The Korean Herbalist

 Korean Children Were Hit With This Plant. Their Grandmothers Made Medicine From It. Lespedeza bicolor · 싸리 Every Korean of a certain age knows 싸리 by its function before its name. It was the broom in the yard — stems bundled and tied, swept across dirt floors and earthen courtyards. It was the fence material — flexible branches woven between posts to make walls around vegetable gardens. And for children who misbehaved, it was the switch: a slender, whippy stem cut from the shrub growing at the edge of every yard and hillside in the country, applied briefly but memorably to the back of the legs. The plant was everywhere. It was used for everything. And then, somewhere in the twentieth century, the dirt floors and earthen courtyards disappeared, the woven fences gave way to concrete block walls, and 싸리 retreated from daily life. To see it in flower today — as it is right now, in late June, the arching branches hung with small pink-purple blooms — is, for anyone who grew ...

  The Flower That Was Illegal for Commoners to Grow — and Was Blamed for Blinding People   Campsis grandiflora · 능소화 (凌霄花) There is a vine growing over the railing of a riverside walkway that stops people mid-stride in July. The flowers are large — six to eight centimeters across — trumpets of deep orange-red that hang in clusters from the ends of arching branches, facing downward as though looking for something on the ground below. The whole plant leans over whatever it has climbed, heavy with blooms, the weight of the flowers pulling the branches into long drooping arcs. This is 능소화 (*Campsis grandiflora*), and for most of Korean history, ordinary people were not allowed to grow it.   A Flower Reserved for the Aristocracy 능소화 arrived in Korea from China long enough ago that no one recorded when. Its Chinese name, 凌霄花, means "the flower that surpasses the sky" — a reference to the height it reaches when given something to climb, which can be ten meters ...

  The Plant That Rattles When It's Ready — and Has Been Eaten and Feared in Equal Measure  Rumex crispus · 소리쟁이 Walk past a stand of 소리쟁이 in late summer and you'll hear it before you see it clearly. The thousands of small, papery seed casings covering each stalk catch the wind and produce a dry, whispering rattle — which is exactly where the Korean name comes from. 소리 means sound. 쟁이 is an informal suffix for something that characteristically does a thing. 소리쟁이 is, literally, the plant that makes noise. By the time it's rattling, the plant has already finished most of its year's work. What you're hearing is the sound of seeds waiting to go somewhere else.   What It Is Rumex crispus — curly dock or yellow dock in English — belongs to the Polygonaceae family, the same family as buckwheat and sorrel. It is native across Eurasia and has since naturalized on every inhabited continent, following human disturbance with the persistence o...

 It Looks Like Dried Coins on a Stem — and Korean Medicine Has Used It for Centuries Thlaspi arvense · 말냉이 (석명) There is a plant growing along a riverbank levee that, by midsummer, looks less like a living thing and more like something forged — dozens of flat, round, papery discs strung along a stem like coins on a string, or scales on a fish skeleton. Walk past it quickly and you might mistake it for some kind of dried grass seed head. Stop and look closer, and the shape resolves into something much stranger: a plant whose entire fruiting structure is made of these small translucent discs, each one a seed pod in its own right. This is Thlaspi arvense — 말냉이 in Korean, field pennycress in English. It is a humble, unglamorous weed of disturbed ground. It is also, somewhat surprisingly, a documented entry in traditional East Asian herbal medicine, with a name and a use that long predates the riverbank it's currently colonizing.   What It Is Thlaspi arvense belongs t...

  The Flower That Dies by Noon: Ohio Spiderwort's Quiet Invasion of Korea  Tradescantia ohiensis · 자주달개비 There is a plant growing in the gap between a tree and a wall in my neighborhood that most people walk past without a second glance. It looks vaguely grass-like until you notice the flowers — tight clusters of deep purple buds at the tips of arching blue-green stems, a few of them already open, catching the morning light. By noon, those open flowers will be gone. Not wilted, not fallen — simply closed, finished, done for the day. Tomorrow, new ones will take their place. This is *Tradescantia ohiensis*, the Ohio spiderwort. It is native to the prairies and roadsides of North America. It has no business growing in a Korean city. And yet here it is.   What It Is *Tradescantia ohiensis* belongs to the Commelinaceae family — the same family as 닭의장풀 (*Commelina communis*), the dayflower that turns up in every Korean vegetable garden as a weed. The two plants sha...

  It Was Sitting Outside a Convenience Store at 3 AM, and It Has a Darker History Than You'd Expect Hydrangea macrophylla · 수국 The rain had stopped sometime around midnight, but the pavement was still wet when I walked past the convenience store. There, near the entrance between a wire rack of umbrellas and a stack of delivery boxes, sat a small potted plant — deep pink flowers clustered into tight balls, each petal holding a bead of rainwater. I stopped. Because I knew something about it that most people walking past at that hour probably didn't. That cheerful little plant contains cyanogenic glycosides. Under the wrong conditions, those compounds release hydrogen cyanide.   What It Is Hydrangea macrophylla is so common in Korea that most people stop seeing it. It grows along roadsides, fills temple courtyards, spills over garden walls in old neighborhoods, and appears every June at every convenience store entrance in the country. The Korean name is 수국...

  The Wild Raspberry Hiding in the Korean Undergrowth: 산딸기 There is a moment in early summer in Korea when certain hillsides and forest edges offer something you did not plan for: a small red fruit, the size of a fingertip, sweet and slightly tart, appearing among leaves that most people walk past without slowing down. No sign marks it. No one planted it. It has simply always been there, ripening according to its own schedule, eaten by birds and the occasional person who knows what to look for. This is 산딸기 — the mountain raspberry — and it is one of the more satisfying discoveries the Korean landscape offers in June.   What It Is 산딸기 (*Rubus crataegifolius*) is a deciduous shrub in the family Rosaceae, native to Korea, Japan, China, and the Russian Far East. The genus *Rubus* includes raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, and cloudberries — a group characterized by aggregate fruits composed of many small drupelets clustered together around a central co...