Medicinal Plants on the Coteau

In the flat coastal plain of south Louisiana high ground is sacred. Our indigenous ancestors were mound builders. Settlements appeared along chenières, or ridges of oaks, and local folklore says that even one old live oak tree is a good sign that the surrounding land won't flood. In times of severe hurricane, one survival skill was to lash one's self to the mid-branches of the live oak with grape and muscadine vines to ride it out. Those that did this usually survived. 

In this near sea-level prairie, it is known that the hill of Grand Coteau is sacred, high holy ground. It was this way long before the land was claimed by colonial-era settlers like Sieur Smith, the Religious of the Sacred Heart and the Jesuits. Much is made about the Catholic presence of the land, because of the early institutions such as nearby Saint Charles College, Saint Ignatius School and the Schools of the Sacred Heart, where a miracle happened when Mary Wilson was healed by the intercession of Saint John Berchmans. But a local legend is that it was the Grand Coteau where indigenous men, notably the Opelousa and Ishak, would go to "fight with honor". The validity of this and what it means, whether battle, ceremony, hunting or even competitive ball game is still mysterious. This story seems to weave in with lore of the Prairie des Femmes, just across the bayou and east of the Academy for girls, being a place where the women stayed when the men left to fight or hunt. 

Grand Coteau is on the Coteau or Coteau Ridge. It is the ancient bluffs of the Mississippi River when it flowed west, also called the Teche escarpment. The land that holds the ancient convent and Academy of the Sacred Heart has been called "la prairie des coteaux". The Academy is a pastoral landscape reminiscent of old France and colonial Louisiana, containing multiple live oak and pine alleys, pecan alleys, formal gardens and orchards, open rolling prairie with horse and cow pastures. The four-story Academy is surrounded galleries and a garconière, formal gardens, rolling pastures and then beyond, the Secret Hart and the bois vièrge, a forest primeval that has never been disturbed throughout the centuries. In the formal gardens one notices the early varieties of roses, crepe myrtles, camelias, azaleas, sweet olive and gardenias. There are white, red and pink roses and azaleas, as well as pineapple guava bushes in the center whose flowers taste like Fruit Loops. L'absinthe grows in the pecanères which are plentiful and produce sweet full pecans in the fall.  The sheer age of some of these bushes and trees ensures high yield of their medicines and fruits. I often think that the sisters and enslaved people who planted and developed these gardens, they who indeed survived times of famine, flood and war back here, seem to have taken seriously their choices of edibles and ornamentals.  

Over the seasons of working at the Academy and as my eyes adjusted to the landscape, they also zoomed in on the native and medicinal plants that pop up at the fringes and in the lands that surround the gardens. This seemed to be a deeper indicator of native land stewardship, a sign of ancient wild habitation still amid the efforts to tame the land. Chou-gras (poke salat) was shooting up at the base of the pines of the alley, in Saint Francis Patio and along the Chapel wall. The woods to the east of the Academy were full of poke as well as nettle, resinous pine, violets and muscadine. In the tree lines are oak, pecan, copal, cherry, magnolia, chassepareille, cherry laurel, hickory, tulip tree, bitter orange and palmetto. I collect Spanish moss, perilla, chickweed, violet flower, root and leaf, white clover, green resurrection fern, and orange chanterelle mushrooms from the oak alley. I find fresh herbe cabri every fall along the ditches of the Jesuit pasture. Their leaves can be used for tea and the young seed eaten as a melon flavored snack.

The nettles in the woods I gather bare handed in the spring and dry the leaves for tea. I'll use the formic acid on the leaves for muscle and mood therapy and the seeds for nutrition. From the poke I gather berries for dye, the leaves for spinach and the extremely toxic and dangerous root for inflammation therapy. The bitter orange fruit we gather and use for Christmas decoration with cloves for pomanders. I gather white flowers of the sweet olive, orange, and gardenia that fill the gardens at different intervals to make enfleurage oils. The girls and I make accessories such as flower crowns, necklaces and crafts (like Marie Antoinette's bouffant) with the fallen roses, azaleas, camelias and wildflowers of the garden. I harvest baume from the native plant garden as a spice and perfume, chassepareille leaves for insect repellant and cherry from the woods for bounce. I harvest pine sap daily from the trees of the pine alley, sometimes they appear as resinous ambers that fall from above, and other times in the clearest tears of sap that are produced when the grounds crew hit the exposed roots with lawn mowers while manicuring the gardens. I walk the pine alley in the fog of the morning collecting miniature domes of sap from roots like dewfall. 

