Wintergreen

Organic Gardening Magazine Description Organic Gardening is one of America's most popular gardening magazines. Each issue offers expert advice to make your garden the easiest and best ever. Plus, you'll read about practical tips for growing vegetables and flowers naturally.	Winter Green
	Botanical Name : Gaultheria procumbens Also Called: Teaberry, Mountain tea, Winisbugons (Ojibwe) Habitat: The acidic soil of woodlands, bogs and clearings from Canada west to the Dakotas and south to Georgia.
			Description: A shrubby plant that has mid-summer white bell-shaped flowers that hang down. They are followed by sealing-wax red berries that last all winter and taste of wintergreen when chewed.
The true stem creeps just below the surface, resembling a root, while the flowering stem stands upright with a few leaves crowded near the top. The evergreen leaves, which can be gathered at any time, are shiny and leathery, with finely cut edges. They are glossy green above and light green below. Sometimes they are blotched purple or entirely red.					The berries taste great and they go a long way in salads and fruit dishes.

				The berries are best combined with other fruits, since they need juiciness and sweetness for balance. Don't cook them, or you'll destroy their flavor.
And speaking of destroying flavor, don't bother buying commercial dried leaves for tea. They won't have any flavor. They are useful in a potpourri to scent your home, however. To make wintergreen tea, fresh leaves have to be fermented in water to release the mint taste in them. What you do is fill a jar or other glass container with fresh leaves and water. Cover it and place it in a warm place for a couple of days, until the water is bubbly. Then warm the jar up by putting it in a pan of hot water and drink the liquid. You can also drain the leaves from the liquid and let them dry out slowly out of the sun. You can reuse these leaves to make tea. It won't be as strong as the first batch of fermented leaf, but it is still good.

What the Ancestors Knew Wintergreen contains methyl salycliates, the active painkillers of aspirin. It is good for colds, headaches, and to bring down fevers. To native peoples it was an important medicinal beverage. The berries are high in Vitamin C and the fermented leaves were used to flavor cooked meat and fish. Eastern Algonquin Tribes - Used the tea medicinally and as a tonic. They ate the berries, valuing them as tonic to the stomach. Wintergreen was also said to expand the lungs capacity for air, enabling users to run for longer distances. The leaves were also added to tobacco to smoke. Long Lake Superior Chippewa - All parts of the plants were used ceremoniously as an infusion to cleanse the wounds from tattooing the body in a sacred fashion. The Menomini - Steeped the leaf of the wintergreen with the berry to make a tea, which was drunk for rheumatism. The Flambeau Ojibwe - used the leaves to brew a tea to cure rheumatism. They also used the leaf tea from the youngest, most tender leaves as beverage tea, and especially favored it because it made them feel good. They also ate the berries. The Potawatomi - made a tea from the leaves to break a fever. They also said the tea cures rheumatism and lumbago. The Seneca - Used wintergreen as tonic to remove air from the stomach. The Tete De Boule - Applied wintergreen as a poultice to the chest for bad colds. A tea was made with the leaves that was used as a cure-all, given for flu, colds, stomach troubles, etc.
Lenape Myth -		The origin of wintergreen and cranberry comes from the extinction of the mastodons. These pachyderms were put on the earth for the people to use. But they became too destructive and unruly. A great, bloody battle ensued in a bog, with all the other animals fighting the mastodons. The mastodons lost, and to this day you can sometimes still find their bones in the bogs. The Great Spirit compensated for the loss of meat by transforming the spots of blood into wintergreen berries and cranberries, which dot the bogs with red to this day.[
This site written, designed and maintained by Lame Wolf © 1998 Update - 1/3/1999