The author of ‘Pacific Northwest Medicinal Plants’ touts nature’s healing potential
Scott Kloos has a profound affinity for plants.
He’s the founder and director at The School of Forest Medicine, a founding member of Portland’s Elderberry School of Botanical Medicine, and the owner of Cascadia Folk Medicine, a producer of small-batch herbal extracts.
He’s spent the past two decades working with the native flora of the Pacific Northwest, immersing himself in the botany and medicinal qualities of regional vegetation and studying at the Herb Pharm in Williams and with other master herbalists, such as Portland’s Matthew Wood.
But it’s the natural world that’s been his greatest teacher. Kloos said learning directly from plants was common among our ancestors centuries ago, but along with humanity’s connection to nature, it’s a practice that’s faded away over time.
His new book, “Pacific Northwest Medicinal Plants: Identify, Harvest and Use 120 Wild Herbs for Health and Wellness,” is an approachable guide to regional herbal medicines – and to becoming reconnected with nature.
At the heart of Kloos’ methods is his deep-rooted respect for plants and their surroundings, evident throughout his book.
In addition to teaching readers how to find, harvest and use medicinal plants, Kloos imparts his philosophies of ethical and sustainable harvesting, becoming attuned to the natural world and open to its lessons.
His book, released May 17 by Timber Press, aims to teach beginners the techniques of “wildcrafting.”
Kloos will be at Powell’s City of Books on West Burnside Street at 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 22, 2017, for a book signing and to talk about medicinal plants.
Emily Green: Why should we make our own herbal remedies when there are so many pharmaceuticals readily available?
Scott Kloos: There’s a growing awareness around the limitation of modern pharmaceuticals, and many people are finding out, unfortunately through self study and self experimentation, that there are side effects. Ultimately, the theory behind pharmaceutical use is that there is a pathogen, and the way to healing is to kill the pathogen.
In herbal medicine, we think about things holistically, and working with the whole organism – and pharmaceuticals don’t do that. So what ends up happening a lot is that when you take a pharmaceutical to do something, it then has another effect. New diseases ride in on these supposed cures. So you’re not creating the foundations for health, you’re treating a symptom in the moment. When you work with herbal medicines, we are looking to create the space in the body where healing can happen, and the innate wisdom of the body can heal itself and bring a state of harmony back, and that’s what I think of as a true cure.
The wild plant population can’t sustain the world’s population, so we need cultivated plants as well, but wild plants carry different energy with them that connects us with wild nature and the environment where we live because they are shaped by the same forces. So because of that, there is a whole other level of healing which, for me, is the deepest healing, because I feel like a lot of our disease as a culture comes from a disconnect from nature. These plants not only heal our bodies, but they end up healing our spirit as well.
E.G.: You have said that humanity has really come out of touch with its deeper connection with nature over the past 400 years. How might someone reconnect?
S.K.: Because of who we are as humans, and the way we’ve evolved with a deep connection in nature and with plants, it’s easier than people think. Sometimes people come to my classes and they say, “I can’t do this” or “I don’t know what I’m doing,” and they’re surprised with how easy it is.
Basically you just have to find a way to quiet the mental chatter and get out of that mindset, and what I recommend to people is to let your consciousness sink down into your heart. There’s a way of perceiving with the heart that is different from our minds that we are so accustomed to. Just spend time in nature, in that space – whether it’s sitting by a creek with your back up against a tree or while you’re walking – and just see what that feels like.
There’s these practices that are coming out now, I think in Japan they call it forest bathing (shinrin yoku). There’s all this healing potential just from spending time in the forest. There’s a remembrance deep within us that comes from being connected in that way, which is something that – if you go back in time in our human evolution, it has not been that long since we have been apart from that.
One of the best ways I’ve found is just doing the things that I talk about in this book, which is going out and identifying the plants, making connections with them, harvesting them to make medicine and ingesting that medicine that we make from those wild plants that brings us more into that relationship.
