Hi, I'm Shana from Sage Country Herbs.
And I am here at Mount Pisgah Arboretum
with Mountain Rose Herbs,
and we're going to go and enjoy some
of our plant friends of the Pacific Northwest.
Come on.
So let's start with these majestic trees right here.
These are some of the common oaks of the Pacific Northwest.
And I love talking about oaks
because they range all across this country.
So oaks are part of the plant family Fagaceae.
They are of the genus Quercus,
which is just a fun genus to say.
I'll say it again. Quercus.
And there are many, many, many different species.
And so I come from Southern California,
the hills of Northern San Diego County.
And down there, we have a lot of the coast live oaks.
And they have smaller leaves
and they tend to be a little bit smaller in stature
than these majestic, fabulous oaks that are up here.
Some of the differences that I can notice just being here is
because we don't tend to be nearly
as moisture heavy down there,
we do get a good amount of moisture from the ocean,
but that moisture burns off,
and so we don't tend to have a lot
of moss like this growing on our trees.
Some of the other things
that I can see is the hanging usnea down.
Some of these wonderful lichens
that have this great relationship with trees.
I love usnea.
I'm going to focus on that for a moment
because one of the coolest things
about usnea is the fact that it's kind of like,
I like the metaphor
that usnea is like an external lung for the trees.
That, you know, people will learn
that trees are a part of like taking
in the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen,
but within that, there's also a lot of toxins
that are found in the air.
And usnea actually is a wonderful filter of those
without actually holding on to them
because there are some likens like usnea
that we can also use for their medicinal benefits.
When I look at these trees around me,
what I see are ecosystems.
Like, right here, this is an oak woodland.
And oak woodlands are beautiful.
Of course, they have a primary character of oaks
as their kind of star,
but then there's all of these other side players
and the usnea and the other lichens
that are hanging from them in the moss.
These are some of those side players
of the ecosystems that these oaks helped to create.
Beyond ecosystems, some of the claims
to fame of oak itself is food.
Where I come from,
the oak is actually the primary food source historically
of a lot of the indigenous tribes of Southern California.
So some of the main ones that I focus on are the Kumeyaay.
I that's one of the primary nations of San Diego County.
And the Kumeyaay are very, very well known
for their historical use of the oak.
And there are many different oaks,
but the beautiful thing is that all oaks create,
their fruit, is a dry fruit called an acorn.
It's a nut.
And like many nuts, they have a hard outer shell,
they have some meat on the inside
and that is the actual seed.
And so you could sprout that nut.
And just like most trees, they produce so many nuts.
And if you have oak tree in your yard,
you end up with so many babies
of the oak acorns
that were either planted by nature itself
or more likely planted by the squirrels in the neighborhood.
And the interesting thing about squirrels
and nuts is that we all, you know,
we learned this when we were young
that, like, squirrels taking the nuts and they make caches,
but the interesting thing is that they make caches all
over the place and they don't always remember everywhere
that they put their nuts.
So there are some nuts that end up being forgotten about,
or maybe that squirrel gets taken out by a coyote,
and so some of the nuts that it actually put into storage
then just sit there.
And maybe there's rain
and those nuts actually start to grow,
and now you get new trees.
And so there's this relationship
with the oaks producing the nuts
and then those oaks also have a relationship
with the varmints and the different animals
that live around it that actually help
to take its seeds and plant it for the trees.
It's just a relationship that is natural,
that naturally forms in nature.
And I love thinking about these relationships.
You know, the bee, when it goes to a flower is not thinking,
"Well, I'm going to help pollinate that flower,"
so that then... Like, no.
There's just the bee is there for its own needs
of gathering nectar and gathering pollen,
and the flower is like, "Well, hey,
this is actually helping me get this, you know,
get the fertilization of my eggs happening,"
or the pollination, I should say.
I love the relationships.
I love diving deeper than just name that plant
into why?
What's its role in its relationship with its ecosystem?
So let's go back to the oaks.
So oaks produce acorns and acorns are,
they're actually a perfect food.
They are rich in all the macronutrients
of they have good-quality essential fatty acids,
they have good-quality protein,
they have good-quality complex carbohydrates and fiber.
They are complete and perfect in terms of being food.
However, some of the drawbacks of eating oaks,
and I've had people ask me in herbal classes like,
"Oh, aren't acorns toxic?"
To which at first I laughed, and then I realized,
oh, it's kind of rude to laugh at somebody's question.
So let's deal with this, you know, real.
Oaks are not toxic;
however, they are incredibly rich in tannic acid.
