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Quotes about Native Plants from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"When it comes to gardening with native plants, local botanists are often your best resource, and the ones who work at public gardens are often eager to help. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is, of course, just one of many such places; it hosts a fine Web site and offers some great reading on the basics of responsible landscaping. EcoHouse Brazi ¦Mi In Brazil's Urea neighborhood, near the base of Sugarloaf Mountain and the shores of Rio de Janeiro, architect Alexandra Lichtenberg tackled a remodeling project that applied green principles to an average urban home." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"After the Bronze and Iron Ages, erosion decreased dramatically for almost two thousand years as native plants regenerated across a largely abandoned landscape—until erosion accelerated again in the modern era. Similar cores taken from small lakes in southern Sweden also record the transition from little preagricultural erosion to much higher rates after arrival of the plow. One from Lake Bussjosjo shows that forest stabilized the landscape from 7250 to 750 bc until erosion accelerated following forest clearing." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Such isolation meant that the island supported few native plants and animals when wayward Polynesians landed after paddling across the Pacific Ocean. The native flora and fauna offered so little to eat that the new arrivals' diet was based on chickens and sweet potatoes they brought with them. Sweet potato cultivation took little effort in the island's hot, humid environment, leaving the islanders with enough free time to develop a complex society centered on carving and erecting gigantic stone heads." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Instead of growing square miles of one kind of corn, we can assemble a whole community of crops based on native plants that can support each other. In other words, we can build a farm the way nature would. as Understanding Soil Soil is the skin of the earth. It's the first point of contact between the planet and the atmosphere. The highly fertile top layer of soil—the uppermost twenty centimeters or so—is known as topsoil. Like the air we breathe, this layer of earth is so ordinary and ever-present that it is easy to take for granted." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) "Many of the native plants that Native Seeds/SEARCH has helped reintroduce to the region are specifically well suited to controlling diabetes; prickly pear paddles, for instance, are a great source of nutrients and of soluble fiber, which slows the rate of digestion, keeping the body's glucose levels more stable. Other crops simply serve as nutritious, high-protein staples that cost very little to cultivate. Native Seeds/SEARCH has proven that traditional crops have a future." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) "Then the CEO's marketing director brings him some research showing that an increasing number of people are willing to pay a premium for high-performance green products (which is already true, as the popularity of hybrid cars shows), and that some country clubs are already responding to their members' requests to use fewer pesticides, less water, and more native plants on their golf courses (which is also already true)." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"Folk Names Canary Island broom, kanarischer ginster, kytisos, Spanish broom, spartion, spartium Islands and, when they left, carried the islands' native plants with them. Knowledge of the use of broom as an inebriant may have traveled along as well. Yaqui shamans from northern Mexico use Canary Island broom for ritual purposes (Fadiman 1965). In the United States, the flowers are smoked as a tobacco substitute (cf. Nicotiana tabacum) (Fadiman 1965). Distribution The bush is endemic to the Canary Islands." - Christian Ratsch, The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications (Get the book.)

"They might, for example, displace existing plants and animals, create new plant pathogens, disrupt ecosystems, transfer genes to weeds or wild relatives, reduce crop diversity, or "contaminate" native plants or organically grown foods. Widespread planting of Bt crops, for example, might encourage the proliferation of insects resistant to the Bt toxin. Similarly, widespread use of herbicide-resistant crops might transfer that resistance to undesirable weeds or encourage further reliance on chemicals—such as Monsanto's Roundup—as pest-management strategies." - Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Get the book.)

"Once they were introduced to the islands of the Caribbean by Spanish explorers, they established themselves so quickly that subsequent generations of newcomers mistook them for native plants. Consumption of bananas in North America began in the mid-i9th century, and bananas became extremely popular when the United Fruit Company began to import them from Jamaica in 1885, later spinning off the internationally recognized brand Chiquita. Blueberries and cranberries are heath shrubs belonging to the vaccinium family, native to the Americas." - The New York Times, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind (Get the book.)

"Native plants used as medicine in Hawaii. Honolulu: Lyon Arboretum, University of Hawaii at Manoa. -. 1993. Plants in Hawaiian culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kreuter, Marie-Luise. 1982. Wunderkrafte der Natur: Von Alraunen, Ginseng und anderen Wunderwurzeln. Munich: Heyne. Krochmal, Arnold, and Connie Krochmal. 1984. A field guide to medicinal plants. New York: Times Books. Kronfeld, Moritz. 1981. Donnerwurz und Mduseaugen. Berlin: Zerling. (Orig. pub. 1898.) Kruedener, Stephanie von, Isolde Hagemann, and Bernhard Zepernick. 1993. Arzneipflanzen?" - Christian Ratsch, The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications (Get the book.)

