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An Old Redneck and Goldenseal

© Gregg Pasterick

My wife's stepfather didn't like me much at first, perhaps not much in the end either, for all I know. He was an old, conservative, self-made man; one of thirteen children raised in a holler in the hills of Kentucky, where "reading, writing, and Route 23" were all that mattered. He learned to read. He learned to write. And he followed Route 23 out of the Bluegrass State northward, into the promised land of Ohio.

My ponytail and earrings made him crazy. "Gottdamn hippy," he was known to say of me.

He was a hunter, a real outdoorsman. He knew herbs and animals by their old folk names; he understood the seasons and the machinery of nature without a single scientific term or bit of Latin. He was an old redneck, but a wise man in the woods. He taught my wife and I about hunting morel mushrooms.

He owned a nice piece of wooded land in central Ohio, a couple counties north of the blight of Columbus. My wife and I spent time there each spring for a couple or three years hunting those delicious mushrooms, bird watching, and hiking among acres and acres of wildflowers. We discovered many species there for the first time, species such as Blue-eyed Mary's, Nodding Trillium, and Firepinks. Large-Flowering Trillium often grew in great, snowy colonies. And we found Goldenseal there, a now rare wildflower over-collected through the years for its value as a folk medicine.

A member of the Buttercup Family (Ranunculaceae), Goldenseal (Hydrstis canadensis) grows deep in the woods of eastern North America. Each plant - a single hairy stem - is topped off with a single flower. The flower, which is only about ½" wide, is a collection of numerous stamens and pistils; there are no petals, and the sepals fall off after they open. The leaves and inedible fruit resemble those of raspberry. The yellow root was a source of dye, and the part of the plant thought to have medicinal properties. It was used for both purposes by Native Americans and colonists alike, as evidenced perhaps by folk names such as Eye-balm, Eyeroot, Golden-root Jaundice-root, Yellow-eye, Yellow Puccoon and Yellow-wort.

In A Modern Herbal (published 1931), herbalist Maude Grieve wrote, "The American aborigines valued the root highly as a tonic, stomachic and application for sore eyes and general ulceration, as well as a yellow dye for their clothing and weapons.

"It is official in most Pharmacopoeias...

Goldenseal

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