Planting the Future

VIRGINIA SNAKEROOT

Aristolochia serpentaria

DOUG ELLIOTT

A large velvety-black butterfly flashing metallic blue hind wings fluttered past my feet. It was a sunny April afternoon and I was exploring an open woods of oak, hickory, and ironwood near the Broad River in the piedmont of North Carolina. The butterfly was flitting along near the ground. There were no flowers in bloom in the area, yet the butterfly was flying up to every young green shoot—honeysuckle, asters, grasses, and tree seedlings. It didn’t land on these plants but rather flew from one plant to another, spending a second or two at each sprout as if it were checking each one out. The butterfly sailed right by taller plants and bushes, pausing only at delicate shoots between about 2 and 4 inches in height. The butterfly was hunting a rare herb.

This was a gravid female pipevine swallowtail (Batttus philenor), ready to lay her eggs. She was searching for the one species of pipevine found in this area—Aristolochia serpentaria, the famous Virginia snakeroot. As an adult butterfly she can sip the nectar of many different flowers, but her young can only feed on members of the Aristolochiaceae family and in this region, Virginia snakeroot was her only choice. I watched her hover excitedly around one particular delicate sprout with three light green unfurling leaves. No doubt she was receiving chemical and olfactory confirmation. “Yes! Finally I’ve found it!” her rapidly fluttering wings seemed to say. While her wings kept her airborne, her legs reached out and grasped the plant. The tip of her abdomen briefly touched the stem, and there she placed a glistening golden egg hardly bigger than a poppy seed. Within a few seconds she was on her way again, continuing her plant-by-plant search for the next snakeroot. I followed her (at a respectful distance) for the next half hour or so as she continued her thorough survey of the forest floor. We may have covered as much as 100 yards, and she may have inspected as many as a thousand plants as she zigzagged back and forth along the ground. In the entire time I spent observing her, she found only the one Virginia snakeroot shoot. She eventually flew up into the canopy, and I lost sight of her.

This was the first time I had ever had a butterfly to serve as an herb-hunting guide. Although there were obviously enough snakeroots in the area to support at least a small population of these swallowtails, this confirmed for me something I had long suspected—that even though Virginia snakeroot has a wide range (from Florida and Texas north to Missouri, Illinois, and southern New England), it is rarely abundant. It is an understated, diminutive herb. Any specimen over a foot tall and having more than ten leaves is considered large. The rhizome is rarely over an inch long and weighs a tiny fraction of an ounce. Even in areas of ideal habitat where the plant is relatively common, I never see it growing thickly in beds or patches—just an occasional plant here and there. Even the butterfly I followed, which had dozens of eggs to deposit, seemed to instinctively understand the plant’s limited growth habit. She only placed one egg on that single plant she found, for a single plant like this can support only one caterpillar. Up in the higher mountains on Aristolochia macrophylla—the huge Dutchman’s pipe—I have seen a swallowtail lay more than a dozen eggs on one leaf.

Virginia snakeroot is part of Aristolochiaceae, the Birthwort family. Members of this group of plants are found in a variety of habitats, from northern forests to deserts and jungles around the world. Other temperate North American members of this family include wild ginger (Asarum canadensis, sometimes known as Canada snakeroot), the heartleafs (Hexastylis spp.), and the Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia macrophylla, also known as pipe vine).

Virginia snakeroot’s strange-shaped, velvety, maroon-brown flower comes into bloom in late spring after the leaves appear. Growing from a short basal stem, the flower is swollen at the base with a narrow curved calyx tube that flares open at the mouth. It usually lies directly on the ground.

As scarce and little used as the plant seems to be now, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Virginia snakeroot regularly found its way into herbal markets in 100-pound bales. Due to this demand, it may have been exterminated in some parts of its range. It was listed as an official drug in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1942, and in the National Formulary until 1955. It also was listed in the pharmacopoeias of London, Dublin, and Edinburgh. The 1927 edition of Culbreth’s Manual of Materia Medica and Pharmacology considers it to be a “stimulant, tonic, diaphoretic, diuretic, emmenagogue, aphrodisiac, antiperiodic, [that was used to] stimulate appetite and digestion, increase bronchial and intestinal secretion, heart action and mental exhilaration. [It was also used] as a stimulating expectorant in typhoid pneumonia, exanthematous diseases, intermittents, dyspepsia, diphtheria. Fluid extract good locally against poison ivy rash.”

