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 along! So i'm very excited to introduce this plant right here
and the reason is because it actually checks a bunch of boxes for me and that is as a field
botanist and an educator that takes people out into the field and teaches ethical wild crafting
in the southwest one of the things that i really learned being down there is the
population density and the minimal actual natural spaces to be able to go out in and so in teaching
people how to identify plants in nature some of the really important aspects that i've come to are
the best things to teach people about harvesting are going to be our invasive species because
people tend to be really attracted to the sacred people tend to be really attracted to the things
that others put up on a pedestal but the problem is if everybody falls in love with the sacred
there's always a finite amount but if we make the invasive species like this blackberry here into
the sacred meaning wonderful medicine and food and learning all these different ways of using it
we're never actually going to hurt it because invasive means it's not originally from here
it's generally out competing the native plants that are part of this ecosystem
and if it's invasive here it's usually invasive in a wide area so there is so much blackberry
along the west coast to recognize that it's wonderful food in delicious berries but also
all of these leaves are wonderful medicine and we can absolutely use these leaves medicinally
and by doing that we're actually helping the ecosystem by using the plants that
are invasive in that area which is going to help to take some of the pressure
off of the native species that are competing with these invasives so this is actually one of my
favorite medicines to use because it's so invasive so let's start with what is a common look alike
unfortunately to the untrained eye a common look and look alike of blackberry is poison oak
but it's really easy to tell it apart number one it has spines poison oak thankfully does not um
number two while this one does have um i've got some five leaflets over here we've got
three leaflets so um and that actually goes the same for poison oak most of the time with poison
oak you see leaflets of three but sometimes you can see leaflets of five same thing goes
for this blackberry sometimes you'll see leaflets of three but other times there's leaflets of five
but what is different is that poison oak primarily has scalloped edges while blackberry primarily has
toothed edges where the edges or what are called margins actually come out to a tooth so that's a
really good one to be aware of the stems are another key giveaway and that is that poison
oak is a woody vine that tends to climb up things and even if it's not climbing up things the vine
itself tends to be woody at least at base whereas um these are not woody vines these um they don't
tend to have any like bark on them but they do tend to have ridges on their vines they are
still vines but they don't tend to be as woody and they are of course covered in spines so that's a
really good way of being able to tell them apart you're looking at the leaflets you're looking at
the fact that they're spines and you're looking at whether it is vining and most of the time the the
poison oak is going to be climbing up something with its vines whereas blackberries tend to like
to make thickets like this is okay so what can we do with blackberry well of course we can eat them
the real key to blackberry is the tannins tannins are very very common in nature
so before we get to the tannins i like to do the introductions
and that is that this plant is part of the rose family it's the rose ca family and its
genus or its latin or scientific name is rubus rubus is the genus of blackberry and raspberry
are also rubus and salmonberry and actually a wide variety there are many rubus's genus in
the northwest and really actually all over the west coast all the rubuses have fruit that can
be eaten some of them are more tasty than others and all the rubuses have tannins in their leaves
so you can actually use this very similar to one of its sister plants which is raspberry
raspberry the common raspberry is rubus adeus and while eating raspberries are delicious raspberry
leaf is a very very recognized and commonly used plant medicine raspberry leaf is an astringent
and it has a specific affinity for the uterus and so raspberry leaf tea is very commonly used
you can use raspberry leaf tincture as well but it's very commonly used in the second
and third trimesters a pregnancy to help not dry the uterus but actually tonify the tissue
the mucosal membranes of the uterine walls and that can be a really wonderful thing especially
as during pregnancy the uterus is growing and we want to make sure that we maintain that tonality
a tone membrane is a membrane that can move and shift with the dance of life
and a non-tone membrane can either be too dry or like too flaccid and and loose and not holding
its tone i love tonality i love understanding that like maybe you've played an instrument like maybe
you play a guitar and you have to tone you have to tone your strings you have to you have to make
sure that it is um that it is well i don't play a guitar so i'm using the wrong terminology but
you understand the concept that you need to make sure that the string is at the right um the right
tension so that when you strum it you get the right tone you get the right note if that string
