Medicine Chest: Prickly ash harvest, learning from the plant ..

I've already written a post (it's here) about my personal experiences using prickly ash for pain. Might be useful to read that first, then read this one.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I particularly like prickly or thorny plants. Hawthorn, rose, nettle. Motherwort with its scratchy 'crown of thorns' seed heads. And, of course, prickly ash. (Interestingly, all of these have pain relieving qualities - here we have the Doctrine of Signatures in action again ie what a plant can cause, it can treat.)

These plants also make us pay attention to where we are and what we're doing when we hang out with or harvest them. I like that singular focus required for the work. And I don't mind a bit when one of them pokes or scratches me back to the task at hand if my mind has wandered. In this world of multi-tasking as a way of life, it feels good to have hands and mind working together as one.



And I love working with barks, each with its own texture and behaviour as I peel it off the branch. Each with its own fragrance. The fragrance and behaviour of prickly ash bark is entirely unique - more on that in a bit.

Around here, the prickly ash species we have is Xanthoxylum americanum. I find it growing most often near water or on the edge of moist forests. I don't see it often, but where it grows, it grows plentifully.

By the side of a small river, prickly ash growing in the company of alder, scrubby oak and others.
Note the St John'swort flowers in the foreground. 2 kinds of pain relief within spitting
distance from each other. Cool.

It's a shrubby plant compared to some other species of Xanthoxylum (also spelled Zanthoxylum). The species seems to be represented pretty much world wide, including (attention foodies!) the Szechuan pepper (Zanthoxylum piperatum). In fact, our own prickly ash berries, picked while still green, can be used similarly to Szechuan pepper. I'll include a link below if that idea tickles your fancy.

Less than 24 hrs after picking,
the seeds are being released from
their capsules/"berries". 

I say "berries", but the one thing I learned the other day as I harvested them is that they're not berries in the traditional sense of the word. They're simply capsules for the small hard black seed within.

I was a tad disappointed at this discovery, for two reasons. One, because the word berry had me thinking I'd get a little explosion of juicy prickly ash flavour in my mouth. Two - and this is the greater disappointment - that in all of my reading on the subject, nowhere had I seen reference to the fact that the berries are not, in fact, berries.

(Which leads me to a mini-rant. It bugs me that even the "best" of the books or sites on the use of plants as medicine, we rarely hear from those who are liable to be the most intimate with the plants. We hear from the clinical herbalists who prescribe them. We hear (even more) from the arm-chair quarterback "journo-herbalists" who regurgitate the old texts. But it's rare that we hear a detailed account from the person who gathers the plants. And even more rare that we hear the story of the person who takes the tincture or the tea for what ails them and how - or even whether - it works as described by the practitioners.

That's why I write the way I do. I not only gather the plants and make the remedies but I use them, too. I try to give the kind of well rounded reports that I wish I could find "out there".)

Where was I? Ah yes - the berries are not berry-like. But they sure are purty!

Since I still have the prickly ash bark tincture I made some time ago, I really didn't mean to gather any berries that day. I just want to "make their acquaintance" so to speak. But once I'd tasted a couple I was absolutely not going to pass up on the chance for more of that tingly, almost electrical mouth feel and the orange-meets-lime flavour.

How to gather them, then? I was glove-less. I had no cutting tools. And yet here I was trying to harvest one of the wickedest plants in our area.

At first I thought to pick the "berries" in clusters but the shrub said "No" (and I said "ow!).




If you look closely, you'll see there are single thorns along the bigger branches, then pairs of forward curling thorns at the joints of the twigs. This is one seriously well armed plant.


Fine, then, what to do? Ask the plant.

Now I know how "woo" that may sound but I honestly don't care. It works. Ask the plant - it will tell you how to pick it.

I found myself reaching in, taking hold of a medium sized twig where it attached to a branch. As my hand moved in my brain said "danger! danger!" but my inner knowing told me I was safe. And sure enough ..

the twig, loaded with berries and nice fresh leaves released itself into my hand. As I went through the bush I'd ask "this one?" and I'd receive a yes or a no. I only took where I sensed a yes and came away unscathed.

Nice.

I probably should have asked Paul (my husband, photographer, rambling companion and all around good guy) to record the process of peeling the bark the next day. Alas, I did not so I'll just have to describe it to you. The last time I worked with prickly ash the twigs must have had fewer thorns, because I used my usual peel-the-bark-lengthwise-with-a-small-pen-knife method. This time, with these twigs, that would have been suicidal. They had thorns every inch or so. Once I had snipped off the leaves and berry clusters with scissors I stared at the twigs in something like dread ..

Again, I asked the plant, "How do I do this?"

I found myself using my thumbnail, moving around circumference of the twig so that the bark came off in something like a spiral motion. The thorns were no trouble at all that way, they just lifted off with the bark, nice and smooth and easy. Again, I came away unscathed.

And oh, the fragrance that arose as I worked! What a pleasure.

I felt a feeling of "rightness" as I worked. I realised that for many, many generations the Native people of this land used prickly ash. The plant itself still holds the knowledge that humans will use it, just as it knows that birds will eat its seeds and deer will browse on its leaves. Doing what I was doing has been done many many times before - just not lately. It felt good, and somehow humbling, to be part of bringing that relationship of plant and human back.

As it happens, my dear sweet man has been in the grips of some powerful pain lately. A back thing - well, a cascade of back things, really, because that's how it often is with backs, one thing sets off another. He'd been doing much better the last few days, using Somatic movements to unclench the muscles which in turn have been releasing the locked up spine. But he was still looking and feeling a bit ghostly. The combination of the pain and the Tylenol he'd been taking to deal with it had left him feeling spaced out, exhausted, drained.

Prickly ash has been bringing him back to life. Three drops of tincture yesterday gave him a little colour to his cheeks. Prickly ash does that - the books will tell you it stimulates the circulation so that healthy blood can flood to areas it has been lacking and waste products can be more efficiently removed. What that feels like is rejuvenation, the life force coming back.

Meanwhile, although I don't currently need to take prickly ash therapeutically, yesterday I was nibbling and tasting bits of bark, bits of seed coat/berry and the occasional leaf, just because that tingling sensation is - to me - such fun. This morning I can report that I am feeling very here. My senses are heightened. Amped up. Colours are brighter and as I look out the window I can see, am more aware of, each and every leaf on each and every plant, tree and vine within view. There are raindrops hanging suspended on the tips of the long needles of our white pine and I can sense the pine-ness that each one contains within it.

Trippy stuff, man!

Keep in mind that your local species may differ from the one we have here - your mileage may vary. But if you do decide to engage with this plant, or you have already, I would love to hear about your experiences.

I haven't yet decided what to do with my harvested bark, leaves and "berries". I could tincture them, I could make a syrup (oooh, that could be tasty!), or even an infused oil for topical use to warm the joints externally. We'll see. I might just dry everything for teas or decoctions or just to have a nibble now and then. It's so nice to have choices.

Here is the link to using Xanthoxylum americanum berries as Szechuan pepper - it's a fun site if you're into wild food.