I remember once visiting one of my herbal mentors, an older Appalachian mountain man named Theron Edwards. When I complained of a headache, he held out a small jar to me and said, “Smell of this, buddy, it’ll he’p ya!” In that jar was a tiny rhizome with a bundle of dry fibrous roots. I took a tentative sniff and noted a distinct balsamic, turpentine-like aroma. “Hit’s Virginia snakeroot,” he explained, “but you gotta breathe it in deeper than that for it to do you any good.” I placed my nose over the jar and inhaled deeply several times. In an hour or so my headache dissipated. These results were neither dramatic nor conclusive, and this was hardly a clinical trial; still, I was intrigued at how a folk practitioner (who had no qualms about gathering considerable quantities of more common roots and herbs for medicines and tonics) had found a way to use this tiny, scarce herb in a relatively nonconsumptive way. In his folk version of aromatherapy, one small root can be used over and over for several years.

In the doctrine of signatures, an ancient system of knowing plants, it was believed that every herb contains a sign or a “signature” that offers a clue to its use. The curved, bulbous shape of the Aristolochia flower reminded the ancients of a fetus, hence the name birthwort and the use of some species as an aid to childbirth. The name Aristolochia comes from the Greek, aristos (best) and lochia (delivery), from its supposed value in childbirth.

At least one member of the genus is still used in other ways. I once stayed with a Mexican family in a village tucked in among the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains and found myself ailing with a case of “turista,” the loose-boweled intestinal distress so common among newly arrived gringos. Once my hosts learned of my condition, one of the youngsters was dispatched into the dry scrub countryside to find yerba del Indio (herb of the Indians). Before long he brought back a small creeping vine with narrow heart-shaped leaves and a familiar ruddy, purplish flower much like our eastern species, but with accentuated veins at the mouth of the floral tube. It was none other than A. watsonii, a dwarf desert species of Aristolochia. They brewed it up into a tea. I drank a cupful and by the next morning my symptoms were gone. “Es bueno para pegarle,” they assured me: “It’s good to stop you up.”

Recently, however, the Aristolochia genus has been analyzed chemically and a compound known as aristolochic acid isolated from every species that has been studied. This acid has been found to be mutagenic and carcinogenic in animals. According to Norman Farnsworth, professor of pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “No herbal medicine in the genus Aristolochia should be used by humans over an extended period of time.” After learning this, I am glad 1 cupful did the job while I was in the Sierra Madre!

In his book Las Remedios, contemporary herbalist and director of the Southwestern School of Botanical Medicine Michael Moore calls Aristolochia watsonnii “raiz del Indio” and considers it to be highly useful in small doses, in tea or as a tincture to treat “early stages of flu or fever ... infections and blood poisoning ... to stimulate digestion” and in powdered form as a wound dressing.

Some of the same chemical compounds that yield medicinal benefits to humans are also used by the butterflies that take their name from these plants. The adult pipe vine swallowtails are reported to have a pungent, penetrating odor and disagreeable taste, which is believed to come from chemical compounds in the pipe vine leaves eaten by their larvae. This is similar to the mechanism in monarch butterflies that lets them derive a protective chemistry from compounds in the milkweeds that their larvae feed upon.

Aristolochia serpentaria is a woodland herbaceous perennial. The root consists of a short, knotted rhizome with numerous wiry rootlets. The plant grows best in rich forest soils, shaded by mixed hardwood trees, or in the shade garden.

To propagate by root cutting, cut the rhizome with a sharp knife into two or more pieces, then replant them just under the soil surface and cover with a mulch of decomposing leaves. In the wild these small plants tend to live in colonies, and in cultivation may be spaced as closely as 1 foot apart. All transplanting should be accomplished in the fall, so that the plants can become used to their new location and “dig in” over the winter, sending up new stems in the spring.

