Join co-leader, Amanda McQuade Crawford and myself on behalf of the American Botanical Council and the Amazon Center for Education and Environmental Research for an unforgettable journey to Peru. After arriving in Lima, Peru, we transfer to the airport for a short in-country flight to Puerto Maldonado in the heart of the upper Amazon basin along the Madre de Dios River. Our first few nights are at Inkaterra Lodge, an extraordinary doorway into the flora and fauna of the Peruvian rainforest. See itinerary link right for specific details. The facility and gourmet meals based on regional cuisine will cater to your creature comforts while the knowledgeable professional guides will provide us a doorway into the vast biological diversity just outside your cabin door. After a few nights at Inkaterra, we head up river by boat to catch a plane from Puerto Maldonado to Cusco, a brief 30-minute flight that takes us to the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere. At Cusco we will be met by our guides for the Andes portion of the trip. We will head for Ollantaytambo, and hop the trains to Aguas Calienté for the trip up to Machu Picchu. After that we will spend a few days exploring the ancient Quecha culture of Peruvian Andes. I love this trip and I know you will too. If you have any questions feel free to send me an email.
Join me Friday and Saturday morning, July 23 and July 24th, 11:30am-12:30 pm each day for programs at the University of Illinois, Chicago, College of Pharmacy (Room B 32 Pharmacy).
Friday’s lecture will be “Herbs and Spices as Medicine: Traditions and Contemporary Experience.”
Saturday’s presentation will be “From Folk Medicine to Phytomedicine: Medicinal Plants in the Modern World.”
The American Botanical Council (ABC) presents a photo workshop with acclaimed botanical photographer and herbalist Steven Foster, at Finca Luna Nueva Lodge in Costa Rica from May 12-18, 2010. Spend six nights at the beautiful facilities at Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, an ecolodge and Certified Biodynamic herb farm in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest, located, just ten miles from one of the world’s most active volcanoes, the Arenal Volcano.
Plants provide more than simple visual aesthetics. Photography offers an excellent medium to begin to explore simple beauty and gaining a deeper understanding of how to relate to plants. We will focus on techniques for improving your plant photography. Rather than dry optical theory or studio techniques, we will spend most of our time on techniques for field work.
ANYONE CAN TAKE GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS! JOIN US NO MATTER WHAT YOUR SKILL LEVEL. IT’S NOT THE CAMERA THAT COUNTS. WORKSHOP REQUIREMENTS: ENTHUSIASM TO LEARN AND ENJOY A FABULOUS TROPICAL VENUE.
The workshop fee includes six nights (meals inclusive) at Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, airport transfers from San Jose International Airport (SJO), and the workshop itself. Priced at only $1,250 (double occupancy) to allow anyone who has dreamed of taking a photography workshop in a lush tropical location to fulfill that dream. The price does not include roundtrip airfare from your originating airport. Single rooms are $200.00 additional. Participants will also be required to purchase their own travel/medical insurance. Sign-up deadline is May 1, 2010.
On Wednesday March 24th, The Dr Oz Show is scheduled to run a segment on plant-based medicine, entitled Cures From Around The World, featuring Dr Memet OZ and Medicine Hunter Chris Kilham.
The segment features Cat’s Claw (Uncaria tomentosa), Bitter Melon (Momordica charantia), Tamanu oil (Calophyllum inophyllum), and Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia).
The segment includes imagery from the field, samples on camera, and audience participation sampling the various botanicals featured. No branded products are mentioned, but the audience is made aware that each item can be purchased either at retail or online.
See Chris Kilham’s website: Medicine Hunter. Chris also does a great weekly herb segment for the Fox News Health Blog.
One of the most beautiful fall wildflowers, cardinal flower Lobelia cardinalis, has striking scarlet blooms. It’s a difficult plant to photograph because the vibrant flowers have a somewhat reflective texture making it easy to get an over-exposure blowing out details. Therefore, if using a reflective metering system, the photographer must adjust the exposure with an 18 percent gray background. The root and leaves were used by indigenous groups for various purposes. The root infusion was used for stomachache, syphilis, typhoid and worms. Leaf tea was utilized for colds, crop, nosebleed, fever and other uses. Historically, it was mentioned as a possible substitute for Lobelia or Indian-tobacco (Lobelia inflata), but considered weaker. Cardinal flower is an obscure medicinal plant seldom if ever used and best appreciated as a wildflower. See Foster and Duke 2nd edition (2002) for more information on medicinal use of various Lobelias.
We have new photo galleries of “goji” — the fruits of Lycium chinense (shot in the Oriental Herb Garden at the American Botanical Council, created in association with the Academy of Oriental Medicine in Austin) and Lycium barbarum. Go into any health or natural food store these days and you will find goji berries in just about everything—goji juice, goji-laced chocolate bars, whole dried goji berries ready to replace your raisins. Better known in pre-marketing hype days, as Lycium, Chinese wolfberry, Chinese boxthorn, or Chinese matrimony vine, the dried fruits proliferating in the market are either from Lycium chinense or Lycium barbarum. L. chinense has wide distribution in East Asia, whereas L. barbarum is found primarily in the central Chinese Province of Ningxia. Both species are widely naturalized outside of China. Lycium chinense is found in at least fifteen states east of the Mississippi and five states west of the Mississippi. It grows as a weed at the edge of my yard, and perhaps yours as well. Lycium barbarum is found in almost the entire continental U.S. (except Nevada) and half of Canada. The dried fruits are a common food item throughout eastern Asia and the Middle East, where barrels of the inexpensive dried fruits are a staple in every market. When one sees the price and availability in foreign lands, it’s easy to shudder at the price charged for the bright red Asian equivalent of raisins in the American market. The name “goji” was never used for the plant or its fruit until it was popularized in the American market in the past decade. “Goji” is a phonetic twist on the Chinese name for the fruits “Guo qi zi“. The fruits were not commonly called “berries” either. In the American Herbal Products Association’s book Herbs of Commerce (2000), a list of more than 1,600 herbs found in the American market with their scientific names, common name synonyms, and “standard common name,” Lycium barbarum and Lycium chinense are both listed under the standard common name “Lycium”.
To a botanical photographer and herbalist like me, there’s nothing quite as exciting as seeing a plant that you’ve always known yet never seen in bloom for the first time. Such was the case when I was at the American Botanical Council’s annual on-site board of trustees meeting at the Case Mill Homestead in Austin on November 7th, when ABC Education Coordinator, Holly Ferguson, pointed a blooming SAFFRON plant out to me. The delicate stigmas of saffron (Crocus sativus) are, of course, the saffron of commerce. What a beautiful plant! We have additional photo galleries of Crocus species including Spring Crocus (Crocus vernus var. neapolitanus) growing wild on Mt. Komovi in the mountains of Montenegro (part of the former Yugoslavia), as well as cultivated Dutch Crocus (Crocus vernus).