For those unfamiliar with Professor Storl, he is one of those remarkable people who have blurred the conventional boundaries in his life-long quest to understand the relationships – both historic as well as present-day – between people and plants, and then to share with others what he has learned.
Back in 1971, Dan Jason published “Some Useful Wild Plants; A Foraging Guide to Food and Medicine From Nature,” a book that eventually sold over 30,000 copies and became one of the best known books on foraging for wild plants in Canada and the northern United States.
What with marijuana now legal for recreational – as well as medicinal use – most everyone here in Oregon seems to be opening a shop selling it in any unused retail space, garden shed, or chicken coop. Indeed, the proliferation of cannabis throughout the state is at levels never before seen (and that’s saying something in a state that contains both the city of Portland and the annual site of the Oregon Country Fair).
When I first heard about the new book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask; Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings by Mary Siisip Geniusz, Wendy Makoons Geniusz, and Annmarie Geniusz, my mind immediately left back to a previous ethnobotanical book I read a few years ago: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss; A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses – a book I found both fascinating and profound.