is too tight you get the high pitch and if it's too low you get the flat note so what you need
is the right tonality you can talk about it like a drum head as well if it's if it's pulled too tight
you get the wrong tone if it's pulled too loose you get the wrong the tone is flat so you need
that right tonality so the same thing goes with a growing uterus but it's not just during pregnancy
also helpful for um some types of menstrual cramps uh some people will use raspberry leaf tea
and notice that it is really helpful for menstrual cramps or just that like boggy feeling personally
i love raspberry tea because a it's sweet and it's a great adjunct and base for other teas because it
has the adds this sweetness and tartness without adding any sugar which i think is a wonderful
thing if you can learn to make teas that taste so good that people don't think oh where's the sugar
like that's a that you've reached this level of formulation of teas that's pretty awesome
so you can use blackberry leaf in the exact same way that use raspberry because they're
actually very very closely related so you can use these leaves just clean them and dry them
of course you need to be careful not only are there spines on the stems on the
leaflet stem but there's also spines on the back side of the leaf as well so when picking and
drying you want to make sure that you're careful you can pet the spines they actually go in one
direction but if i pet it backwards that's not going to be very enjoyable for me so you want to
just be aware of that but you absolutely can use this in the same way another way i might use the
tea bleeding gums astringents are fantastic for bleeding gums because bleeding gums are generally
from flaccid tissue tissue that is that is getting swollen and so it's holding blood and then you go
and you maybe floss and your gums start to bleed well you can swish with herbs i adore swishing
with herbs i make my own mouthwash it works incredibly well but i do warn you if you make
your own mouthwash if you're going to swish with herbs the issue is that part of the color comes
out and just like when you drink coffee or tea and you can stain your teeth you swish with herbs
when you brush your teeth and you can do the same thing so all you do you swish before you brush
your teeth and then you're just brushing off any stain that it might leave but you're having that
really nice tonifying effect on the gums which is a wonderful thing other things that you can
use blackberry leaves for really anything that you would use an astringent for so that could
be a sore throat that could be something like heartburn you could use technically you could
use it on a sunburn now the problem of course with the sunburn is that if you make like a spit
poultice and you take a leaf and you chew it up you're going to slice your tongue on those fines
so probably not so great for that but take them home and make tea out of them and then you can
blot that tea on a sunburn and it actually works really really well astringents well they dry draw
and shrink swollen tissue and in the process of doing that they actually constrict the capillary
at the tissue that they touch so you get a cut on your arm the astringent goes in and the tannins
actually constrict the capillaries where the blood is coming from that is what's making that little
cup bleed and so then they can help with you know small bits of bleeding and and help to stop
an open wound from open bleeding and that is very helpful you can use them on a bug bite a bee sting
a mosquito bite those types of things lots of just general wonderful first aid stuff that you can do
with things like blackberry leaves and it's invasive so you're not going to hurt the plant
and you can easily selectively take leaves from areas that don't have fruit because
you want that fruit because it is quite delicious now historically blackberry is actually used for
diarrhea because some of the tannins in the root will a lot of tannic acid is deactivated in the
stomach so the tannins in the root of blackberry have historically been used in the 17 and 1800s
they have historically been used for diarrhea diarrhea is really problematic if it's if it
is unchecked it's dehydration it's too much fluid leaving your body and that messes with your blood
pressure and all kinds of other things so you want to make sure that if somebody is having diarrhea
that you're helping to reduce that now there's a lot of reasons why someone might have diarrhea
and that's an important thing to understand why someone might have it but historically one of the
things that people would do would be to actually make a tea of the root of blackberry be very
careful when digging it up because it is covered in defensive spines but the root of blackberry
will actually help to tonify the walls of the colon that are not sucking that excess moisture
back out because that's actually part of the colon's job before you have a bowel movement the
walls of the um descending colon actually suck excess water out of the bowel movement so that
you can have a healthy bowel movement and you're not having diarrhea so blackberry root actually
helps to tonify the tissues of the colon which is a wonderful thing tonification is a wonderful
thing and helps with our body's ability to defend itself helps with our body's ability
to heal and then if we can actually be using invasive species then we're also
helping our local ecosystems also to heal as well i love win-win-win relationships so yay
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
you