TINY.
I think she’s some sort of screech owl? DON’T JUDGE ME I DON’T KNOW. I’m an herbalist, not a, uh, veterinarian.
Alice the Possum
I didn’t get to pet her — while she’s pretty well adjusted to humans, she’s still legally a wild animal, and if she’d decided to nibble my fingers to see what I had for breakfast, they’d've had to put her to sleep and check her for rabies, even though she lives with people. I think this is kinda dumb — if she were living outside, sure, but she ain’t — but I do understand they don’t want just anyone poking at her.
I know that if my fingers smell like food there’s a pretty good change she’ll nibble — I’ve had pet rats for years — and as far as I’m concerned, if I get bit by any animal, it’s my fault, but most people don’t get that, so they’ve got to be kinda paranoid.
I really wanted to pet her though.
I did get to touch her tail — which is like a rat’s tail but even harder! And grippier — she has more control and more, well, grip than a rat.
Like the owl, she was hit by a car when she was young; she kept the eye but can’t see a thing out of it.
She is terribly cute. I’m always glad to meet animals up close.
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The Tour de Fleur happens every month through the summer — I can’t make it to some of them, since they’ll fall on the same day as the monthly craft show I’m doing, but I plan to go to as many as I can. I really enjoyed learning a couple of plants I can use by sight.