"Different types are usually derived from native plants of the particular region or country, such as Australian bush flower essences, rain forest essences (Brazil), Alaskan flower essences. History Bach flower remedies were developed by Dr Edward Bach (1886-1936), a physician and homoeopath. Bach believed that negative states of mind caused physical illness, and his approach to maintaining health was focused on the patient's psychological state. His theory was that by treating patients' emotional and mental responses to their illness, physical symptoms would then be relieved." - Dr. Michael Heinrich, Joanne Barnes, Simon Gibbons and Elizabeth M. Williamson, Fundamentals of Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy (Get the book.)

"With so few major crops in the world, all of them domesticated thousands of years ago, it's less surprising that many areas of the world had no wild native plants at all of outstanding potential. Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating. Yet some of the world's failures to domesticate wild plants remain hard to explain. The most flagrant cases concern plants that were domesticated in one area but not in another." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.) "The explanation is that the region lacks dense local concentrations of resources that would permit many people to live together, and that (until the arrival of missionaries bringing crop plants) it also lacked native plants that could have permitted productive farming. The bands' food staple is the sago palm tree, whose core yields a starchy pith when the palm reaches maturity. The bands are nomadic, because they must move when they have cut the mature sago trees in an area." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.)

"The native plants of the Greek world among the most used Plant Mentions Plant Mentions F hellebore 63 pomegranate 37 c garlic 49 elder tree 35 P French mercury 47 myrtle 35 ft parsley 46 squirting cucumber 33 w leek 46 sage 31 \i flax 45 cypress 31 d an is 43 barley 30 It white beet 43 rue 30 b cauliflower 41 laurel 29 n origanum 40 29 c Source: Touwaide, Alain, 1997-1998, Bibliographie historique de la t Lettre Jean Palerne, 30: 2-22; 31: 2-65. aThe identification of plants mentioned in ancient texts is a critical issi used in current literature." - Amarjit S. Basra, Handbook of Medicinal Plants (Get the book.)

"Neither Bantu nor white farmers, heirs to thousands of years of farming experience, were subsequently able to develop southern African native plants into food crops. Africa's domesticated animal species can be summarized much more quickly than its plants, because there are so few of them. The sole animal that we know for sure was domesticated in Africa, because its wild ancestor is confined there, is a turkeylike bird called the guinea fowl." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.)

"For example, purple loosestrife, a native of Eurasia, has crowded out native plants in many North American wetlands in part because of its reproductive edge: a single plant may produce as many as 250,000 seeds. Kudzu, a native of Asia nicknamed "the plant that ate the South," has strong, tough vines that can grow up to 60 feet (18 meters) in just one season, smothering any vegetation in its path. Predation Lions, snakes, and eagles are examples of predators—organisms that hunt and eat other organisms." - The New York Times, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind (Get the book.)

"Wl ere Our Plants and Their Uses Come From Th ; plants that grow wild on this continent can be divided into two main cate-gor es: native plants and introduced plants. Native plants have evolved here for several millions of years. They are found in t ne woods, in the plains, in the mountains, in the deserts - mostly in places wh ch have not been too drastically transformed by the encroachment of the wh te man. ntroduced plants have invaded all the areas where the ground has been dis-turl ied: around dwellings, in cities, along roadsides, in fields and pastures." - Francois Couplan, Ph.D., The Encyclopedia of Edible Plants of North America (Get the book.)

"Harrington, who ate his way through uncounted edibles while researching his classic reference book, Edible native plants of the Rocky Mountains. Chestnutlike in texture, the thin-shelled, starchy seed is nestled in a tiny basal cup. To remove the bitter tannins, the nuts must be soaked in several changes of water until sweet tasting. This leaching process may take from a few hours to a few days, depending upon the variety. Ground into meal, acorns can be used in the same manner as cornmeal." - Dianne Onstad, Whole Foods Companion: A Guide For Adventurous Cooks, Curious Shoppers, and lovers of natural foods (Get the book.)

"Only those people from other climates, who eat virtually no coconut or other native plants, have a difficult time surviving. Herbalists have noted for years that in regions where certain diseases are common, medicinal plants grow that can cure these diseases. This is why every culture in the world has a form of traditional medicine based on the use of local herbs. The people who live in the tropics where coconut grows are protected to some extent from malaria, yellow fever, and other common infectious organisms." - Bruce Fife and Jon J. Kabara, The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil (Get the book.)

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