Each spring at the start of
bug season I receive mysterious visitors to the fringes of a bush lot I have
along Highway 35.
They arrive in a white van,
park on the edge of the highway then scurry into the woods with black garbage
bags. From a distance they seem to be digging small plants and placing them in
the bags.
Whenever I try to approach
to ask them what they are doing, they scurry back to the van and drive off.
They wear mosquito head nets so I can’t tell who they are except that they are
middle age and speak what sounds like an Asian language. Usually there is a man
and two women.
I don’t really care that
they are on my property because I suspect they are gathering spring shoots of some
kind for cooking and eating. But I would really like to know because it might
be something interesting that I might want to cook and eat.
Various friends and family
have offered guesses: Fiddleheads (ours are not the tasty delicacies found on
the East Coast); wild asparagus (I would have found and eaten that before
them), wild leeks (a possibility).
There are many possibilities
because our woods are filled with dozens of edible low growing plants that most
of us know nothing about.
Someone recently raised
another possibility: “Is it ginseng they are digging up?”
Ginseng? I never knew that
Ontario had wild American Ginseng, the roots of which have been used for
thousands of years by our Indigenous people and other cultures as a traditional
medicine.
We do indeed have it. It is found
in the bottom half of Ontario, western Quebec and 34 U.S. states. It grows in
mature hardwood forests that offer dark rich soil.
North American ginseng is
similar to the Asian ginsengs and like the Asians our Indigenous peoples used it
as an important medicine for ailments ranging from fevers to indigestion and
headaches.
Father Joseph-François
Lafitau, a French Jesuit priest, is credited with finding ginseng in the New
World. He had read about Asian ginseng in reports from Jesuits in China and
believed Canada had similar climate and surroundings and started looking for
it.
In 1718 he found a ginseng
plant growing near Montreal and was able to identify it definitely with the
help of the Iroquois, who of course had been using it forever.
After that, trade in ginseng
root exploded. Ginseng became a major export of New France, second only to furs.
Trappers and frontiersmen made small fortunes digging it and selling it.
John Jacob Astor, the
American fur baron, sold a boat load of ginseng to China, and legendary
woodsman Daniel Boone is said to have dug the plants and sold loads of roots to
China.
Like with so many other
things, the European takeover of the New World began exhausting ginseng
supplies.
Overharvesting and habitat
loss have resulted in wild ginseng being declared a species at risk in Canada. It
is illegal to harvest it. The penalty is as severe as a $250,000 fine and up to
five years jail time.
Our Canadian courts often
are too kind and poachers generally receive a fine of a few thousand dollars and
a suspended sentence.
One wild ginseng root the
size of an adult finger can bring a poacher $1,000 or more on the black market.
Ginseng scarcity is driving
up prices and it has become an important cultivated crop in southern Ontario. Interestingly,
some of Ontario’s new cultivated ginseng industry is operating on fields that
once grew tobacco.
The Ontario Ginseng Growers
Association reports that it now has about 160 members producing cultivated
ginseng, much of which is sold to Asian markets. Ginseng demand is increasing
in Asia because of improving
economies and a growing middle class.
The federal government says
that Canada exported 263 million kilograms of cultivated ginseng, worth $239
million, to Asia in 2016.
It is a valuable plant but I
don’t think that’s what the visitors to my property were after. They were
picking some kind of shoot to eat, much like my wife and I sometimes go looking
for tender young dandelions for salad.
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