Real-life plant medicine in a video game?!

Earlier this year, my partner started playing “The Long Dark,” a post-apocalyptic survival game set in the Canadian Arctic. I began watching him play, and was quickly drawn in by how beautiful and thoughtful the game is.

I’m easily frustrated and stressed out by video games; I don’t like it when there’s a short time limit or you’re constantly in danger.  “The Long Dark,” at least in “story” mode, mostly isn’t like that. You have all the time you need to find what you’re looking for or get where you’re doing, as long as you can stay warm and reasonably well-fed and hydrated. The snowy, mountainous landscapes are gorgeous, and even the most run-down shacks where you might spend the night feel cozy. (Okay, possibly not the ones that have frozen corpses in them.) There are occasional attacks by wolves, moose and other animals, but the story is the main thing. 

One aspect that drew me in was the use of real-world plant medicine. Oh, sure, the game warns you not to take anything in it as real survival advice, and some of the healing properties of the plants are beyond what their real-world counterparts can do. But with a little additional research, these plants can actually help us heal from common ailments and injuries.

Rose hips

Rose hips are a well-known and long-used plant medicine, both for their anti-inflammatory qualities as well as the fact that they’re rich in Vitamin C. The interior seeds are covered with irritating hairs, and should be scooped out before eating or cooking with rose hips. 

In “The Long Dark,” rose hips (like most of the other plants in this game) also have to be prepared before using, and can be made into a tea that helps with pain, burns or broken ribs. I’m not sure if real-life rose hips can do any of those, except perhaps pain relief, but they can keep you from getting scurvy from your mostly-meat diet.

Reishi mushrooms

Researchers are looking into a variety of mushrooms for their potential healing benefits, and reishi is no exception. Like many mushrooms, they can help boost our immune systems and help us fight off viruses, infections and possibly even cancer. In “The Long Dark,” they function more like antibiotics, helping you recover from food poisoning, infections, dysentery and intestinal parasites. Hmm. 

Birch bark

Birch and willow trees contain high levels of salicylates, which make up the principal anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving medicine in aspirin. (Willow’s latin name is salix.) Before medicinal companies began synthesizing aspirin, people the world over used birch and willow for pain relief. In “The Long Dark,” birch bark is pretty rare, and its main benefit is helping to “restore condition” by 5 percent, a perplexing and vague outcome. 

Old man’s beard

Old man’s beard is a kind of long, stringy lichen in the usnea family, often found dangling from trees (Spanish moss is in the same family). All lichens have antibiotic and antimicrobial properties and have been used for millennia to treat wounds and infections. In “The Long Dark,” the function of this plant matches closely with real-world uses; your character turns it into bandages that reduce the risk of wounds becoming infected. 

(If you’d like to see me preparing some usnea oil and other herbal items, check out my latest video on YouTube.) 

Cattails

If you’ve read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s popular book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” you may recall her reverence for the cattail plant. On Facebook, she writes of its many, many uses: “Food from the roots, vegetable from the stalk, pollen for flour, edible flower stalks, seeds for tinder or diapers, leaves for cordage and mats and baskets, torches from seed heads, aloe-like medicine from the goo which looks slimy but feels great on bug bites … and more.” For this reason, I was especially excited to see cattails in “The Long Dark,” even if their usefulness is diminished. You can eat the stalks for a small amount of nourishment, and use the heads for tinder. 

Unfortunately, the final chapter of “The Long Dark” isn’t out yet, so we won’t know how it ends until late 2023, and that’s if the ending comes out on schedule. Have you played it? What did you think?

Making friends with plants

Comfrey and chamomile.

Plant care has not always been my strength. I’ve had so many plants die from too much water, too little water, too much sun, too little sun, haunted soil -- who knows. But sometime in the past several years, I’ve slowly learned how to read plants’ cues. 

We are lucky to have a backyard, especially in a pandemic when it’s not as safe or easy to get outdoors into nature. But for a long time, our yard was next-door to a eucalyptus tree, which constantly blew a thick carpet of its leaves onto our soil, which discouraged anything else from growing. But a couple of years ago our neighbor cut down the eucalyptus, which opened up a lot of possibilities for gardening. 

Since then I’ve planted a variety of flora, some that are native to the Bay Area and California, and some that just do well here. We’ve got succulents and nightshades, chartreuse coleus and deep green impatiens with cheerful pink blossoms. But we’ve had a lot of trouble growing edible plants. Only cold-weather crops like kale and Brussels sprouts grow well in our cool and foggy city, and they often wind up so coated in aphids that they’re inedible. 

Herbs, on the other hand, seem to do okay. I’ve planted oregano and chives, mugwort and rosemary, yarrow and lavender that don’t mind the chill, and don’t attract every insect within a two-mile radius. 

This year I wanted to expand the number of herbs in my garden, and I began to wonder what the Ohlone Indians might have planted or foraged. At the same time, I didn’t want to steal information from a culture that isn’t my own. My own ancestors displaced indigenous tribes in other parts of the country, and even if they hadn’t, I have no business adopting their customs as my own. That said, the plants that grow well in the Bay Area have done so for a long time, and connecting with the land where I live means connecting with the plants of the region. 

The bulk of my ancestors came from Britain, Ireland, Scotland and northern Europe (Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia), so I started digging around for the earliest information I could find on the use of native plants in the UK and Ireland. Before the age of modern medicine, it’s likely they would have used these plants as medicine, and learned about them from their own ancestors. And some of them were likely to grow happily here in San Francisco, too. 

I found a couple of good resources in particular. One was the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, a chant that mentions nine plants, the healing they provide, and how to combine them together to make a medicinal salve. The poem mentions mugwort, plantain, shepherd’s purse, nettle, betony, chamomile, crab apple, chervil and fennel. It is included in a text commonly called the Lacnunga, a collection of miscellaneous Anglo-Saxon medical texts and prayers, written mainly in Old English and Latin. It dates back to the 10th or 11th century, though some parts of it are much older. 

Another good resource is this post, from the Herbal Academy, about the gardens at Glastonbury Abbey. They include 11 plants that have been part of ancient British culture for centuries, including some brought over by the Romans, Saxons and Vikings. Among them are lady’s bedstraw, lemon balm, yarrow, meadowsweet, lovage, vervain (verbena), comfrey, elecampane, betony and woad. 

I knew a number of these plants would thrive in San Francisco, so I decided to add a few, including mugwort, comfrey, chamomile, lemon balm and vervain. Nettle already grows wild in the garden after the rainy season, and fennel grows like a weed in several spots in our neighborhood. Planting, growing, tending and making use of them makes me feel more connected -- to the ground under my feet, to the land where I live, and to my ancestors, who probably used these herbs as food and medicine. I love the idea that one of them could walk into my garden and recognize what’s growing there, know how to work with each leaf and bud.