Healing gardens: The North Fork's first pharmacies
Before there was your family pharmacist, and long before chain drug stores popped up all over, aches and ills were addressed by potions and poultices made from North Fork plants.
Nancy Smith of Mattituck, a master gardener for 30 years, has long been fascinated by the role native plants played in the medicine of the Native Americans whose village once stood on the land that’s now home to the Mattituck-Laurel Historical Society.
Five years ago, the historical society was considering planting a Victorian herb garden, but when members of its board sought Ms. Smith’s advice, she instead suggested a garden that focused on Native Americans’ healing plants.
“Indians didn’t just sit around with a toothache or a bleeding wound and wait for the drugstore to open,” she said on a recent afternoon while looking over the society’s healing garden she created on the society’s grounds.
“Most pharmaceuticals are based on plants from South America, but we don’t realize what was here,” Ms. Smith said. There were few doctors among the colonists, because they couldn’t make money in the New World, so settlers turned to Native American medicine men for advice on how to cure their ailments.
Ms. Smith, who was a science teacher for 33 years, scoured rare seed catalogues and local roadsides looking for the perennial plants that make up the garden.
Some, like the purple coneflower, whose root contains immune system-boosting echinacea, have been selectively bred to produce a larger, more formidable flower than the true genetic original. Ms. Smith had looked for the plant as it grew in the wild.
She found seeds for the wild plant in a catalogue from North Carolina. After two years, though, the plant she grew from that seed has yet to flower.
Native strawberries, high in vitamin C, were also much smaller and harder to find than their modern counterparts. After years of encouragement, they’re beginning now to spread through the garden.
While planning the garden, there were many moments when Ms. Smith asked her husband to pull the car over to the side of the road, having spotted a plant she’d been looking for. That was the case with mullein, a large roadside plant with leathery leaves and a tall stem full of yellow seeds.
Mullein is full of essential oil, and its leaves are so hefty and textured that Native Americans used them to line their moccasins. The plant was also known as “Quaker Rouge,” because Quaker women, whose beliefs included a prohibition on makeup, would rub the leaves on their cheeks for a ruddy, healthy look.
The Common Ills - News
Before there was your family pharmacist, and long before chain drug stores popped up all over, aches and ills were addressed by potions and poultices made from North Fork plants. Nancy Smith of Mattituck, a master gardener for 30 years, has long been
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