Lippia alba: Oaxaca lemon verbena

It all started with a little tour of his back yard.

He’s an aging Greek professor and doesn’t like lawn, so his back yard is a tangle of edible plants…. incredibly strong basil from Greece, pineapples started from tops, an olive tree with one very proud olive.

Lippia alba

“Here” he said, breaking some branches off a bush as round as it was tall, ‘the leaves make a great lemon tea.” He paused and emphasized it: “A really good tea.” I didn’t know it at the moment but that little exchange typified the schism in the plant world between those who use a plant and those who wonder what it is.

Years later I have five bushes of “it.”  The question, of course, was and is, “what is “it” since my friend’s association with botany does not extend beyond consumption. It was clearly in the same greater collective as the American Beautyberry and the Lantana in my yard, which are both in the verbena family. The leaf shape, growth habit, and exotic oils was consistent with that family, but that’s a huge family.

“Where did you get it?” I asked him on another visit. From his neighbor he said. “Which one” I asked. “The Cuban,” he said.  That was some help. It was doubtful this plant was from Sweden or the like. “Where did he get?” I asked.  The answer was not encouraging: A shrug of the shoulders.  Maybe Sweden wasn’t ruled out.

My first near success was to find on the internet a picture of a Lippia alba var. globiflora.  That looked promising. I found it while looking for “Cuba and verbena.” At least I had the family, genus and species right. The variation is still debatable.

Lippia alba (LIP-pee-uh AL-buh) is one of those plants that was found when it wasn’t really lost, and then was lost but not by those who use it then found again by those who don’t use it. That’s kind of how my friend and I related to this plant. This past year he’s been pleasantly drinking tea made from the leaves. What the plant is, is not relevant to him or his plant. If I never figure out exactly what the bush is makes no difference to him. He likes the tea. That’s the same situation when researchers work on a plant and then leave for a century only to come back and rediscover the same plant the locals kept right on using.

The botanical name contains some intrigue as well. Alba means white. Lippia honors Italian naturalist Dr. Agostino Lippi, 1678 -1704 (some call him a French traveller.) But more than that it is a genus of plants that has aromatic oils and Lippia can also be the feminine form of Lipos, the Greek word for fat. It is perhaps a double entendre or a convenient naming.

If one does an internet search on Lippia alba one learns that it has been the subject of a lot of research, reported in 2007. It clearly has been discovered. Its oils are antibiotic, antioxidants, and sedative, not inducing sleep but increasing the length of sleep.  It also helps prevent ulcers…. I was beginning to understand why my friend was so relaxed all the time.  And indeed, I may never figure out which Lippia alba it is, if it is one. All I really know is it makes a nice tea…Perhaps that is all I need to know.  Perhaps that is all we ever really need to know. Humanity got along fine without botanists, or nutritionists.

Now, pardon me, but I have to put some tea water on to heat….

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: Very aromatic shrub, three to six feet, branches slender, tends to sprawl, leaves heavily veined, hairy with strong lemon smell, leaves slightly hairy, oval to oblong, serrate, small flowers purple to violet, pink or white in leaf axils. Lower branches can put down roots.

TIME OF YEAR: Leaves year round

ENVIRONMENT: Grows in most soil and can tolerate some shade, naturalized in Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico, Native to Mexico to Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina as well as Colombia.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Leaves as tea, fresh or dried. The bush has a multitude of herbal/medicinal uses. It is a sedative, menstrual aid, and anti-hypertensive, among many things.

Osage Orange

 Maclura pomifera: The Edible Inedible

Sometimes everybody is almost wrong.

If you Google “Osage Orange” or “Maclura pomifera” (mak-LOOR-uh pom-EE-fer-uh) (in 2009) you’ll get some 50,000 hits.*  Approximately 49,997 of those sites will tell you the Osage Orange is not edible. Two of three remaining sites, here and the one below, will say it is edible. The third one reports we say it is edible but we must be wrong.

Osage Orange Seeds

In all fairness, not all of the fruit is edible. Only the seeds are. In fact, the Osage Orange it is closely related to the Mulberries, which we do eat, and the Paper Mulberry which also has an edible fruit. But, 99.999999% of the Internet sites says it is not edible. Why? Two reasons. Somebody a long time ago said the fruit was not edible, and the Internet is mostly cut and paste wrong. I have truly become disgusted with sites like Wikipedia regarding the inaccurate information about plant edibility.

