The Korean Herbalist

  The Bluest Flower in the World — Korea's Cornflower and Its Royal Wartime Story There is a particular shade of blue that painters have chased for centuries. Not sky blue, which is pale and variable. Not navy, which is dark and serious. Something in between — a saturated, almost electric blue that reads as pure color rather than a tint or shade. Ultramarine came close, ground from lapis lazuli at extraordinary expense. Prussian blue, invented accidentally in a Berlin laboratory in 1704, came closer. But the cornflower got there first, and did it for free, in the middle of wheat fields across Europe and Asia. 수레국화 — the cornflower — produces one of the most genuinely blue flowers in the plant kingdom. Most "blue" flowers are actually violet, or lavender, or blue-purple. This one is actually blue. Standing in front of it with a camera, I kept second-guessing the color. It seemed too saturated to be real. It was real.   The Plant: 수레국화 (Centaurea cyanus) **Korea...

  The Weed That Farmers Spray and Scientists Study — Korea's Orange Foxtail There is a hierarchy in how we think about plants. At the top: medicinal herbs, edible greens, useful trees. In the middle: ornamentals, garden plants, things we tolerate. At the bottom: weeds. Plants that grow where they're not wanted, that compete with things we're trying to grow, that farmers spend money eliminating. 둑새풀 is firmly in the weed category. It grows in rice paddies, wheat fields, and irrigated ditches across Korea, and agricultural science literature treats it primarily as a problem to be solved with herbicide. Several studies have been published on its resistance to ALS-inhibiting herbicides. There is no shortage of papers on how to kill it. And then there's a 2016 Korean study in the *International Journal of Molecular Medicine* that identified a compound called tricin in 둑새풀 extract with significant anti-inflammatory activity — suppressing inflammatory markers in ma...

  The Tree That Built the Silk Road — Korea's Mulberry and Its Thousand Uses For several hundred years, the Chinese Empire guarded this tree with the kind of intensity normally reserved for military secrets. The knowledge of how to raise silkworms, how to feed them the leaves of this specific tree, and how to unravel the cocoons into thread — all of it was a state secret. Exporting silkworm eggs or mulberry seeds was punishable by death. The monopoly on silk production funded dynasties. Silk traveled west along the trade routes we now call the Silk Road, arriving in Rome at prices so extraordinary that Roman senators debated banning the fabric as a drain on the treasury. The secret eventually escaped, as secrets do. Byzantine monks smuggled silkworm eggs out of China hidden in hollow walking staves, sometime around 550 CE. The knowledge spread. But for centuries, this tree — 뽕나무, the white mulberry — was the biological foundation of the most valuable trade n...

  The Weed Western Chefs Pay Good Money For — Korea's Chickweed and Its Quietly Impressive Resume In London and New York, chickweed appears on the menus of high-end restaurants as a microgreen. Chefs call it delicate. They describe the flavor as mild and fresh, slightly grassy, tender in a way that other greens aren't. A small handful costs what you'd pay for a coffee. In Korea, it grows out of walls. This photo was taken against a concrete block, which is a fairly accurate summary of 별꽃's attitude toward growing conditions. It doesn't need soil. It doesn't need much sun. It appears in cracks, at the base of fences, in the neglected margins between paved surfaces — blooming quietly in white while everything around it looks like infrastructure. The gap between how the West prices this plant and where it actually grows is one of my favorite things about foraging in Korea.   The Plant: 별꽃 (Stellaria media) **Korean name:** 별꽃   **English com...

  The Herb That Built a Nation — Korea's Mugwort and Its Three Thousand Years of Use In the beginning, according to Korean myth, there was a bear who wanted to become human. A tiger wanted the same thing. Both came to the god Hwanung and asked. He gave them each a bundle of garlic and a bundle of mugwort, and told them to stay in a cave, away from sunlight, and eat only these for one hundred days. The tiger gave up after twenty days and left. The bear endured. On the hundredth day, the bear became a woman. She married Hwanung. Their son was Dangun — the founder of the first Korean kingdom, Gojoseon, in 2333 BCE. This is the Dangun myth, the foundation story of Korea. And embedded in it, before cities or kingdoms or writing, is 쑥 — mugwort — presented as one of two substances capable of transforming a wild creature into something civilized enough to found a nation. That's a significant amount of cultural weight for a plant most Westerners consider a weed.   The Plan...