E.G.: I wasn’t surprised to see St. John’s wort and lemon balm among the remedies in your book, but I was less familiar with Douglas fir and Oregon grape being used medicinally. I did a quick Google search, and it turns out they’ve been used medicinally for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But I was wondering, are all the remedies outlined in your book backed by peer-reviewed studies that show their medicinal quality, or do we need more research in this realm of medicine?
S.K.: For some, there is that peer-reviewed research, but the problem with that is that there is no money involved. People doing that kind of research, mostly, are looking for something they can patent and make money from. But there are some – in fact St. John’s wort has had a lot studies done on it that prove what we already knew about its uses.
Most of the information is based on traditional uses over time, whether it’s from the native people here, who are still working with and using these medicines, or from similar plants that grow in Europe or on the East Coast that people have been working with for a long time, but interestingly enough, I have the sense that this area of the world just may be the place where we least understand the medicinal properties of the plants.
On the East Coast, when the Europeans arrived, there was a lot of interaction between the Native people and the Europeans and sharing of knowledge, and for obvious reasons, that willingness changed by the time the Europeans got to this side of the continent. So we’re learning about some of this stuff on our own, and there is still a lot of plants out there that we don’t know the medicinal properties hardly at all, if at all. So it’s kind of an exciting time and place to be an herbalist, if that’s a direction you want to go about learning – increasing the knowledge about plants.
But the plants in the book are pretty well known. For myself, with the direct experience that I have, and also my peers and colleagues and people that I respect who have done a lot of work with these medicines, the scientific studies are kind of icing on the cake, but still valid information to have. And if it helps other people feel more confident in using these plants as medicines, then I’m all for it. But I’m definitely not into the idea of people doing research and then turning the medicines into a huge money-making commodity.
One of the problems with some of the scientific research, St. John’s wort is a good example: In Europe, they do a lot of scientific research with the plant because it’s an accepted part of medical-doctor usage to some degree, where it isn’t so much here, and so with St. John’s wort, they did studies where they said, we’re going to find the active ingredient. And they thought, “OK, it’s this oil called hypericin,” and they started cultivating plants that were higher in hypericin, and what they found was, five or 10 years later, they figured out it’s not hypericin; it’s this other thing, and then they spent all this energy, and in the end, what matters is the whole plant. We can’t think of the plant in that non-holistic way.
E.G.: Can you explain what wildcrafting is?
S.K.: We use the term “wildcrafting” to distinguish from harvesting because harvesting, in my mind, implies a mentality of: Everything is there for the taking by humans, and so we just take it. The “craft” part of wildcrafting is the art of connecting with not only the plant, but the ecosystem where it grows and understanding all the different facets that go into creating the conditions for that plant to thrive.
For one, we don’t want to harvest endangered or rare plants. Two, you want to make sure you can correctly identify the plant. And then, making a whole range of assessments that I describe in the book, regarding the viability of the plant and who or what else depends on the plant. If there’s a plant that a certain caterpillar, moth uses to lay its eggs, and the larvae grow there, and we harvest a bunch of it and there’s not enough for them, that has ramifications that cascade to other animals that might eat that insect. So we want to do it in a way that’s careful, that will allow the plant and the stand of plants to thrive so that ultimately the goal is to have there be more there than when we started.
E.G.: In your book, when you lay out how you approach medicinal uses, you wrote that you avoid the “What is this good for?” mentality. So how do you approach the medicinal question?
S.K.: I don’t like to think about it that way, but that’s what ends up happening when I take people on out on trips; they ask, “What’s that good for?” And “What’s that good for?” And that’s coming from that same place I was talking about where we’re just looking for the magic bullet that’s going to heal one thing. We need to look at it more holistically, and the way I like to think about it is: developing relationships with the plants. For me, the plants have been my teachers, on all levels. They can help teach the body how to function in a more harmonious way, on the physical level and then also on emotional and spiritual levels as well, developing relationships with them helps us on that level also.