Fruit is not edible

It was from Jim Mason, a naturalist with the Great Plains Nature Center in Wichita Kansas, that I learned the seeds were edible. They taste somewhat like raw sunflower seeds. Not bad for an inedible fruit though he does say it takes a lot of work to get the seeds, and he’s right.  The Osage Orange grows in Florida — I know where there is one in Jacksonville. I have visited it several times. However, the tree grows in abundance in the mid-west, being part of the 1930’s reclamation process. It is, or was, the most intentionally planted tree in the United States. Its native range is a swath running from east Texas up into Oklahoma and parts of western Arkansas. It grows in 39 states and Washington DC, excluding the coldest and or driest areas, such as the high plain states and upper New England. Also found in Canada, it’s “invasive” in Italy and approaching invasive in Spain.

To separate the edible seeds from mature fruit put the fruit in a bucket of water and wait until the fruit is soft, then separate the seeds out.  This will be an aroma-filled process and not pleasant. Let’s just say starving would help.

William Maclure, 1763-1840

Also called Hedgeapples, the Osage Orange got some of its reputation from killing livestock. But careful investigation shows the animals usually suffocated on the large fruit. That got translated into “toxic.” But one livestock feeding study found no significant chemical problems with the Osage Orange. As for the seeds, birds and small mammals have enjoyed them for a long time. Squirrels seem particularly fond of ripping into one.

While the edibility of the Osage Orange has been maligned for decades, its usefulness as a tree has not. It was and still is esteemed for making bows. In fact, some bow makers think the Osage Orange’s wood for bows is superior to the Yew Tree, which is usually held up to be the classic standard.  The wood is turned into various products or used to make guitars. The bark also furnishes a yellow dye and tannins.

Botanically, the Osage Orange, Maclura pomifera, was named for a Scottish-born semi-American geologist named William Maclure (1763-1840.) He moved around a lot so calling him an American is a bit iffy.  Pomifera means bearing apples.

 Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

Graphic courtesy of the Great Plains Nature Center

IDENTIFICATION: Tree to 40 feet and 20 inches diameter, often with a short thick trunk and numerous low branches. Bark gray to yellow-brown, thick, divided into narrow forking ridges, usually with hard sharp spines to one inch at leaf base. Sap thick, white, sticky. Leaves alternate, ovate, 2 to five inches long, one to three inches  wide. Fruit large yellow-green knobby balls to five inches in diameter.

TIME OF YEAR: Fruit, smelling faintly of orange, in late summer, fall.

ENVIRONMENT: Bottom lands that are often inundated with water, mixed with other hardwoods, and interspersed with prairie, and grow where moderately dry as well.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Seeds raw or roasted

*The original article was written in August 2009. Since then the number of hits has increased from 50,000 to 1.5 million (Sept 2014)  and I think now a few more sites say the seeds are edible. One addition to make. I learned of a study that was looking for old homesteads to excavate in the midwest. They originally thought of using old wells as a possible homestead locator but found old Osage Orange trees were more indicative of a former homestead nearby. That says something about the usefulness of the tree. 

Lunch Drops In

Monkey Puzzle Tree seeds

My good friend Saul is a luthier, a man who works with exotic woods. He repairs premium wooden instruments. It is not unusual for him to be working on a Stradivarius or a Guarneri someone sat on. And for 30 years he thought the tree right outside his shop was a Monkey Puzzle Tree, Araucaria araucana (air-ah-KAIR-ee-uh air-ah-KAY-nuh.) That’s what it was sold as. It’s not. It’s a close relative, the Bunya Pine.  The falling cones from either, however, can still injure you.

The Monkey Puzzle Tree is from Central Chile and Argentina. But, it’s a common landscape plant in Florida and southern border states all the way to California then up the west coast. It is also cultivated in England and Ireland, In fact the tree’s name came from an incident in England’s Cornwall in 1850. The tree back then was rare in gardens and not widely known. The owner of a young tree at Pencarrow Garden was showing it off to a group of friends when one said “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that.” At the time the tree had no common name in English. It was first called the ‘monkey-puzzler’ tree  but ‘monkey-puzzle tree’ eventually caught on.

Cone of the Monkey Puzzle Tree

The point has been made that any monkey trying to climb the tree would likely be injured. Its leaves are more like ferocious reptilian spines than leaves. And, monkeys don’t live in the tree’s native range. However, dinosaurs did some 250 million years ago and there is some speculation that the ancient tree’s armament was to dissuade dinosaurs from lunch. Most surprisingly, it’s in the Pine family closely related to the Norfolk Pine, Araucarua excelsa (air-ah-KAIR-ee-uh eck-SELL-suh.) Like the Natal Plum and Chinese Elm, it’s an easy-to-find tree in temperate suburbia. They’ll be around for a while because some are at least 2,000 years old or more.

