Robert Newman Interview, continued…

page 1 | 2

Cindy: How long was your contract with the institute?

Robert: The contract was for 6 months, but we renewed it twice. I stayed one and a half years there.

Cindy: What about the garden at American College and your rare collection?

Robert: Eventually I realized I couldn’t keep taking care of the garden at ACTCM. There was a point where it was starting to become too much after three to four years of caring for the garden and putting out all my money for seeds, plants, soil, plus, most of the equipment. I told the school I would give it one more year, which would be my fifth year there. The school had allowed me to use their water, they got me a hose once and I got to use their postage meter for letters and some packages I’d send to other growers, various sources and other botanic gardens. But I just couldn’t keep paying for most of it myself and putting out so much time and energy. I had already graduated and gotten my license. I worked as a staff acupuncturist in the clinic at the school and I had a part time practice that was beginning to get busier. The school simply could not support my efforts in the garden. And for the most part, no one offered help at the school. Everyone was too busy. Motivation was lacking and the school was not offering tuition breaks to students to help out, so I told the school we needed support. We both thought about grant projects because the school didn’t have the money itself. Interestingly, the school was beginning to use the gardens more and more as a tool to promote the school in educational offerings. It was part of every tour when prospective students visited the school. They eventually got a grant writer and we met and talked about some concepts and directions for public promotion. Then nothing happened. Finally, months later I found out that the grant writer was gone and no one had told me. And no one was ever hired after that while I was still there. After 5 years and a collection of 1500 plants, I couldn’t support the school’s garden anymore. That was just before I visited China and got offered the job curating the medicinal plant collection at the Nanjing Botanical Garden.

Cindy: Did you give your collection away?

Robert: Yeah. The school was disappointed, but they understood, plus, I left several hundred species that I had planted in the garden. They still had a very impressive collection. Before I left my official role as ACTCM’s herb garden curator, I needed to find a home or homes for the main collection—about 1000 plants, most of which had been in pots. I ended up giving those 1000 plants to a contact in Oregon, but it turned out she didn’t have an adequate place for the collection and many were lost. I also tried to make sure that the network of growers around the country had seeds or cuttings of as many of the plants as I could—unfortunately, I didn’t have any propagation material of quite a few of these 1000 plants. The material I left remaining at ACTCM—several hundred species—was now in the hands of a couple of students at the school, but I wasn’t concerned about the possible loss of the plants in that remaining collection at ACTCM because propagation material of those several hundred species was well spread out in the hands of my contacts in the U.S. Then I left it up to the school to do what they wanted with the garden. This was done before I left for China in 1997.

When ACTCM realized that I would no longer be able to do it for nothing and they would lose the plants after I left, they decided to offer two students tuition breaks to take over management of the garden. Some effort was made to get other students involved. So, I tried to pass on to those students before I left the info about what plants were still there and what to do. That was the end of my control over the garden there. They gave me a plaque and a recognition award and a party before I left for China. I learned so much from the experience, and it ended up getting me a lot of great contacts and new friends and somewhat of a reputation, so there was some benefit from all my efforts. I also did get to work in Nanjing as a result.

Cindy: How did your network of growers come about?

Robert: I was ordering from Vinnie in MO and we were trading while I was developing the ACTCM garden. As I was saying before, I think Joe in NC found out about me through Vinnie. Jean in NY contacted ACTCM and then we got connected. I was looking for people who were enthusiastic and had the ability to grow these plants. It bothered me that I might be holding certain species of material and I could lose plants or maybe not even get things started. I wanted redundancy with several people growing the same stuff. Hopefully, someone would be successful and keep the material available. In those times when I was doing the garden, a lot of this material was completely unavailable and was very difficult to find and obtain. There are many more sources now—it’s so much easier compared to then, though there are still many species that are hard to locate and get established here.

I wanted to find people who were interested in growing Chinese medicinal plants, but at that time there were not too many people who even knew about these plants. However, I discovered that some growers weren’t necessarily interested in medicinals but they might be interested in unusual and uncommon plants. So I found some interested collectors and experienced growers amongst some of the places I was ordering from and began to trade with them. As it turned out, some of these collectors were occasionally also mildly interested in medicinals.

I wanted to see this material in the hands of a lot of growers. I especially wanted to get it in the hands of people interested in perpetuating and promoting to others the awareness of the material’s medicinal potential. I felt if I made these connections, the material would have a much better chance of being here to stay. And I still feel this way now. I still send material to this person interested in Aristolochia’s or that person interested in plants in the mint family, and so on. I didn’t have some special or particular knowledge of how to find the right people to grow these plants. It seems it just turned out the way it did because of fate.

Cindy: What do you say when someone says that we should embrace the plants that grow around us as medicine? We grow Chinese herbs and use them but most of them are not native.

Robert: I think there is validity to it. It’s preferable to use those plants that are in nature around you. When I studied with Elliott Cowan, my plant spirit medicine teacher, I really got a strong sense reaffirmed in me that when plants are able to naturalize in your area—when they are that much at home and they’re that strong in your area—I think they are going to produce better plant medicine. Be it on a physical, biochemical, energetic or spiritual level, I do think there is validity to that. But on the issue of using native United States (US) medicinals, you do have to take into account that there is not that much information available, from a really holistic standpoint, of the properties of native medicinal plants—the level of depth usually pales when compared to the information available about Chinese medicinals.