And that tannic acid is very, very, very drying.
Most people have experienced the drying effect
of tannic acid.
If you have had a cup of black tea
and you take a sip and your (slurps) tongue feels all dry
like a piece of boot leather,
you've experienced tannic acid.
Well, if you just go and crack an acorn and,
you know, pop the acorn, the meat of it,
and you start chewing, and you're
going to (slurps) start getting all like dried out
and you will have to really work hard to swallow it
because it'll dry everything out.
And dry mucosal membranes actually make it
a lot harder to swallow.
And if you do get it down,
it will dry out all the mucosa of your stomach.
So you can totally see where somebody might say,
"Oh yeah, that's toxic."
But it's not toxic like releasing compounds
that will kill you.
It'll just dry everything out.
And if it makes it all the way down,
it'll just constipate you really bad.
So yes, it will feel toxic,
but the key is that there's nothing actually
that is going to, you know,
have a like poisonous effect on your body.
It's a physical effect of drying out your mucosal membranes.
And that doesn't feel good,
but it's also really easy to mitigate that
because tannic acid is water-soluble.
So traditionally, you take acorns
and you crack them and you either soak the meat of the seed
or you grind it up into a powder
and you soak it and you flush it with water.
And that water is extracting out
the water-soluble tannic acid,
sometimes just called "tannins."
So that now renders all of this wonderful protein,
fat, and complex carbohydrates ready to eat,
as well as ways of storing it as well.
So acorns are amazing food.
Really important because when people think about,
and I love teaching about the idea
of what's called the "Paleolithic Era,"
this is the time period from about 2 million years ago
to about 10,000 years ago.
And really it's a time period of hunter gathering.
And it ended because humans started planting crops
and not moving around.
And so that kind of ended that Paleolithic Era.
But people think about this in these like caveman terms.
And while certainly hunting was very important during
that time, hunting, when you don't have guns and scopes
and that type of thing,
is really, really, really hard.
And gathering is when you understand the cycles of nature
and when things are ready to be gathered,
it's actually really, really easy.
And everybody can take part in the gathering.
The children, the women, the men, the elderly.
Everybody can take part in the gathering.
And then it's also much easier to be able
to store things like acorns for a long time,
like a year, until your next acorn harvest.
Much easier than trying to process all of the meat
and store that for a long period of time.
And so I really like to think
about the hunting, gathering.
I like to actually shift it to gathering, hunting
because the gathering is such an incredibly vital part.
And the other aspect of gathering is
where does the diversity of food come from?
It comes from gathering.
You know, there's all kinds of reasons
where hunting is beneficial to people
who are living a sustenance lifestyle,
but it's the gathering
that actually creates the different flavors,
the different nutritional profiles.
So acorns from oaks are really
in terms of like life maintenance,
acorns from oaks are where it's at.
Oh yeah.
There's all kinds of medicinal aspects of oak as well.
Most of the medicinal aspects of oak are coming
from that tannic acid, the tannins.
So when we think about tannins, it's in the bark.
You don't generally use the "barky" bark.
You use what's called the cambium layer,
which is the secondary layer underneath.
The tannins are found in the leaves
and they're found in the roots,
but why on earth would you ever try
to take down a tree for tannic acid?
That's just ridiculous.
But oak bark, especially on branches,
is much, much easier to gather.
You would never gather bark from this
because you'd be opening up the tree to potential infection.
But one of my favorite ways to work
with oak bark medicine is after a storm,
when branches have come down.
Personally, I love to work with medicine
that is kind of presented by nature.
I like to take advantage of abundance.
And everywhere has abundance in some way, you know?
In Southern California, we have a lot of fruit.
I mean, we have a long growing season.
There's a lot of fruits to take advantage of abundance.
But when we recognize abundance is just what is plentiful.
And it could be food and it could be,
well, it could be a wide variety of things.
So when we recognize what is abundant,
well, after a storm and you've got all these branches,
what a great time to then go and collect your branches
and be able to peel away that bark
and make that bark into medicine
that then you can use long-term.
So the medicine that we would be looking
at would be the tannic acid, and that is highly astringent.
Tannins are astringent,
so what they cause in drying you out we can
also use to our benefit.
So anytime you have something that is like a croupy cough,
something like wet and mucusy, really wet, mucusy sinuses,
wet mucusy, you know, lungs or throat,
and you just keep having to go like, (clears throat)
you know, you're trying to like clear that mucus.
And that is actually a wonderful thing.
That wetness is allowing you to move that mucus.
And I also think it's really important
to understand mucus is not the enemy here.
