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Endangered plants and women’s health: Fertility herbs at risk

  • Susan Leopold
    Susan Leopold

    Susan Leopold, PhD, is an ethnobotanist and passionate defender of biodiversity. Over the past 20 years, Susan has worked extensively with indigenous peoples in Peru and Costa Rica. She is the Executive Director of United Plant Savers and Director of the Sacred Seeds Project.

    Prior to working at United Plant Savers, she worked as a librarian at the Oak Spring Garden Library, specializing in digitizing rare herbals and botanical travel manuscripts. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Botanical Dimensions and the Center for Sustainable Economy.

    She is an advisory board member of American Botanical Council. She is a proud member of the Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia and the author of the children’s book Isabella’s Peppermint Flower, teaching about Virginia’s botanical history.

    She lives on and manages a productive farm, the Indian Pipe Botanical Sanctuary with her three children in Virginia, where she raises goats, peacocks, and herbs. She is an avid recreational tree climber, in love with the canopy just as much as the herbs of the forest floor.

  • 9:41 reading time (ish)
  • Sustainability & Social Welfare Western Herbal Medicine

Written by Susan Leopold, PhD

It was early spring when visiting a friend in southern Virginia that I came across a rare encounter with a small colony of just emerging False Unicorn root (Chamaelirium luteum). This sacred fertility herb was thriving in the woods nestled throughout a graveyard of rusty old farm equipment. Hiding in plain site along a winding creek there were about 20 or so plants spread out in small clusters with the tricking sound of a winding creek. I was in awe of these divine forest beings. A part of me deeply hoped that the digger’s hand would never find this population and that the rusty old farm equipment would be a deterrent, a strategic decoy. We don’t yet understand how to successfully cultivate this plant. It can be germinated from seed, but it takes years to grow. It needs a certain type of soil to thrive, and it produces both male and female flowers, which complicates its ability to reproduce under cultivated circumstances. So, ironically, we do not know how to propagate and cultivate a plant that is highly desired for women’s reproductive health. If there were one plant that I feel strongly about taking out of commerce in Appalachia, this is the plant I would choose.

Susan Leopold

Susan Leopold, PhD, is an ethnobotanist and passionate defender of biodiversity. Over the past 20 years, Susan has worked extensively with indigenous peoples in Peru and Costa Rica. She is the... Read more

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