[Sallie]

That’s a very interesting question! So many “western” herbs are also found in the chinese materia medica. I think the answer will vary by region as students or practitioners using solely western herbs tend to use the ones easily available to them. I can’t think of anything I use on a regular basis that can’t be identified with a pinyin in the materia medica. @Lena @darcy-ogle @Emmie @Sheri I know all you ladies use regional herbs. Kim Goodwin does too but she hasn’t accepted my connect request so I can’t tag her. Any ideas to offer here?

[Lena]

Yes, I saw this question and pondered on it for a bit. I mean, the question has to concern herbs that grow in the West but NOT in China… and used most often. Thomas should be able to answer I’m sure.

[Robyn]

This is one of my most fascinating questions for me this year. I discovered that there’s a term for the similarities between many eastern Asian and eastern North American plants – the Asa Gray disjunction.

Dr. Jun Wen is an evolutionary biologist at the National Museum of Natural History.

She has published some of the most recent and exciting papers on the disjunctions of plants in East Asia and North America. She’s writing a book to provide an evolutionary synthesis on the eastern Asian–North American plant disjunctions.

I asked her how Panax quinquefolius got to North America. She replied, “In the Miocene when the earth was warmer, the ancestor of Panax quinquefolius might have migrated via bird dispersal across the Bering Land Bridge.”

Many forest elements migrated between eastern Asia and North America that way. It then further dispersed eastward into the eastern part of North America. Panax has two biogeographic connections between the two continents. The earlier one is between dwarf ginseng Panax trifolius and its Asian relatives. The biogeographic analyses support the direction of the Eocene North America to eastern Asia in this older disjunction.”

[Sheri]

I found this fascinating – thank you for sharing!

[Sheri]

I know it shifts from season to season and year to year, but this year has been astragalus for me. I have been on a bone broth kick as I work to eliminate more and more processed foods out of my family’s diet and a staple in all my broths is astragalus root. Sure, I load it up with other herbs (nettle is ALWAYS a go-to), but with the rise in virus outbreaks this time of the year, one can always do with a good, hearty base broth.