Richters HerbLetter


Date: 98/02/28
Contents
1. Lemon Geraniums Absorb Toxic Waste
2. Spicy Alternative in Fusarium War; Extracts from Hot Peppers Can Send the Pathogen Packing
3. Echinacea: Deep Healing Roots
4. Herbal Medicine Technology Park Set for Australia
5. Melatonin Reported Found in Three Herbs
6. Herb Business News

1. Lemon Geraniums Absorb Toxic Waste
By Charles Oberdorf

TORONTO, Toronto Star, Feb 21 -- A fascinating botanical story has sprouted at the University of Guelph.

A familiar flowering plant, the lemon-scented geranium, is capable of absorbing and accumulating almost unimaginably large amounts of toxic heavy metals from contaminated soil, horticulture professor Praveen Saxena and three associates announced a few weeks ago.

First, a boring but necessary clarification: Correctly speaking, Guelph’s plants were Pelargonium sp. Frensham.

The window-box plants with red and pink mopheads of bloom that we call geraniums are all pelargoniums. True geraniums are leggier, smaller-flowered garden plants, frequently called cranesbill or storksbill geraniums, from the shape of their seed pods.

But never mind; the Guelph researchers call their plants lemon- scented geraniums, so do most garden catalogues and so will we.

Saxena didn’t set out to find plants that cleaned the soil.

He was investigating stress tolerance in a number of plants and, for a private company, also looking for ways to propagate popular plants using tissue culture.

"Knowingly and unknowingly," he says in an interview, "we subjected some lemon-scented geraniums to fairly extreme stress - watered them with very hard water, kept them at temperatures so high they killed everything else in the greenhouse."

He did realize, he says, that lemon-scented geraniums had a lot of mass, that leathery feel to their leaves, and that such tissue could accumulate metals.

And in fact, when he watered his cuttings with various metal solutions, within two weeks they accumulated up to 3,200 milligrams of cadmium, 18.700 milligrams of lead, 6,400 milligrams of nickel and 650 milligrams of copper for each kilogram of plant tissue, dry weight.

All plants, its true, absorb some mineral traces from the soil.

Once in a while a garden plant will even show signs of a deficiency of manganese, say, or magnesium.

But the operative word is traces.

The quantities of metal Saxena’s geraniums were taking up were no traces.

Scientists would call the geraniums hyperaccumulators, because of their ability to accumulate metal ions in very high concentrations.

However, unlike other known hyperaccumulators, such as Indian mustard, the geraniums have a good growth habit and can survive a variety of other contaminants, such as high concentrations of hydrocarbons - compounds such as paraffin, coal tar, polyethylene or naphtha - also common in polluted soils.

And, as if that weren’t enough, lemon-scented geraniums are a cash crop.

Makers of perfumes and potpourris harvest their essential oils, and those oils can still be safely extracted from plants grown in contaminated soil, regardless of their metal content.

In fact, the metals themselves can also be retrieved by burning the plants and smelting the ash.

With contaminated farmland or a former industrial site, Saxena says off-handedly, "rather than having to truck off and dispose of an acre of topsoil - the standard procedure - you could take away a coin."

He thinks the geraniums could be bred to grow roots up to a metre long, although most soil contamination is nearer the surface than that.

"It would probably make more sense to plow every year for a few years to turn up the deeper soil. You’d have to harvest the geraniums and replant, anyway."

Does anyone else remember Ataratiri, that vast no-man’s land where Front St. meets Bayview Ave.?

It was supposed to be redeveloped as a residential neighbourhood like the one behind the St. Lawrence Market.

Project halted because soil was too toxic.

The provincial environment ministry halted that project a few years ago, after all the land had been assembled and the plans designed.

The problem, they said, was soil too toxic for human contact.

The only solution anyone saw at the time was to truck away many acres of earth, at prohibitive cost, to an undetermined site that would then be just as polluted and unfit for use.

A few seasons of lemon-scented geraniums, anyone?