  Korea's Pine Pollen Has Been a Superfood for a Thousand Years — Before the Internet Discovered It Right now, in health food stores across North America and Europe, jars of "pine pollen powder" are selling for forty, fifty, sixty dollars for a few hundred grams. The marketing language talks about testosterone support, adaptogenic properties, ancient wisdom. The product is presented as a recent discovery. Korea would like a word. 송화가루 — pine pollen — has been part of Korean food culture for well over a thousand years. It appears in historical texts from the Goryeo dynasty. It's an ingredient in traditional royal court cuisine. Korean grandmothers used it in sweets and beverages long before anyone thought to put it in a capsule and sell it with a QR code. The photo here shows exactly where it comes from: the male flower cones of 소나무, the Korean red pine, just before they release their pollen. Those small yellowish clusters, dense and bumpy, are packed with ...

  The Tree That Blooms From Its Own Trunk — Korea's Redbud and the Judas Connection Most flowering trees bloom from the tips of their branches. New growth, new flowers, the usual arrangement. 박태기나무 didn't get that memo. Look at this photo carefully. The flowers are not coming from the ends of branches. They're growing directly out of the trunk and the older wood — bursting from the bark in dense magenta clusters before a single leaf has appeared. The tree looks like it's on fire from the inside out. This is called cauliflory, and it's a genuinely unusual trait in temperate trees. You see it mainly in tropical species — cacao, durian, jackfruit — plants that evolved in dense forest shade where pollinators stay close to the ground and trunk-level flowers make biological sense. 박태기나무 carried the habit out of the tropics and into the temperate woodlands of China and Korea, and it remains one of the most visually striking things that happens in a Korean garde...

  Korea's Most Bitter Vegetable — And Why That's Exactly the Point I wrote recently about 씀바귀 — the bitter spring green that Koreans have been gathering for centuries. I mentioned that it has a close lookalike, and that both are edible and both are bitter. This is the lookalike. And according to anyone who has eaten both side by side, this one is more bitter. 고들빼기 has the distinction of being described, without much argument, as the most intensely bitter vegetable in the traditional Korean diet. That is a competitive field. Korea has a long and serious relationship with bitter spring greens — 씀바귀, 민들레, 머위, 냉이 — and 고들빼기 sits at the far end of that spectrum, the one that makes even people who like bitter food pause for a moment. And yet Koreans didn't just eat it. They made it into kimchi.   The Plant: 고들빼기 (Crepidiastrum sonchifolium) Korean name: 고들빼기   English common name: Sonchus-leaf Crepidiastrum   Scientific name: Crepidiastrum sonchifoliu...

  The Korean Lilac That America Fell in Love With — And the Woman It Was Named After Somewhere in an American garden right now, a lilac bush is blooming. It might be in New England, or the Pacific Northwest, or a suburb of Chicago. It's compact, fragrant, and reliable. The label on the nursery pot says " Miss Kim Lilac ." Most people who plant it have no idea where it came from. Or who Miss Kim was. This is that story.   The Plant: 수수꽃다리 (Syringa oblata subsp. dilatata) Korean name: 수수꽃다리   English common name: Korean Early Lilac   Scientific name: Syringa oblata Lindl. subsp. dilatata (Nakai) P.S.Green & M.C.Chang   Family: Oleaceae (물푸레나무과)   Blooms: April – May   Height: 1–5m   Native range: Korean Peninsula, northeastern China 수수꽃다리 is a deciduous shrub native to Korea — one of the earliest lilacs to bloom each spring, often flowering before the leaves have fully expanded. The flowers are small, tu...

  The Plant That Looks Like a Maple, Grows Out of Rocks, and Might Save Your Teeth There are plants that choose the easy life. Rich soil, full sun, good drainage, plenty of room. And then there is 돌단풍, which looked at bare rock faces and streambeds and decided that would do just fine. The name says it directly: 돌 means rock. 단풍 means maple. This is the rock maple. Not a tree — a low, spreading perennial that grows from crevices in cliff faces and rocky ravines, pushing out leaves so convincingly maple-like that you do a double take the first time you see it flowering in a place where no maple could possibly survive. I found this one in deep shade, which is exactly where it wants to be.   The Plant: 돌단풍 (Mukdenia rossii) Korean name: 돌단풍   English common name: Maple-leaf Mukdenia, Rock Fatsia   Scientific name: Mukdenia rossii (Oliv.) Koidz. (syn. Aceriphyllum rossii)   Family: Saxifragaceae (범의귀과)   Blooms: April – May ...