Botanical Wednesday: It's been a long time if I'm missing Oplopanax horridus

We had a blizzard this week. It's bitterly cold right now. I was trying hard to think of good reasons to have left the Pacific Northwest, and this is about the only thing I came up with: Devil's Club.

They're big. They're prickly-spiky-thorny. They're evil. You did not go blindly charging through the lush green brush in the woods unless you wanted to risk tangling with knives and needles.

I might be willing to trade sub-zero snowstorms for Devil's Club, though.

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PZ -- you are a very ill individual, dude. Science and all that, old bean, but that thing looks like it would admire to take large parts of one's corpus with it, for fun. Take the snowstorm. Srsly.

By thepoliticalcat (not verified) on 04 Mar 2015 #permalink

Expletive, that thing looks evil enough to grow in Missouri.

Devil's Club is a sacred plant for the First Nations people of the North West Coast. It teaches you to be aware in the forest......It is part of the ginseng family and has a reputation for increasing physical ; mental and spiritual prowess.

When I spent time in Kitkatla....an isolated FN village on the NW coast, I was told by the chief and medicine man that the leaf-stems were peeled and chewed on by old people to "make them feel young"".........

I have experienced the spines in my hand though.......I grabbed one to stop me sliding down a scree on ball=bearing-like pebbles, undoing an hour's climb........When I got back home, hours later, my hand looked like a blown up red rubber glove and was throbbing with intense pain......powerful stuff......

By Luise Grav (not verified) on 08 Mar 2015 #permalink

Devil's Club is a sacred plant for the First Nations people of the North West Coast. It teaches you to be aware in the forest......It is part of the ginseng family and has a reputation for increasing physical ; mental and spiritual prowess.

When I spent time in Kitkatla....an isolated FN village on the NW coast, I was told by the chief and medicine man that the leaf-stems were peeled and chewed on by old people to "make them feel young"".........

I have experienced the spines in my hand though.......I grabbed one to stop me sliding down a scree on ball bearing-like pebbles, undoing an hour's climb........When I got back home, hours later, my hand looked like a blown up red rubber glove and was throbbing with intense pain......powerful stuff......

By Luise Grav (not verified) on 08 Mar 2015 #permalink

@ Luise Grav

". . . and has a reputation for increasing physical ; mental and spiritual prowess."

In a purely Nietzschean "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." manner, I'm guessing.

By rocketride (not verified) on 12 Mar 2015 #permalink