[Editor’s Note: This research was done with plants supplied by Richters.]


2. Spicy Alternative in Fusarium War; Extracts from Hot Peppers Can Send the Pathogen Packing
Greenhouse Canada [ARS News Service], Feb 1998 -- Cut chrysanthemums are a traditional winter bouquet. But florists and nurserymen in the U.S. must guard these fragrant flowers against fusarium wilt, and the primary means of protection - fumigation with methyl bromide - will be banned in the U.S. in the year 2001 under guidelines of the Clean Air Act.

Spices such as hot peppers may provide an alternative.

Researchers with the U.S. National Aboretum’s Floral and Nursery Plants Research Unit have found that extracts made from hot peppers and cloves send the pathogen packing. The arboretum is part of the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Society of American Florists estimates that 57-million chrysanthemum blooms and 100-million pompons - the smaller flowers used in bouquets - were sold in 1995. Making sure these flowers are healthy protects an important market.

In laboratory studies, ARS scientists treated soils with extracts of clove and cassia tree. They also tested a mixture of chili pepper extract and essential oil of mustard.

The chili pepper mixture knocked out 99.9 per cent of the fusarium populations. Although clove and cassia killed less fungus - 97.5 per cent and 96.1 per cent, respectively - they maintained their fungus- suppressing power longer than the pepper.

The scientists hope to devise a two-step strategy: first adding the spices to the soil to kill fusarium; then introducing friendly micro- organisms to crowd out any fusarium that survive the spicy onslaught.


3. Echinacea: Deep Healing Roots
By Coralie Adams

Greenhouse Canada, January 1998 -- Echinacea may be considered new in the medicinal field, but it’s a plant with very deep healing roots.

Echinacea was the topic of a presentation by Ken Geness during Hort Week ‘97 activities at Olds College in Alberta.

The Diversification Centre North (CDCN) in Edmonton is a good resource, he said. Their research notes that echinacea - earlier known under an interesting variety of names, such as Scurvy Root, Kansas Snakeroot, Rattlesnake Week, etc., (Echinacea: A Review, by Dr. S. F. Blade) - has been used by First Nations peoples in North America for centuries.

In recent times, echinacea has been called purple coneflower and/or rudbeckia.

Responding to concerns raised by course participants, Geness said the government may well either restrict echinacea as a ‘drug plant’ or it may simply bring in a set of regulations for growers. The reason for this type of intervention may stem from concerns that such products as pesticides may "change the plant".

He noted there is now a lot of discussion about whether field grown, greenhouse grown or hydroponically producted echinacea will result in a plant with the same medicinal properties.

Geness explained that the current interest in echinacea is not so much as a medicine to cure specific illnesses, but rather because of echinacea’s ability to act as an immune enhancer.

Although there are nine known species of echinacea, the three grown commerically for medicinal processing are Echinacea angustifolia, Echincea purpurea, and Echinacea pallida (Echinacea: A Review, by Dr. S. F. Blade).

Geness favours E. angustifolia but at least one grower who was in attendance said she favoured E. purpurea because it is such a vigorous, robust plant and is easy to grow.

Geness, who has been growing echinacea for three years, said growing methods are changing rapidly. The plant "likes to be over-crowded", he said, and he recommends spacing the plants four to six inches apart.

Currently, echinacea seed is valued at $800.00 per pound and the root is valued at $50.00 per pound. While field grown echinacea takes anywhere from 3 - 5 years between seeding and harvesting, Geness said it’s possible to compress that time in a greenhouse situation, quoting a four-month seed to finish with an optimum two-year harvest possibility.

Geness cautioned course participants to always buy their seed from reputable sources as problems have been experienced by growers who bought seed mixed with chaff and/or immature seeds. To avoid that problem, plugs can also be purchased but can vary in price from 15 cents to $1 per plug.

When field growing, Geness recommends growers plant a maximum of one acre. Why? At present there is no planting or harvesting machinery available so everything is done by hand. Any field over one acre would be beyond most people’s ability to care for it.