The Chinese have made this effort through their theoretical principles of Chinese medicine to apply this understanding of these principles to these plants—and usually over 100’s of years, sometimes longer. They have an in-depth knowledge about taste, temperature, the organs or channels that are affected, the functions, the contraindications, dosage, good combinations, processing and preparations of these herbs. Temperature is a very critical and basic idea and one that seems to be neglected in most current western systems of herbal medicine. Does an herb cause your system to heat up or cool off as a result of taking it, or is it neutral in temperature? This goes to a lot of problems people can end up having from herbs due to not realizing these things, and that is only one aspect of these herbs that can be critical.

The Chinese have recognized this and have this great system behind the herbs, so there are people now who are starting to look at western herbs from the US and Europe and so on from this understanding of Chinese medicinal principals. But it will take decades to confirm and reconfirm the conclusions of these efforts. People who are starting to do this kind of work are really just getting started and should be congratulated for doing this work.

There are also particular plants that can be introduced that will naturalize in particular areas. We are seeing this in your garden quite readily and in Vinnie’s too. I think those plants have a great deal of potency likely in their medicinal effects because of that fact. This is something that can be observed additionally with the introduction of more plants. The issue of invasion is also JL Hudson’s soapbox rant about criticisms people have about him offering rare introductions. He’s brought a lot of foreign plant material to the west and sold them through his company. He thinks it’s spreading around anyway without our help—plants spread. They spread through their seed, on a wood log, or via animals, birds. We’re animals too. If you walk along a path and there’s some local Agrimony, Burdock or Xanthium seed that attaches to your clothing, you find that you spread it around without even trying. This is the way nature is. It wants to spread diversity. Some people will ask what kind of diversity is that when you have some of these plants taking over and wiping out the native flora.

Cindy: Yes, that’s a big issue. In connection with that, what are your thoughts about invasive issues with the further introduction of Chinese medicinal herbs?

Robert: I’m not convinced and—I may be wrong on this—but I’m not totally convinced that these plants that end up invading an area are doing it in "completely" undisturbed areas. It’s very possible they are going into areas that have already been disturbed by human beings, and there is this concept that these plants are trying to restore things back to nature in these areas. It’s certain that we need to start to have a look at the balance with some of these areas and what’s happening there. Some researchers may not be aware of some of these areas and that issue. The question is, are these plants doing that? If you look at the way nature works, nature seems to often do that where humans have been and basically wherever any damage or fair amount of disturbance has occurred. It sends in all these weeds typically, these weedy, invasive-type things and they start initially to take back over the land. And if nothing is done to get them out, then over time, through the process of succession, they have larger plants that then come into the area. These later, larger plants are generally less capable of living in more varied environments. They are usually plants that are more sensitive and specific for certain conditions and they are often larger, woodier plants. And if those get established then typically you see trees come into the area.

You can see this after a fire and after some disturbance to a particular environment. Like I said, I’m not sure these plants are coming into totally pristine environments on one level or another. I can appreciate being careful about bringing in some of this stuff, but we also need to start recognizing that we are the ones messing up our environment. And these systems might not be so fragile and have so many problems if we weren’t screwing things up in the first place. If people are that concerned then there should be an equal amount of effort about protecting some of these environments. Perhaps there is, but I'm not so sure it’s really being done at the right level, from a completely deep enough perspective.

An attitude pervades western society and it goes to a very deep issue about a lot of problems with health and it certainly goes to problems with the environment. Here in California, for example, there are pests that have been affecting the vineyards, and actually it’s the wine growers who have created the problem. There is a monocrop agriculture with the vineyards that takes over huge areas of land with no diversity. Most of it is grown with chemicals for pests and fertilizing. The environment—particularly the soil—that is created from this result produces weaknesses in the plants; it’s a guarantee.

It’s the same with how these attitudes, these conditions, are affecting our health. People are having more fungal infections, yeast infections, chronic viral and bacterial infections—people’s flora internally is out of balance and they are getting weaker and weaker immune systems because of it. I see more and more patients with these problems and it’s a mirrored process between our inner environment and the outer environment that surrounds us. The flora in our soil is being damaged and so is the flora in our bodies.

There is a big problem with our attitude and how we deal with the problems that we create in the environment. Rather than return the environment to a healthy state and begin to look at the environment from a whole systems approach, we are still looking at it as if there is this separate aspect that you can fix—this one little part you can address and then it will all be better. With one technological band-aid you create a new technological problem. Just give an antibiotic when there’s a bacterial infection. Then give some nasty anti-fungal medication that will kill the resultant yeast infections. Then give a medication to try to reduce the damage to the liver from the anti-fungal medication. If that doesn’t work, then maybe you can get a liver transplant, or maybe you can’t. This is a serious problem and it’s an attitude that is pervasive in our culture on all levels. Maybe the society doesn’t really want to look that deep at these issues, because they generally would involve having to examine and question so much of the materialism and consumerism and the priority we have made of basically unlimited economic development at any cost—in other words, the motivation of greed.