E.G.: And maybe this is what you mean when you say “psycho-spiritual” properties of plants (the topic of his next book), but for someone who is unfamiliar with herbal medicine, can you explain what that means?
S.K.: That’s a primary focus of my work. A good example would be hawthorn, which is blooming around town right now. It’s an excellent remedy for the heart on the physical level, and then on the emotional level, there are all these teachings it can bring. It helps soothe a wounded heart and helps soften a hardened heart, and it teaches us how to be in touch with our vulnerability.
There’s a lot of things like that where we can learn from the plants; how to hold ourselves energetically and work with our emotions in a different way and be more attuned with them. Specifically, in the book regarding hawthorn, if we are talking about the health of the heart and want a healthy physical heart, we can’t ignore the life of the emotional heart and how that affects us on the physical level too.
E.G.: Is it through meditation that you would achieve some of these psycho-spiritual benefits?
S.K.: That’s a really good way to do it, to sit with a plant, whether it’s the plant itself in a natural place where it’s growing, or to take the tincture or drink the tea, and just open yourself in a space of meditation and think of this plant as a teacher and see what comes.
That’s how I’ve learned so much about plants, and I believe that’s how people have learned about plants forever – both the physical stuff and the psycho-spiritual stuff, because when you learn to attune yourself to a plant’s energies, whether it’s the physical constituents or the more spiritual, esoteric side, you can really feel what’s happening.
Actually, hawthorn was the first plant I ever worked with in that way. I was taking a class with a woman named Deborah Frances, and she passed out hawthorn berries to everyone and said, “Taste it and sit quietly for five or 10 minutes.” We sat, and then everyone shared what they experienced, and we basically painted a picture, both of the physical properties and of the emotional and spiritual properties of that plant, just within the group. I started doing that with some friends here in Portland, and then it turned into this public thing, and for years I held weekly plant meditations and all kinds of people came and we learned about the plants together.
If you look at the accounts of anthropologists talking to indigenous cultures and the anthropologist asks, “How did you learn about the plants?” and they say, “Oh, the plant told me it was good for this.” And then the anthropologist is like, “Oh, that’s so quaint – they think that the plants talk to them.” And my experience is yeah, they do. There was probably some kind of trial and error, but with some plants it would be impossible to find some of these ways that they work just through trial and error, so there’s a lot more to it than our modern scientific research modality can understand.
E.G.: What are some things that someone who is new to wildcrafting should keep in mind while they are out foraging?
S.K.: Never harvest anything until you’ve positively identified it. If you’re just learning, start with some of the easier plants. In the book I talk about the six plants that everybody should know (black cottonwood, nettle, Oregon grape, St. John’s wort, western redcedar and yarrow). I listed them because they are useful, and they are easy to identify – there is nothing else that really looks like them around here.
To help learn, I recommend going on plant walks with other herbalists, or a botanist or if you have a friend who is knowledgeable about plants.
Look for the defining characteristics, those are mentioned in the “How to Identify” section for each plant – the things you need to look for to know that this is the plant you’re looking for. Because what we don’t want is for people to harvest the wrong plant, especially if it’s a potentially toxic plant. There are some plants, and I mention this in the book, that are deadly toxic in the area. All of those really deadly toxic ones are in the parsley family, called the Apiaceae, and anytime you are harvesting a plant in that family, you need to be absolutely sure.
No one who gets this book should go out and start harvesting angelica, for example, which is in that family. It also has plants that look similar to it and could kill someone with just a tiny piece of the root.
E.G.: Is there any particular plant among the 120 that you outlined in your book that is of any special significance to you, on a personal level?
S.K.: There’s many, but one that pops into mind is devil’s club. That plant, I would say, is my foremost ally in everything that I do. It has a lot to teach on many levels, and it’s a plant of protection. It symbolizes the protection of the forest, and also our own psychic and energetic protection. It got the name devil’s club because of the way it looks with all of its spines, and some European person came along and said, “That looks like something the devil would carry.”