While found mostly among southern border states the tree is actually hardy and prefers cooler climates with some nice specimens in the Pacific Northwest states and British Columbia. It is a favorite display tree in Great Britain and grows well in Australia and New Zealand.  It does, however, take a male and a female tree to produce cones and seeds, usually a ratio of seven ladies to one fellow but I’d plant two guys just in case. The delicious seeds are edible raw or cooked. They are rich in starch and resemble an almond in size with a slight flavor of pine nuts.

The official tree of Chile, it was first found by outsiders the 1780s. It was named Pinus araucana 1782. By 1873, after a lot of botanical arguments, it became Araucaria araucana. The name Araucana comes from the native Araucano People who used the seeds of the tree in Chile. Sadly its numbers are dropping in its native range and has been protected since 1990.

Lastly, the seeds of the Araucaria bidwillii, (air-ah-KAIR-ee-uh bid-WILL-ee-eye) a native of Australia, are also edible.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: Pyramid-shaped tree 90 to 130 feet tall, 3 to 4 feet in diameter. The branches grow horizontally in whorls of five in opposite pairs, drooping, stems brittle, bark corky; feathery leaves, pale green, compound, tripinnate; The leaf is an armor-like scale, triangular, oval to lance shape, 1 to 2 inches long, shiny green on both surfaces but surface marked with longitudinal lines, RAZOR SHARP. Male and female flowers. Male cones and female cones. Female cones are large, round, dark brown, develop in two to three years, 4 to 7 inches long, 3 to 6 inches wide, falloff at maturity; split in three when dried, 200 seeds are brown to orange, triangular in shape with papery wings, 1 to 1 1/2 inches long, the nut is long and narrow with 2 small even wings that are denticulate at the top.

TIME OF YEAR: When ever you find thefemale  cones on the ground.

ENVIRONMENT: Prefers well-drained, slightly acidic, volcanic soil but will tolerate almost any soil type. It produces the heaviest where there are cool summers.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Seeds, raw or cooked. They can be boiled or roasted. Ground, they make a good flour substitute.

HERB BLURB

Resin from the tree is used to treat wounds and ulcers.

Moringa wood is extremely brittle

Moringa oleifera ….Monster…. Almost

If you have a warm back yard, think twice before you plant a Moringa tree.

Is it edible? Yes, most of it. Is it nutritious? Amazingly so, flowers, seeds and leaves. Does it have medical applications? Absolutely, saving lives on a daily basis.  Can it rescue millions from starvation? Yes, many times yes. So, what’s the down side? They don’t tell you that under good conditions it grows incredibly fast and large, overwhelming what ever space you allot to it. It can grow to monster proportions in one season.

Leaves eaten raw or cooked

I live in central Florida exactly — and I mean exactly — on the line between temperate and subtropical. I have not experienced a hard freeze here in seven years probably because I sit on a hill and have a 30,000 gallon pool to moderate temperatures. Around year two I got two food trees, Katuk and Moringa. You can read about the Katuk in another article.

It is an understatement to say the Moringa grows more than 10 feet a year. I have two trees and every year I cut off 15- to 20-foot branches. It requires constant attention. Despite its impressive growth pattern, it’s an extremely brittle tree. A man can easily break off a branch four inches through,…. It’s nice to feel like Hercules now and then.

The easy-breaking branches also lend themselves to a common-heard phrase in India when someone is being a little too demanding: “Don’t push me up a Moringa tree.” But, I will admit both trees withstood 100 mph winds three times in the hurricanes of 2004.

I want to impress upon you that my reference as to how fast this tree grows is a gross understatement, no matter how overstated it might seem. While gigantic growth is great for hungry poor countries, it is a significant headache for a suburban yard, even a 40-acre ranch.  Unattended, the tree grows into a spindly giant. If you don’t attend it twice a month you will have a monster on your property, and I have two of them, one self-seeded. Should you choose to grow it, just know what you are getting in for. Now days I cut both trees back to a three foot stump every spring, the same as where they are cultivated. These things grow so fast, I speculate you could get a crop of leaves off them in Northern Canada. Then over winter it inside.  It might make a real nice potted, pruned indoor tree for northern climes. That said, let’s view the virtues of the Moringa.

This tree is one of the world’s most useful plants. A native to the southern foothills of the Himalayas, Moringa oleifera  (mo-RIN-ga oh-lee-IF-er-uh) is cultivated around earth’s tropical belt. Moringa is grown for its leaves, fruits, seed, sap and roots. It provides a variety of food and medicine. The young fruits pods, called drumsticks, can be cooked many ways, often like green beans, and have an asparagus taste. A superior cooking oil comes from the seeds, and the light oil can be used to lubricate delicate mechanisms. The leaves are extensively used as a vegetable — I have a restaurant-owning Chinese friend who makes a great soup out of them — and the roots are made into a condiment resembling horseradish in taste, but use it sparingly for it contains an alkaloid, spirochin. A blue dye can be made from its sap. Even a health drink is made from the tree. M. oleifera also might have a great future in water purification, a prime cause of illness in the world. And that is just the start of the amazing overgrown weed called “The Miracle Tree.”

