Beyond ornament: permaculturist Chuck Marsh helps us deepen our relationship to useful plants

New Life Journal, Feb-March, 2002 by Chuck Marsh

This issue's Organic Living section was provided by the upcoming Organic Grower's School.

The relationship between plants and people has always been a complex one. We are totally dependent upon the plant kingdom for our very evolution and ongoing survival. The plant world has also used us, even seduced us, into aiding its movement around the planet and into speeding its evolution through our selection, breeding, cultivation and use of many of its members. We have long been engaged in this dance of interdependence with plants. First peoples were acutely aware of their reliance upon plants to meet their needs for food, medicine, shelter, fiber, oils, and other basic neccessities for human thriving and survival. The importance of healthy human/plant relationships was and is a sacred responsibility for tribal peoples throughout the world and continues to play a powerful role in their religious practices. This direct, interdependent and sacred relationship between people and plants creates a level of conscious connection that has been largely lost to most modern people. This has resulted in a cultural impoverishment and an ever-deepening disconnection between people and the natural world.

From this perspective, gardening becomes sacred work. The garden, no matter how small or humble, becomes a place for healing and worship, a place where life can be nourished and cultivated. We garden to learn and to share the fruits of our learning and our labors with others. The abundance and regeneration that the world so desperately needs can find its roots through the reclaiming of gardening as sacred, lifegiving work. Gardening useful plants thus becomes a re-evolutionary activity as we take back the responsibility to provide for more of our own basic needs, thereby reducing our dependence upon the alliance of consumer culture and modern chemical agriculture.

In modern landscapes, plants have often been reduced to a merely ornamental role in an attempt to hide, soften, screen, or distract from the rampant ugliness that we accept for most commercial and residential buildings in America. These are largely landscapes of control, not meant to be directly experienced or used in any real fashion, but merely gazed upon and left to the professionals to spray, clip, and mow into submission. It is nearly impossible to find anything to eat in these green deserts, for fruit bearing plants were long ago banished for being too messy. These landscapes mirror the values of our culture of disconnection.

Everything shifts when experience becomes direct. When you pick an edible leaf, or a flower, or a fruit and eat it straight from the plant, you are partaking of a sacrament. The plant has become a part of you. You have recieved nourishment directly. No intermediaries are needed. The sacred connection that has sustained humans down through the ages is alive and made manifest through the simple act of eating, using or growing a plant. This is the return to awareness that can heal our world.

Consider a typical American corn field. It has one product, corn, used primarily for feeding people and animals. For every pound of corn produced there are on average seven pounds of soil lost due to erosion. This erosion is the lost inheritance of future generations. Contrast this with the typical Zapotec Indian corn field in Oaxaca, Mexico, the world center of corn diversity and corn's point of original cultivation. The Zapotec field not only yields corn that has been adapted to place and use over thousands of years by native peoples, but also contains over sixty other plants that are useful to the Zapotecs for food, medicine, fiber, dyes, nitrogen fixation, insect control, erosion control, and myriad other purposes. Which corn field represents a healthy, even sacred, relationship between people and plants? Agriculture reflects culture. Monocultures of the mind are reflected in agricultural monocultures. Diversity in ecosystems, whether natural or cultivated, leads ,to greater stability and resilience in the face of disturbance. We have much to learn from native peoples about developing healthy, useful relationships with plants.

So what are some multifunctional plants that you can use? They're often already growing in your garden. The common daylily is a good example. Many parts of the daylily are edible. The flower buds can be dipped in tempura batter and fried. The withering flowers can be collected, dried and used to thicken and flavor soups (they are a major ingredient in Chinese hot and sour soup). The roots have been used in traditional Chinese medicine. The young leaves can be eaten and are said to be mildly intoxicating in large quantities.

Sempervivums, also known as "hen and chicks" or houseleeks, are a common garden succulent whose leaves are quite tasty raw or lightly cooked. I consider sempervivums to be our cold-hardy aloe vera substitute. Though less potent than aloe, juice from the leaves can be used to soothe mucous membranes and treat burns and earaches. Other common garden succulents are also useful. All sedum varieties also have edible leaves and prickly pear cactus, which also grows well in our region, has both deliciously edible fruit and leaflike pads that can be sliced and cooked like green beans after removing any cactus spines. Recent research has focused on medicinal phytochemicals in prickly pear cacti. As a natural builder, I'm personally interested in using this plant's juice as an additive for earth plasters to increase the plaster's durability for cob and straw bale building.