Mucus is, number one, it's keeping everything lubricated.
Number two, mucus is also wrapping
around infectious material like bacteria or a virus.
And so that then allows us to be able to get it out
by, (clears throat) you know, clearing that mucus
and sometimes being able to spit that mucus out,
you're actually getting some of
that infectious material out.
So mucus is actually a really important part.
And I say this because I'm up in the Pacific Northwest
and I've never dealt with dry mucosal membranes up here.
But once I moved down to the Southwest,
it is a primary component of my clinical practice
that we deal with dry mucosal membranes, like all the time.
And I learned from that
how to work with my mucosal membranes.
So I really appreciate being able
to understand the physiology of the mucosa
because it's part immunity, it's part of our protection.
It's also part of just our general digestion
and how it works.
So let's finish up how we can work with tannic acid.
So tannic acid is inherently drying.
So we're going to use it for wet mucosal membranes.
And that can be anything, you know,
from a sore throat to,
you know, weepy eyes, to sinuses,
to, you know, a wound that is really weepy.
What feels more magical is the way
that tannic acid actually has an affinity
to binding to things.
So tannic acid binds to protein.
And our skin is made of protein.
And actually, every mucosal membrane is made of protein.
Actually, every cell in our body is made
of the breakdown products of protein, which are amino acids.
So every cell in our body is made
of amino acids and fatty acids.
So those are two of those things that we find
in the acorn that allow us to have the extra raw materials
to be able to make a new membrane.
So every membrane in our body,
from a blood cell to a skin cell to a throat cell.
is made of protein and tannins bind to protein.
So that means that when we have a sore throat,
we can drink some oak bark tea
and that's going to bind to the protein layer of our throat
and create a soothing, healing emolliency
that allows that to heal.
You have a sunburn.
You can put some tea that has tannic acid in it,
maybe from an acorn or maybe from some oak bark,
and that is going to bind to the protein layer
of your skin of that sunburn
and actually make a soothing, healing emolliency.
Because how do you heal from a burn or a wound?
You need the next layer of skin to come up.
So the easiest way to heal is to protect it
so that top layer is not so easily wounded again.
So you use that tannic acid, usually in tea form,
maybe as a poultice,
and that is going to help bind up
and then allow that next layer.
So this is so well-documented
that burn centers across America will use tannic acid
as a first layer,
especially on a first or second degree burn.
The other thing that tannic acid binds
to is a classification of chemicals called "alkaloids."
Alkaloids, some of them are going to be chemical in nature,
but there's a ton of alkaloids found in nature.
And the cool thing about tannins binding
to alkaloids is that a lot of things
that are potentially toxic are alkaloids.
Now, there's also a lot of alkaloids
that are not toxic at all,
but it's so well-known that tannic acid binds
to alkaloids that in poison centers across the country,
if you don't know what your kid drank
or what you drank that is making you feel yucky
and you go to a poison control center,
they will give you tannic acid to drink
because if it's still in your stomach,
that tannic acid will actually bind up with the alkaloids
and stop your body from absorbing them
into your bloodstream.
So this is so well-documented.
This has nothing to do with herbs at this point.
This is burn centers across the country
and poison control centers
across the country using tannic acid.
Now, are they getting their tannic acid from the oak?
Probably not, but that's beside the point.
Historically, we can use oak in that same way.
And where did, you know, the burn centers
and the poison centers learn this from?
Well, historically, you know, medicine came from plants.
So historically it probably was used
from something like an oak tree or something like that.
But there is so much history
of the way that we can work with this.
And it seems really overly simple,
but what I find in medicine is that most
of the time it is actually mostly pretty simple.
And if we apply it,
it's the way that we apply things
that can become more complex.
But when we understand these foundational aspects
of oaks have tannic acid, that tannic acid is astringent,
we can use it for a wide variety of things
from sunburns to the potential,
you know, sore throat,
to the potential, you know, somebody drinks something bad,
but also just that tannins are drying.
So they actually help to dry up a swollen tissue
like a bug bite.
I've taken just like a leaf of an oak,
chewed it up into what's called a spit poultice,
and put it on a mosquito bite.
And it's amazing how it will stop the itching
and what was a bump is now gone.
So I think of astringents as like my go-to first aid herbs.
And the fact that you can look around
and there is so many plants with tannic acid in them,
that makes it, when you understand the plants around you,
you can actually have all kinds of medicine
at your fingertips without even realizing it.
Thank you so much for joining us
for a plant walk at Mount Pisgah
and I hope you come back and see more plant walks,
and maybe I'll see you out in the field.