Dry moringa seeds

There is only one family of Moringa trees, and only 13 members, making it one of the smallest groups. Of all 13, M. oleifera is the one most cultivated and usually the one referred to when talking about the edible Moringa. The name Moringa comes from the Tamil/Malayalam word murungakka. A search using “murungakkai” will produce many recipes.  Oleifera means oil bearing. In the Philippines it is called “mother’s best friend,” in Florida, “the horseradish tree,” and in India “the drumstick tree.” In India it is an absolute must-have plant in the kitchen garden. In Thialand they are used as living fences.

From a food point of view, Moringa leaves can be used like spinach, though they are far more nutritious. Sorry Popeye. The leaves can be used fresh or dried into a powder. The leaves are an excellent source of vitamin A and C, a good source of B vitamins, and among the best plant sources of minerals. The calcium content is very high, iron is good enough to treat anemia — three times that of spinach — and it’s an excellent source of protein while being low on fats and carbohydrates. Said another way, Moringa leaves have seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, four times the calcium of milk, four times the vitamin A of carrots, three times the potassium of bananas, and two times the protein of yogurt. That’s quite a line up. The leaves also have the sulfur-containing amino acids methionine and cystine. Medically it is antibiotic and research shows it can be used to treat high blood pressure. A leaf tea is used by diabetics to help regulate their blood sugar. It is full of antioxidants, is anti-cancerous, and when eaten by mothers they give birth to healthier, heavier babies.  A 28 December 2007 study said a root extract is very anti inflammatory.

In fact, let me quote you an earlier abstract from Phytotherapy Research 16 Sept 2006:

Immature moringa pods

Moringa oleifera Lam (Moringaceae) is a highly valued plant, distributed in many countries of the tropics and subtropics. It has an impressive range of medicinal uses with high nutritional value. Different parts of this plant contain a profile of important minerals, and are a good source of protein, vitamins, -carotene, amino acids and various phenolics. The Moringa plant provides a rich and rare combination of zeatin, quercetin, -sitosterol, caffeoylquinic acid and kaempferol. In addition to its compelling water purifying powers and high nutritional value, M. oleifera is very important for its medicinal value. Various parts of this plant such as the leaves, roots, seed, bark, fruit, flowers and immature pods act as cardiac and circulatory stimulants, possess antitumor, antipyretic, antiepileptic, antiinflammatory, antiulcer, antispasmodic, diuretic, antihypertensive, cholesterol lowering, antioxidant, antidiabetic, hepatoprotective, antibacterial and antifungal activities, and are being employed for the treatment of different ailments in the indigenous system of medicine, particularly in South Asia. This review focuses on the detailed phytochemical composition, medicinal uses, along with pharmacological properties of different parts of this multipurpose tree. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Now you know why they call it “The Miracle Tree.” It is being planted extensively in poorer areas of the world, some 400,000 trees in Rwanda alone.

To cultivate, soak the seeds for a day in water, plant in a peat pot. When six inches high, put in fertilized ground, and stand back!  When it is six feet high cut the top off, forcing side shoots. Hang the top upside down in the shade and let it dry. Then grind the leaves into powder.

Today, approaching Valentines Day, I did my annual Moringa cut back. It takes about four hours, not counting nibbling and seed saving. Every year I promise myself I will trim them more often and every year they rocket to the sky. But that’s really not a problem.  I just climb on the roof and collect dinner.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: Slender tree, to about  35 feet; drooping branches,  brittle stems, corky bark; leaves feathery, pale green, compound, tripinnate; flowers fragrant, white or creamy-white, in sprays, 5 at the top of the flower; stamens yellow; pods pendulous, brown, triangular, splitting lengthwise into 3 parts when dry, containing about 20 seeds, pod tapering at both ends, 9-ribbed; seeds dark brown, with three papery wings.

TIME OF YEAR: In zone nine Florida, it leaves most of the year, with seed pods in the late spring and summer.

ENVIRONMENT: Originally from India, planted in frost free areas around the world. Naturalized in many areas. Grows best in sand soil, tolerates poor soil. It loves sun and heat and can be grown from seed.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Leave can be eaten raw or cooked like spinach, young seed pods can be cooked many ways, seeds are edible, cooked flowers taste like mushrooms, and the roots can be made into an occasional condiment.