l'herbe cabri

Lightening Pine

In the storms this afternoon lightening struck very close to the Sacred Heart. I was standing in the first grade classroom admiring their fairyland village of cascading vines and paper mâché houses when the bright lightening flashed through the windows along the gallery and thunder boomed, shaking the coteau under our feet. We screamed and huddled together; it was so close! I started singing Oh les trains quand ils jubutaient by Cesar Vincent to the girls. 

I wondered if it was at my lightening pine again, the tallest and biggest in the pine alley, less than a hundred feet from our 204 year old school building. I check it almost daily since it was struck last year. The injury left is a long open vein in the bark that exposes the weeping sapwood. It produces the clearest tears of sap, like amber pearls at the seam. I've spent the last year collecting the clear suspended drops from this injury in miniature jars. I remember being so interested when it was struck because I knew it would open a wound that would give. I felt that the sap was now charged with a clear electricity.  Since then we have observed the tree healing itself again. The bark can be read. There is an identical scar around the other side that is sealed up with decades of bulbous resin that sometimes form balls that fall at the base. I collect them as curiosities for our knick-knack shelf in class. I found one today. I have taught my girls about tree medicine.

In the light rain after the storm I wandered out onto the wet grounds to check the great pine and found it had again acted as sentinel, channeling the electricity through the sap and down into the holy coteau, a lightening rod protecting the entire campus. 

Tree Medicine

There was a white pine that volunteered in the western yard. It obstructed my view of the open prairie to the southwest, so my husband chopped the top for my photography. That cleared the view for a few years but that tree continued to grow. Except now, at the injury, it weeps sap. I’m not sure if it’s a memory of the damage that was done to clear the path, or if sickness or parasite still lives in the tree. No matter, it has become a medicine tree. On walks around the property I stop there and check the ground for chunks. I follow their fall patterns and gather them.  At first I kept this sap and chunks of resin in my journals, not knowing what to do with it except smell it and let it perfume my journal.

One wet Louisiana winter day I went out to build a little fire in the wax myrtle bower but everything was damp. I pulled out the blank pages of my journal with the resin on them and they worked fine, similarly to the bois gras the men collected and used for fire starter. It kept my little fire going and kept me warm that day and others. It became a habit of mine to be able to spot injuries on resin trees and check them no matter where I was. I kept the pieces of resin in a tin can painted with blue and gold stars on the porch. But one day an indigenous friend gave me a balm made of bear grease and five kinds of fir resins from the north, saying that it would heal any wound and not even leave a scar. Sometimes I put the clearest sap on small cuts around my cuticle. Then I knew then what to do with my resin collection. 

I melted the chunks down with sweet almond oil and when they were incorporated I filtered it and mixed it with melted bay wax from the bower to make a balm that my boys called “tree medicine”. They refused Neosporin but would accept the tree medicine on their wounds, only after I showed them the tree itself.

Daily I work atop the Grand Coteau at a school over 200 years old, full of old oak and pine alleys. Some of the pines seem to be nearly as old as the school and bare many scars and knots that give sap. I immediately began to survey each tree at recess and the girls would ask, "Madame, what are you doing?" Last year, one of the largest pines was struck by lightning and it created a rip in the bark that began to weep sap. Daily the girls and I go out and check this tree, because it gives the clearest sap that looks like tears. I have taught the girls that only the wounded trees will give the medicine, and in their healing, we can also share in it a little. I explained that the sap is like the tree’s blood and the resin is the scab. They apply it, like me, to their cuts, and know that hand sanitizer will clean it and cut the stickiness. I make a spray with the resin also that I use daily as a hand cleaner. Sometimes I come to my classroom and there are curious pine sticks on my desk that upon further inspection are tipped with sap. They'll make a resin platter out of a piece of bark, or dig into a knot with sticks often creating more injury and then more sap. One time I found a half pound chunk of resin, who knows how old, on my desk and thought it was a chunk of tasso. This morning as I was out there in my petticoats and cape gathering fresh pine sap tears with a ruler, and curious as it is, none of the girls even asked me what I was doing.