Botanical Wisdom

My family recently visited Belize, where we stayed for three days at the Lodge at Chaa Creek. Its stunning 330-acre forest reserve along the Macal River offers a natural-history center, a blue morpho butterfly breeding center and the chance to swim, canoe and explore miles of jungle trails.

On the Rainforest Medicinal Trail, we learned that at least 25 percent of modern pharmaceuticals derive from plants, including quinine for malaria and foxglove for heart treatment. Somewhere, perhaps in the tropical forests of Belize, cures for cancer or AIDS await discovery. And it may be Rosita Arvigo, Ph.D., a founder of nearby Ix Chel Farm and Tropical Research Center, who finds them. Arvigo apprenticed herself for 12 years to a Mayan healer, Don Elijio Panti, who died at the age of 103 in 1996. She and 12 traditional healers have worked with the National Cancer Institute and the New York Botanical Garden to catalogue over 3,000 medicinal plants of Belize.

Arvigo has also helped to create the Terra Nova Medicinal Plant Reserve, a “living pharmacy,” as she calls it, where trees and plants with curative properties grow. “We transplant them, as well, from areas that are being cleared for development,” she says. To promote and support preservation, the Reserve sells locally made botanical extracts and elixirs (see www.atlantisherbs.com) and markets ingredients to companies abroad.

Here are some of the plants and their properties that I learned about on the Medicinal Trail:

Allspice: The berries make a pleasant, warming tea for digestive upset and gas.

Basil: A hot infusion eases pain of menstruation and facilitates childbirth.

Guava: Eaten fresh, a remedy for diarrhea, dysentery, upset stomach and colds.

Lemongrass: Taken as a tea for fever, cough or colds.

Papaya: Eaten fresh, helps abate constipation, sluggish liver and high blood pressure.

For quick relief from insect bites and stings, apply any of the following to the affected area:

• A paste of baking soda and water

• A slice of raw potato

• Lemon juice

• A fresh piece of aloe vera

• An ice pack

• Peppermint toothpaste

Source: Rainforest Home Remedies, p. 75

TAKE ACTION

Help Save the Belize Jungle! Fortis Inc and Belize’;s government are pushing to build a dam that would flood 2,000 acres of the biologically diverse Macal River valley. See save www.biogems.org

RESOURCES

Rosita Arvigo and Nadine Epstein, Rainforest Home Remedies: The Maya Way to Heal Your Body and Replenish Your Soul (New York: Harper San Francisco, 2001).

Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D., Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest (New York, Penguin Books, 1993).

Both books can be ordered at www.thegreenguide.com/books/