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Sunday, April 01, 2007

CAPILLAIRE

One wintergreen berry, capillaire or Gaultheria hispidula, is white. The other berry, more commonly known as wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbems, is red. Both may be brewed into interesting herbal teas. We deal with the white-berried creeping snowberry first.

CAPILLAIRE TEA

Capillaire or Creeping snowberry

In continental French, where this word began, capillaire tea was an infusion made by pouring boiling water on the fronds of maidenhair ferns. Capillaire, French for maidenhair fern, derived from the Latin of medieval herbalists where herba capillaris was the herb-garden name for the fern, itself from the Latin capillus, hair. But in early Newfoundland, Quebec, and other Maritime regions of Canada, capillaire referred to a tea made by pouring boiling water over the fresh or dried leaves of a little evergreen shrub named creeping snowberry, Gaultheria hispidula, and then letting it steep for several days in a closed container.

Allergy Alert! Attend the warning that anything containing oil of wintergreen can be toxic to children with a hypersensitivity to aspirin.

Capillaire is a wild tea to be enjoyed as a pleasant change from other teas, but in a small amount and infrequently. All wintergreen berries, white in this snowberry species, are edible, and have saved those lost in the winter woods who knew where to find the white berries under the snow. The rest of us must dial 911.

Gaultheria hispidula was named after an immigrant to early Canada, Dr. Jean-François Gaultier (1708-1756) sent out to New France as a botanist and King’s physician. Dr. Gaultier popularized the use of local herbal teas and identified this plant to Peter Kalm, a colleague of Sweden’s Linnaeus, the great founder of botanical nomenclature, who classified it and named this little creeping wintergreen species after Dr. Gaultier. Just how Linnaeus decided that an inserted letter h would render the French name more authentically Roman is beyond this reader of Latin. The species name hispidula is a diminutive form of the Latin adjective hispidus ‘bristly.’ Hispidula may be translated here as ‘slightly prickly’ or ‘with a few bristles.’

WINTERGREEN

“Into the forest depths
by pleasant paths they go,
He with his rifle on his arm,
the lady with her bow,
Where cornels arch their cool dark boughs
o’er beds of wintergreen.” -

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

Wintergreen bears the botanical name Gaultheria procumbens. Procumbens is a Latin adjective in the form of a present participle. It means literally ‘lying down’ and in botanical Latin means ‘flat and spreading.’ In Quebec French, wintergreen is petit thé du bois, “little tea of the woods.” Wintergreen spreads slowly about four inches annually by stolons. New plants spring from animal-dispersed seeds too. Wintergreen as a groundcover likes partial shade and slightly damp acidic soil. Bright red berries appear in early autumn and persist through winter to the following summer. Often it blooms twice a year. The Ojibwa Indians called it winisbugons usually translated “dirty leaf” but perhaps better translated “bog leaf.”

Throughout its range, wintergreen has many local names: Box Berry, Canadian Mint, Checkerberry, Deerberry, Leatherleaf, Ground-tea or Groundberry, Hillberry, Mountainberry, Patridgeberry, Spiceberry, Teaberry, & Wax Cluster among others. The berries provide winter food for squirrels, chipmunks, deermice, grouse, partridges, bobwhites and turkeys. Red fox eat it when other food is scarce. Deer and bears nibble wintergreen leaves with great relish.

The berries are edible for humans but bland. First Peoples showed white immigrants how to use the leaves medicinally; wintergreen leaves contain methyl salicylates similar to the acetylsalicylic acid found in aspirin.

MAKING WINTERGREEN TEA

Here’s a web note: “Wintergreen was once famous as a native tea hence the regional name Teaberry, but it has fallen out of use because people have forgotten how to prepare it. The leaves can be harvested at any time of year, but have to be fermented if they are to have any taste beyond just a pleasant odor. To prepare the leaves: pack a jar with them, fill with sterile water and set the sealed jar in a warm spot for several days, until the water becomes bubbly with fermentation.

The first soaking of water makes a strong tea when heated and diluted to taste; or the flavored water can be used in cooking or to add a distinctive flavor to lemonaide or orange-pekoe tea. The fermented leaves themselves are strained & placed in a dehydrator or permited to dry out naturally if it is a low-humidity season. The dried leaves can later be prepared in boiling water like any other tea, making a milder brew than the water from the original fermenting.”

Uses and dangers of wintergreen oil.

Here’s another web notice stating that “Oil of Wintergreen is a medicine recognized in the United States Pharmacopoeia. The primary active ingredient of the oil, methyl salicylate, is closely related to acetylsalicylic acid, popularly known as aspirin. They are also similar in the toxic effects of overdose. Aspirin can be fatal in dosages as low as 10 grams (about 30 tablets depending on the amount of AS in each tablet). 3 grams of wintergreen oil has poisoned an adult.

Aboriginal people used wintergreen leaves to make a tea to treat the aches and pains of arthritis, rheumatism, lumbago and gout. Early colonists adopted this practice and wintergreen became an official medicine for arthritis in 1820. Making wintergreen tea requires that the leaves be soaked in water for 12 to 24 hours since the volatile oil is the result of fermentation, which requires this amount of time for the chemical reaction to proceed.

Wintergreen oil’s pleasant aroma and taste combined with its pain-killing attributes made it a prime ingredient of patent medicines of the late 19 th Century. Factory distilling of wintergreen oil created a supply that was used as a flavoring for chewing gum, breath fresheners, candy, and root beer. Its therapeutic attributes as a skin lotion resulted in its use as not only a liniment, but as a treatment for leather to make it pliable for book-binding. Because a ton of wintergreen leaves makes a pound of oil, most commercial production today is a synthetic form of wintergreen oil made from the twigs from birch trees.”