The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [162]
Beyond the culinary and the aromatic, I also grow things now and then for the sake of novelty or curiosity. (I did try growing foxglove once, but it doesn’t do at all well in the desert where I live. The birdhouse gourd vine did much better.) And—as the result of having once taught a class called “The Natural History of Arizona,” I do have a reasonable idea of which desert plants one should definitely not think of squeezing for water, if marooned in an arid wasteland. (Never, ever ingest a desert plant that doesn’t have thorns. Desert plants are a stationary source of water in a dry habitat, and thus in constant danger from bugs, animals, etc. They all protect themselves in one way or another— thorns, spines, thick, waxy skins. If you see a plant that doesn’t seem to be using any of these overt forms of defense, the betting is good that it’s using something else—poisonous alkaloids.)
But no, I’m not by any means a professional botanist or herbalist. In fact, the sum total of my academic credentials is the six class-hours of botany required to get a B.S. degree in zoology at Northern Arizona University. I can tell a monocot from a dicot, diagram the cross-section of a composite flower, and tell the difference between the basidiomycetes and the ascomycetes (those are different kinds of fungi, in case you were wondering), but what with one thing and another, I’ve never found any really graceful way to work these bits of information into a fictional scene.
Of Gophers and Gardens
THE ONLY MEANS I found of peaceful coexistence with the gophers was bribery. If I made a peanut-butter-and-molasses sandwich (on wholewheat bread; God forbid the gophers should suffer from a lack of dietary fiber) every night, and went and hurled this into the middle of the garden, my plants remained largely untouched. If If I forgot the nightly sandwich… Whoops! There goes another pelargonium.
Fortunately, my husband (dear man) built me a gopherproof garden enclosure as a birthday present a few years ago, so the gophers have been reduced to gnawing on the plastic fittings of the irrigation system for their dietary fiber. Now all I have to worry about is dogs with a lust for ripe tomatoes, ants with a passion for my ruby-pearl grapes, and snakes looking for a shady spot to sleep.
However, the furthest I would go in using herbs for medical treatment is to rub crushed lavender on my daughter’s temples for a headache, or to pass out my Altoids peppermint tablets to fellow travelers suffering from motion sickness (oil of peppermint relaxes the smooth muscle of the stomach and intestine, relieving indigestion and flatulence. One person to whom I told this said, “I could have lived without knowing that”). It might not help, but it isn’t going to hurt anybody.
What I do for the botanical details in my books is what I do for the historical ones—I do research. When I first began to write about Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser, I thought quite a bit about what skills a time-traveler should ideally have, and concluded that basic medical knowledge might be one of the better things to be well-versed in. This was also a good choice, in purely fictional terms, because it gave her an excellent excuse for being where all the interesting things (like fights, hunts, wars, and epidemics) were going on.
It didn’t take much thought or research to realize that in the eighteenth century, prior to the advent of antibiotics and anesthesia, the only effective methods of medical treatment were likely to be herbal.
Now, as I say, I have no particular botanical background myself. So, I began looking for information on the use of herbs, whether for domestic purposes like cooking and bug repelling, or for more esoteric medical usage. Luckily, such information was not at all difficult to come by—and in fact, herbal guides and collections have become much more popular in the ten years or so since I began writing Outlander; any general bookstore is likely to have several available.
I should point out that a good many of the herbal treatments