If you create imbalance, nature will deal with it. You will get infections. Nature will not sit there and allow nothing to happen. If you are good prey, nature will send a predator to attack you. This is true with plants too. If you have plants that are weak because of the environment or soil that is imbalanced, because of OUR invasive and destructive behavior, then predators in the form of more aggressive plants or pests will come. It’s just the way it works. It’s a rule of life. If this is true, then what it may suggest is that these plants are invading for a good reason. It’s not an accident. These problems with our internal environment and our external one are not happening in a vacuum: they may be happening because of a void—a void in the stability of a system, but they are not happening in a vacuum, they are not happening for no clear reason. Nature may be trying to restore balance as it always has. And these imbalances that are present may sometimes be rather subtle and may even extend into areas that would appear to be undisturbed—"appear" is a key word here. Also, the disturbance necessary to create sufficient imbalance may not be as visibly obvious as we expect—it often may not be macroscopic. And to think you can stop this process by pulling out all of the invading plants or by stopping animals—all animals, in other words people too—from spreading seeds around might just be rather useless and simply applying another technological band-aid to the problem. This is just a theory, but one that I think needs to be considered.

Cindy: What are your feelings about cultivation over wildcrafting?

Robert: Well, clearly, as the demand for these herbs increases, wildcrafting is not going to be sufficient. But cultivation is a difficult situation. Small-scale situations where people are growing plants in a sustainable agricultural method would probably be optimal. If it would supply enough people, I don’t know. Creating circumstances where you grow numerous different crops in the same localized area is better than mono crops. It’s a step up from the mono crop system. You may also end up getting better medicine produced if you put the right plants together and it has a likelihood of being better for the environment. I think we have to look at this issue and do the best we possibly can. Cultivation on a large scale with a single big crop may turn out to be a big problem, as I just mentioned. And we still need to find out if many of the plants grown in the US produce good medicine. We need to keep trying to grow these plants in different locations and laboratory tests for active components and organoleptic analysis of these plants needs to continue.

Cindy: Do you have any closing thoughts on the future of growing Chinese medicinal plants in North America?

Robert: There are a lot of changes going on in China right now and I’m not sure how much competition there will be here in the US, considering labor costs are much, much cheaper in China. The Chinese are making efforts to cultivate material and are gaining more control over the use of land, where these plants can be cultivated. At the same time, there is an awareness starting to expand the interest in the west. Big buyers here want material to be organic and be untreated, so cleaner material from China will probably become available over time. If that continues to develop there, then we may have a lot of competition. The Chinese most likely have the means to step up production if needed and they are probably becoming ready to capitalize if the opportunities are there for them. And one problem here is that it is probably going to continue to be a struggle to make connections between growers in the US and end users without support. As demand and interest in Chinese medicine continues to grow around the world, the Chinese are going to change with the specific requirements of those demands of the market more and more. And as such, when they see that they don’t have an endless supply in the wild, they will do more cultivation. It will probably not be due mainly to conservation issues that they decide to go towards increased cultivation. It will most likely be due to wanting to have more control about production. We are probably going to see more and more cultivation in China. And if the market demands that material be grown organically, and that more correctly-identified and fresher material is provided, then that may also develop more in China over time. At least that’s my guess. I think it’s going to be difficult to compete with the Chinese. We may have a chance, but as I said, one thing we still need to do is the growing in numerous locations of the US of different species—particularly the root medicines—and then the appropriate testing to determine which locations produced good quality medicines. There’s still going to be the price issue, but maybe that will change if China becomes more capitalistic and more involved with world economics—the value of their currency, their labor costs and subsequently their prices may increase over time. We’ll see.

Cindy: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Robert: Possibly in another state. I might have a small botanic garden in the place I end up living in. And I want to continue teaching. Depending on where I live, I’m not sure how easy that will be. But I also want to keep practicing and doing my clinical work too. It helps my teaching, which in turn helps my practice. I would like to do both of those things. I don’t know that I will get much more support with my work with the plants, but I do intend to keep doing it too—I’m addicted to them, so…

Cindy: Have you thought about writing a book?

Robert: Yeah. Definitely. There are some plans with some of the others in this network of growers to make that happen. We’re thinking about a reference book on how to grow these herbs—and photographs to help identify them. And a photographic identification booklet to help students identify the inaccurate or incorrect dried material coming in would be one goal I have. It would be a book to help students and others recognize the correct material, when possible. I would add the properties and functions of the main species as well as the substitute species, so that if someone was working with a substitute and didn’t currently have access to material of the main or correct species, they would still know what to do with it.

Cindy: That sounds great, Robert. All of us growing and studying these herbs will be looking forward to it. Thank you and good luck.

Cindy Riviere is the owner of Plant It Herbs in Athens, Ohio, and has grown, propagated and sold Chinese medicinal herbs for over ten years. She has been involved in Chinese herbal medicine research programs at Ohio University and through Chinese institutions. Cindy serves on the Board of One-Garden.

page 1 | 2

return to top

return to Features page