I
spent two afternoons this week at a great park here in Shreveport, Louisiana,
called C. Bickham-Dickson park. What I love about this park, even though it's a
city park, is that there’s an entire section in the rear of the park used for
scientific research by Louisiana State University Shreveport (LSUS.) The front
half of the park is where most people walk and picnic. It is manicured complete
with picnic tables and sidewalks. The entire rear half of the park – or as
I like to call it “my hood” - is in the alluvial plain of the Red River. (Most
people don’t even know you can get to the river through this park, but of
course I stumbled around once when I first moved here and made this nice little
discovery.) This section of the park is densely forested and includes numerous
bodies of water adjacent to the river.
This
is also where the Matthew Campbell Memorial Birdwalk is located. The entire
trail has signs describing the various birds you might see in this part of the
park. (I don’t know a lot about Matthew Campbell except that he died very
young. If you have any information about him please feel free to leave a
comment!) It’s a rugged area so sometimes the signs are hard to find.
The
first day at the park this week was motivated by medicinal reasons. Donna (my
amazing girlfriend) had done some yard work and ended up with some poison ivy
rashes on her arms. My goal was to research this a little and see if I couldn’t
find a natural cure. Since I was a child, I have always been fascinated with
Native American remedies. Modern society sometimes scoffs at such “crude”
remedies, but they don’t come without validity. Native Americans did not write
their history, science, or medicine. They shared the knowledge orally, through
generations. Now imagine that you discovered a root or leaf that when boiled
solved something as inherently bothersome as poison ivy. Wouldn’t you tell
everyone you knew?
That’s
exactly what Native Americans did.
And the result was thousands of years of knowledge honed and refined
with each generation. Almost every moderate problem could be treated with a plant. The loss of this knowledge in
the eventual eradication of the native culture in North America is what I
believe to be one of the greatest, epic, most tragic losses of knowledge in the
history of humanity.
Luckily
for us, some of the knowledge survived. And this was the discovery I made. I
found more than one reference to boiled sycamore leaves and bark as a remedy
for poison ivy itch.
Now I
had a mission! First, I had to identify the American sycamore, otherwise known
to the scientific community as platanus occidentalis. This isn’t really as hard as
it sounds. As ironic as this is, the Internet is a great way to get back to
nature. You can sift through various images on the web and pretty quickly get
an idea of what you’re looking for.
I
remember as a kid I would have had to travel twenty miles to town and spend an
afternoon in the library photocopying pages from a science textbook to
accomplish what takes five minutes on the Internet. I will be the first to
admit that when moderated properly, technology is a good, good thing.
Sycamore leaves
Many
of the old timers where I grew up misidentified the American sycamore as some
sort of cottonwood tree. Understandably, with no access to reference materials,
this misinformation got passed around. But as you can clearly see from these
pictures, the cottonwood and sycamore are nothing alike.
Sycamore on the left, cottonwood on the right
The cottonwood has
large grooved bark and its leaves have a shimmering effect when blown by the
wind. The sycamore has smaller bark at the base and high up in the tree the bark
turns flaky, almost paper like, and often falls off exposing an almost white
surface underneath. Like this:
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin offers
this somewhat more scientific description:
The American sycamore is a wide-canopied, deciduous tree, 75-100
ft. tall, with a massive trunk and open crown of huge, crooked branches. The
bark of large, old trunks sloughs off in scales or plates leaving a smooth,
whitish inner bark. Leaves broadly ovate or broader, blade often wider than
long, long pointed. Globular fruits often persist through December. Large,
medium- to dark-green, maple-shaped leaves turn brown in fall.
Sycamore bark
More sycamore bark, from a branch that fell from higher up in the tree
It
took all of about two minutes to find a nice sycamore tree at the park. (There
was one in the parking lot.) But that seemed a little too boring to me so I
went trekking off into the forest to find one. Of course they were everywhere
so I took some bark and leaves and headed home with my catch.
That
evening, with no recipe whatsoever, I cooked a brew of boiled leaves and bark.
Donna agreed to be my guinea pig. It was a very simple concept. After bringing
the whole mess to a boil, I dropped in some rags. As soon as it was cool enough
to apply, I had Donna press the rag onto her arm until it cooled. We repeated
this three or four times.
Soup's on!
The
heat has a two-fold effect. The first is that somehow – and I have no idea why
- the heat brings the healing agents out of the leaves. And secondly, heat
naturally releases histamines, which in and of itself offers itching relief.
(Once when I was covered from head to toe with poison ivy, a scalding hot bath
would offer about four hours absolute itch relief. As it turns out, this was
also an old, country remedy. )
Color difference between boiled and unboiled leaves
And this is what boiled sycamore juice looks like! Now it's time to rub it on your body!
My
hope was to combine the heat remedy with the natural healing powers of the
sycamore treatment and see if the sycamore made the rash disappear faster.
According to Donna, the sycamore concoction did in fact provide itch relief for
the entire day,
two days in a row. This is significant because these are some of the same
amounts of relief guaranteed by over-the-counter remedies which cost anywhere
from $10 to $40 and leave you stinking or trying to sleep covered with lotion -
or both!
Unfortunately,
Donna had to leave town so I didn’t get to study the long-term effects of the
treatment. Poison ivy is tricky
because the rash is caused by an oil called urushiol that your body is reacting
to. There’s no way to prevent the reaction unless you own a time machine.
Rather, the theory is you find the best treatment available to mitigate your
body’s reaction to the oil.
I’m
no scientist, but it appears that the sycamore treatment does provide some
relief. I would need to do some more thorough testing on some more serious
rashes though to get a better idea of how well it works. (Donna did not
volunteer for that!)
If it
provides any relief it all you can see why Native Americans would have utilized
it. After all, they did not have a medicine aisle at Walgreen’s to visit!
All
in all, it was an interesting experiment. If I am unlucky enough to come in
contact with some poison ivy during one of my many adventures the boiled
sycamore treatment will definitely be the first remedy I try!
Stay
tuned for the next blog about my second afternoon at C. Bickham-Dickson Park
and the armadillo family I encountered!
~Winston
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