However, one of the course participants said she was in the process of setting out 10,000 seedlings in the Olds/Innisfail area. Geness knows of one producer in the Edmonton area working with 500,000 seedlings in a greenouse setting. There are reported to be more than 40 growers in the four western provinces and a few states, with 15 of those growers in Alberta.

One of the headaches for growers is germination. Geness said E. angustifolia has a strong triangular seed and is the hardest to germinate with only a 10 - 12 per cent germination rate without cold stratification. He recommends stratifying seeds, then starting them in plugs (usually in a greenhouse or under lights). He said it was better to provide too much light than not enough.

Geness recommends growers to join their province’s branch of the Canadian Herb Society. He also recommends they form a marketing board. As well, the CDCN has a number of helpful publications: Echinacea: A Review, Germination of Echinacea, Greenhouse Production of Echinacea, Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer Management.

Growers, he added, should maintain contact with one another to help them solve the problems, and build on the successes, of this growth industry.


4. Herbal Medicine Technology Park Set for Australia
By Chris Herde

GOLD COAST, AAP, Feb 27 -- Australia’s burgeoning herbal medicine industry could soon have its own home with an ambitious plan to build a research, development and commercial production centre at Lismore in northern New South Wales.

The project is the brainchild of Lismore’s Southern Cross University’s Dean of Graduate College and Research Professor Peter Baverstock, who said it could bring millions of dollars in investment and create thousands of jobs in the Northern Rivers region.

The project - called Cellulose Valley, after California’s Silicone Valley and in recognition that cellulose is a compound common to all plants - has received strong support from the herbal medicine industry, natural cosmetic manufacturers as well as state and federal authorities.

Prof Baverstock said land next to Southern Cross University has been set aside for the "technology park" with the next step being to get a site plan, management structure and a feasibility study into natural plant primary production.

"The thing about having research and development in the one place is that it will attract the manufacturers and the combination of those two will hopefully put the region in the position where it can become the world centre for natural plant product production," Prof Baverstock said.

He said of all herbal medicines consumed in Australia, only five per cent were actually sourced in the country. Ninety-five per cent of that figure came from the Northern Rivers region, making it the natural site for Cellulose Valley.

He said with world best quality assurance, a Cellulose Valley would provide the industry there with a great potential for export.

"For example people ask us why do we grow celery seeds here when they can be grown in Bangladesh for a tenth of the price," Prof Baverstock said.

"The answer is there is no quality control in Bangladesh.

"The herbal medicine industry prides itself in the quality of products and the one thing it doesn’t have at the moment is quality of products in terms of quality control."

Prof Baverstock said Cellulose Valley can set up world best practice in quality assurance and then supply the primary producers in the region with the right genetic type, the right conditions to grow it under, the right extraction procedure and the appropriate storage regime.


5. Melatonin Reported Found in Three Herbs
By Conrad Richter

Feb 28 -- A team of researchers at the University of Guelph have discovered melatonin-like protein in three herbs. In a brief report in the medical journal, Lancet, the researchers, Susan Murch, Colleen Simmons and Praveen Saxena, say that they found melatonin-like fractions in feverfew, St. Johnswort, and in baikal scullcap.

If the melatonin-like proteins found in the herbs are proved to be biologically active, the discovery may help to explain the anti-migraine, anti-depressive and hypotensive properties of these herbs. The group did not test for biological activity.

[Editor’s Note: This research was done using plant material supplied by Richters Herbs.]


6. Herb Business News
Tongrentang: Chinese Skincare Medicines Introduced

BEIJING, AsiaInfo Services, Feb 27 -- Beijing Tongrentang Hongri Health Medicine Co Ltd, a co-funded enterprise by China Beijing Tongrentang Group Company and South Korea Hongri Company, recently introduced a series of skin-care medicines. The medicines are divided into two categories, spot-dispelling and whitening series and acne- dispelling series. All of these medicines are made of pure natural Chinese herbs and have been permitted by the State Health Ministry to be put on the market.


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