I like to think of it as the club that keeps the devils away, meaning the negative thought forms that try to bring us down, that we are so surrounded by in these times. But it’s a really potent ally to help us stay clear with ourselves, and also it’s a great ally in healing deep traumas, especially deep childhood traumas. On the physical level, it’s in the ginseng family so it has adaptogenic properties, it helps when the adrenals are weakened, and in my experience, I’ve found it’s especially good for people whose adrenals are weakened because they are in a state of constant alert, always on guard to protect themselves from trauma. Devil’s club teaches us how to be alert in a way that isn’t taxing on the adrenal. For me it’s been a huge ally in both transformation of trauma and also that protection in the healing work that I do, and then just a symbol of that protection of wild nature.
Email staff writer Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org.
Cascade Oregon grape tea
The root of this abundant plant improves liver and digestive function, clears itchy skin conditions and speeds healing of intestinal infections
This information was compiled from the entry on the Cascade Oregon Grape in Scott Kloos’ new book from Timber Press, “Pacific Northwest Medicinal Plants.”
How to identify
The Cascade Oregon Grape ranges from 4 to 24 inches tall, with stems whose tops are lined with pointy-tipped bud scales. It has pinnately compound leaves, each with 9 to 19 thick, dark green, oval to lance-shaped holly-like leaflets with spiny, coarsely saw-tooth edges. From early spring to early summer, it will have yellow-flowered clusters up to 8 inches long that sit above the leaves. Look for three greenish-yellow outer bracts, 6 bright yellow sepals and 6 bright yellow 2-lobed petals that alternate in 5 whorls of 3. They will eventually ripen into purplish blue sour-tasting berries with large black seeds.
The part of the plant you harvest is the rhizome, or root. A rhizome is a type of root that grows horizontally underground, and emits lateral shoots that grow into individual plants above the earth’s surface that are connected by a root network underground.
Where, when and how to wildcraft
This shade-tolerant plant prefers the semi-open forests west of the Cascades and can be found from sea level to middle elevations.
You can collect the rhizomes from mid-spring to mid-autumn.
From a good-sized stand, find a non-flowering plant that calls out to you. Grasp its stem and give a gentle tug. If the rhizome moves easily, continue pulling and follow it until the rhizome breaks or until you reach a junction point where you can cut the rhizome free. Remove the leaves and replant the crown. Cut the rhizomes into 1/2- to 1-inch-long pieces to dry for tea.
Dry the root pieces on a screen or in a hanging paper bag, just make sure to keep them out of direct sunlight, and if in a bag, make sure there is plenty of airflow around it.
Medicinal uses
The Oregon grape alters the internal mucosa and speeds the removal of waste products in the blood to make the terrain less hospitable to infectious agents.
Take Oregon grape root tea or tincture for giardia, staph, or salmonella infections. These preparations also stimulate liver metabolism, cleanse the blood, and clear damp heat. Take them if you have food sensitivities or allergies, are prone to constipation, wake up feeling groggy and listless in the morning, have bad breath with a coated tongue, and/or have chronic itchy skin conditions.
Skin conditions are often related to liver congestion or impaired hepatic function; if the liver cannot adequately filter toxins and other impurities from the blood, the unprocessed waste products are eliminated through the skin.
Oregon grape root tea can ease psoriasis, acne, eczema and fungal outbreaks such as athlete’s foot or jock itch.
Kloos recommends drinking a cup of Cascade Oregon grape root tea before meals, as it stimulates digestive juices and improves the body’s ability to break down food and assimilate nutrients.
Herbal preparation: Root tea
1) In saucepan, combine 1 part by weight of dried root and 32 parts by volume of cold water.
2) Bring water to a boil, cover the pot, and simmer on low heat for 15 minutes.
3) Strain and drink. You can store unused portion in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.
Drink 6 to 8 fluid ounces 3 times per day. You can stop using the remedy when you begin to feel the beneficial effects, which Kloos said for most will take about 6 to 8 weeks.