The seeds of Virginia snakeroot are quite rare and difficult to collect. As in many forest-dependent species, the seeds have short longevity after drying, so they should be planted in moist soil as soon as possible after maturation. If the newly harvested seeds are to be stored, they should be placed in moist, sifted peat moss in a plastic bag and kept under refrigeration until they can be planted. Sow them shallowly in a prepared bed in the forest or a shade garden. The area should be well marked, because germination times are extensive, and once germinated the young plants must be watched carefully to protect them from foot traffic, weeds, and slugs. The plant is a hypogeal germinator: that is, the shoot arises from the seed, emerging from the ground as a single, vining stem without cotyledon leaves. The first true leaf develops in the fifth week after germination. Fresh seeds sown in the fall will begin to exhibit germination in the spring as the soil warms. Some seeds will remain dormant for up to two years, germinating in the spring of the second year after planting. Seedlings may be grown out at close spacing for a year or two. Once they develop a palpable rhizome, they may be separated and transplanted to 1 foot apart. Although the plants withstand dry woodland conditions, they will grow more quickly and robustly if given a moist, shady location.

The aromatic and camphoraceous root and rhizome (the root) of Virginia snakeroot is traditionally harvested from mature plants in the fall, when the characteristically elongated, heart-shaped leaves begin to turn bright yellow. However, this plant is too rare in the wild to be harvested. Use the following information for harvesting cultivated roots.

The roots are most potent in the fall, after the plant has stored its energy reserves for the winter. Both the knotty rhizome and the hairy rootlets are equally potent medicines. As with all rare forest-dependent species, it is important to wait until the seed is ripened and disseminated, either by natural vectors or by human hand, prior to digging the mother plant. Given that the seed is very difficult to germinate, it makes sense to wait until a healthy generation of young plants is well established before harvesting seed-bearing plants. After digging, the portion of the knotty rhizome bearing the nascent bud should be broken free and replanted immediately.

UpS RECOMMENDATIONS

• Use only cultivated resources.

• Both blessed thistle and burdock are good substitutes.

• Yucca may be used instead for joint conditions.

• Use dill, fennel, or ginger as substitutes when treating digestive concerns.

• For ingested poisons, poisonous bites, and snakebite, cultivated echinacea may be substituted.

I didn’t know what I was seeing the first time I laid eyes on a large pipe vine caterpillar. It was like a weird, purplish-brown sea slug with rubbery tentacles sticking out on all sides and two rows of yellow-orange spots running down its back. It was calmly munching its way down the stem of our prize Virginia snakeroot plant, which grew wild at the edge of our orchard. The larva had already eaten all the terminal leaves on the stem and was now in the process of finishing off the rest of the lower leaves.

What was I to do? I had been able to find very few of these special plants in our area. And here this prize specimen (the only one I’d found near the house) was being completely devoured by the larva of a magnificently beautiful and special butterfly. Should I consider the caterpillar a pest and simply squash it like a bean beetle or a cabbage worm in my garden?

Pondering this, I gave the critter a tentative prod, and the caterpillar responded immediately with a pair of what looked like slimy yellow horns that seemed to ooze out from behind its head. Suddenly the air was filled with a strange bitter odor. In a few seconds the horns were pulled back into the head and the odor dissipated. What an awesome display! These hornlike appendages are actually a gland called the osmaterium, and the odor serves as a repellent to parasitic wasps and other predators.

Suddenly, a few feet away, something caught my eye. It was another caterpillar just like this one, munching away on another Virginia snakeroot! And then I saw another, and another, and another. Each caterpillar was on a separate plant. With the help of these eye-catching caterpillars I ended up finding eight more snakeroot plants in the orchard—plants that I might have never seen and probably would have mowed over if the caterpillars hadn’t called my attention to them.

So I left those caterpillars alone and over the next few days watched as they ate my plants right to the ground. Then they crawled away to pupate. With the caterpillars out of the picture, the snakeroots soon sent up new shoots with new leaves, and these lasted the rest of the summer.

Now each of those snakeroots is protected by a circle of stones. I spend a fair amount of time with the plants, and I keep them weeded as well as I can. Some years the butterflies appear and we can witness their entire cycle. We have even watched a swallowtail emerge from its chrysalis before our eyes and fly away.

The pipe vine swallowtail in its various life forms has taught me a great deal, not only about the Virginia snakeroot plant but also about the miraculous interconnectedness of life. Above all I am reminded that the key to our survival on this tiny blue-green sphere we call Mother Earth is in using her healing resources in a sustainable way.

Culbreth, David. A Manual of Materia Medica and Pharmacology. Philadelphia: Lea and Febriger, 1927.

Farnsworth, N. R. “Relative safety of herbal medicines.” HerbalGram 29 (spring/summer 1993): 36D.

Moore, Michael. Los Remedios, Traditional Herbal Remedies of the Southwest. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1990.