Medicinal & Poisonous Plants of the California Central and South Coasts by Sue Reinhart

What is Medicinal & Poisonous Plants of the California Central and South Coasts about?

Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of the California Central and South Coasts is about the medicinal and poisonous plants that are in the part of California where I live. This book covers much more than the basic medicinal plants you can find in nature. It is also a short course in herbal medicine that applies anywhere. The book is organized in a way that lets you cross-reference between the pages with colorful tabs on the edges so you can quickly find all the plants that have an effect on a certain part of the body, or a certain type of constituent. I have also done research into the magical uses of the plants, as well as the spiritual uses of the Chumash people of my area. However, I’ve covered the uses of the plants worldwide, not just local uses, because many of these plants grow in other places as well.

I have a strong philosophy about plant medicine and how to harvest, it’s very sacred to me. The first third of the book is even more important to me than the information about the specific plants. The material at the front of the book is applicable everywhere, not just in California. For instance, there is a section that talks about plant chemistry and it tells the solvents for the medicinal constituents in plants, but I don’t provide recipes for preparing medicine. Instead, I give you principles. I tell you what solvents will work for preparing medicines from each different plant. Sometimes, for instance, you need different solvents for different uses of the same plant. In the front material, I try to point out general information about the plants, for example, tannins are healing because they dry out the skin and constrict the area, so bacteria don’t grow. Many plants have tannins, not just the ones that grow here. On the central coast of California, you can use the book to identify and find medicinal plants, but the real teaching, that applies to everyone, is in the first part of the book.

You can think about plants in groups according to what kind of constituents they have. That makes it easier to go to another place and have some idea of how to use a related species.

What inspired you to write this book?

I learned the plants from a couple of local teachers over about 20 years. I volunteered at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden for about five years, and researched Chumash material culture as part of that. Then I taught field classes on local trails through the Santa Barbara City College adult education program for ten years.  

I found that there was no highly local, user friendly book about our medicinal plants. I also had some ideas about how to design the book so that people wouldn’t be frustrated when comparing several plants that might work for whatever problem they were researching.

The index tabs on the sides of the pages help the reader to find just what they need to know very quickly. It is meant to be a handbook and a very thorough reference book.

It is also designed so that you can’t miss the information about toxins in certain plants. Through my research, I’ve learned that plants are safer than I first thought, but they have subtleties. No plant is medicinal without being somewhat toxic, it's just a matter of degree. You might drink a tea of something that will ease constipation, but if you take too much of it you might have a miscarriage. Some medicinal plants are just plain edible, but it's still a matter of degree. All plants have vitamins and minerals that might help you, after all.

What part of the writing process did you find the most enjoyable with this book?

Designing the graphics was the most fun. Hiking on the trails with my friend while photographing the plants and teaching about the plants was fun.

My friend needed the information at the time and asked me to teach him. He was willing to pay but he wouldn’t have had the budget to learn everything he needed to know, and he couldn’t make it to my class at the time it was offered. I told him that if he joined me while I previewed the trail for my class each week, I could teach him about what we saw along the way. This went on for 10 years and we became good friends.

Would you consider writing more medicinal books in other areas?

I’ve lived here for a very long time, and I haven’t thought about researching medicinal plants in other areas. It took me about 15 years to learn, in-depth, just our local plants at every stage depending on the time of year.

When I travel to natural places where I don't know the plants, I practically have anxiety attacks about the ones I don't know. Its important to study plants on trails with a real face-to-face teacher over a long period of time, so you can recognize them at any time of year. It's not really something you can just learn from books unless you have a handle on botany and can key them in the field, and that isn’t very fun because you have to carry the heavy book.

To photograph the flora, you must go repeatedly to the same locations for more than a year to find the right things in bloom and learn to recognize them in all their stages during the year. It's not like, “Oh, I'll fly up to the Rain Forest and do a book on that, take a few pictures.” You must have pictures of the flower and the leaves and know how it looks when it's just coming up, how it looks when mature, and how it looks in the winter when it has no leaves or anything. You must get a feel for it and that's hard to do in a short time. You can't do that on a week's vacation.

What got you interested in nature?

I've always loved nature, but I'm also a comfort loving person. I've camped all my life and that was not always comfortable. I wanted to learn how to be comfortable in nature and walk for miles without having to carry my whole household on my back. I read some books by Tom Brown Jr., out of New Jersey, who has a survival school. His books gave me a whole different attitude about nature and about the fact that the whole earth is my home, and how to be comfortable on it with the skills of indigenous people. I also took classes in California from
“EarthSkills,” a school run by some of his more advanced students.

Among the survival skills he taught was a knowledge of a few edible and medicinal plants and how to prepare them. But the plants growing where the classes were held were different from those in near Santa Barbara. I had to find teachers right here who could teach me about the plants in my own area.