Richo Cech, a true herbal elder who has worked with herbs for 20 years, has a practical reverence for medicinal plants and has developed a symbiotic relationship stewarding their genetic treasure and making them available to the public through the Horizon Herbs Strictly Medicinal Growing Guide and Catalog. Richo collects seed from at least 700 plant species on his five-acre farm in Williams in Southern Oregon. The interview was conducted by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

Richo Cech in front of Valerian (Valeriana officinalis)

Arty Mangan: Richo, I haven't seen you in a few years, what have you been up to?

Richo Cech: The same that I've been doing for the last decade, finding cutting edge medicinal plants and bringing them into organic cultivation for production of organic seed that goes out to growers throughout the United States and worldwide.

Arty Mangan: Why is it important for people to grow these seeds out?

Richo Cech: Diversity is stable. It brings stability to our land. The human body is the same way. Having a diverse food source allows for robustness of the inner ecosystem, and having a diverse plant ecology allows for stability of the outside system, and also brings in whole other layers of life that would not otherwise be there. Not only are we creating points of diversity with different species on the land, but also there's layering of diversity, the increase of bacterial and fungal activity in the soils, an increase of all insect life: butterflies, bees, and other pollinators. There's birdsong and blossoms in the morning. There are bats flying around at night. This all just really spirals up from the plant diversity. So I call it a garden for all beings. We create a garden for all beings by planting trees and herbaceous plants and cover crops.

Vipers Bugloss (Echium vulgare)

Arty Mangan: In your book, " Making Plant Medicine" you say the best medicine is the medicine you grow, or that's grown locally and that you make yourself.

Richo Cech: Well, there are practical reasons for that. The more that we separate ourselves from the source of our medicine, speaking of herbs specifically, the more processing occurs, the more potential for deterioration of the actual herbal material occurs. So the efficacy is less. This is probably one of the main reasons why popular clinical studies on the efficacy of Echinacea are turning up negative results, because they're using medicines that are taken off of the shelves at stores. Who knows how many years old the dried root may be? Or they're using the western pharmaceutical model and they're pulling the plant apart into its constituent forms and using these as magic bullets to try to treat patients. So that is very removed from the roots that we dig from dormant Echinacea plants in the winter and chew on them, direct consumption to treat beginning phase influenza.

We need to bring the food from the garden and combine it with garden wisdom for treating self, family, local folks, and others. We need to do that everywhere. It's a grassroots revolution, buying back our power by knowing the garden.

Kiss Me Over The Garden Gate (Shui-hong-hua-zi) (Polygonum orientale)

Arty Mangan: Does cultural context play a role in the efficacy of plant medicine?

Richo Cech: Well, we talked about the freshness of the material, and how that's really important. But there are certainly other levels that are recognized by various rootsy cultures; and this has to do with a spiritual realm. It has to do with tying together the process of planting, growing, harvesting, and using food and herbs by maintaining some level of consciousness and prayer throughout the entire cycle. What this does is instills the food with intention. It instills the medicine with intention.

So when I'm planting calendula, I could be thinking about the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song, or I could be bringing my full human capacity into the act of planting a calendula seed, distilling that awareness into a prayer that the calendula seed I'm planting grow, and that it will prosper and flower and bring beauty to the earth. Then when it's picked, I actually visualize the activity of the herb. I visualize the anti-inflammatory and healing nature of calendula, in my mind, as an herbalist who's used these things many times and made the medicine for scores of years. Then that calendula becomes a little bit more special, just a little bit more special.

Shiso (Perilla frutescens)

So we respect the plant and the use of its body. I mean, what a gift, it's giving its body to us. And each step we think about the motivation for doing this work. In a general sense, we want to help people, and in a specific sense, what this particular plant is intended to do. Then we trust the medicine, because we know how it was grown. We know what it should do, and we have expectations around how it will act. The person who is receiving the medicine is reassured. They see our faith, and they know that it heals.

Arty Mangan: What are some of the new herbs you're working with?

Cape Aloe (Aloe ferox)

Richo Cech: Well, I don't think the herbs are ever new. It's more like new to me or perhaps new to us in this hemisphere. But one that I always like to start with is the Holy Basil, or Krishna Tulsi. It is a powerful herb that has been used historically, and is also employed in modern herbalism and has a really definitive spiritual aspect to it. The old Latin used to be Ocimum sanctum, which I like a lot—Holy Basil. Now they call it Ocimum tenuifolia, or small-leaved basil, differentiating it from the large-leaved, pesto, culinary basils. We feel that the herb just brings a lot of blessings to the land and reminds us of why we really do what we do, and that what we produce here is an offering to people, and trying to keep the energy really refined. Holy Basil is sort of a good reminder of all those things. In Ayurvedic medicine, they grow it near the doorway of the house, in order to keep reminding you as you come home, why you're here, or keep you focused on your spiritual aspirations.

Also, the plant has an adaptagenic or a normalizing effect on human health. So we eat the leaves during the day. There's this direct consumption that we were talking about, where the herbs are really most powerful right off the plant. It contains compounds that are adaptagenic and normalize body functions towards homeostasis. So if you have high blood sugar, then the blood sugar is lowered. If you have low blood sugar, then the blood sugar is raised. The indications for using Holy Basil are many. It proves prophylactic against cancer and degenerative diseases, and it's used for treating sexual dysfunctions. It's used for treating malnutrition. The list really goes on and on.

Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) and Poke (Phytolacca americana)

Arty Mangan: What about your own personal herbal regimen, what's involved?

Richo Cech: I incorporate fresh herbs in with my food. Everything here is seasonal, so in season we tend to gorge on the plants that are really at the peak of their readiness. Then, when they're no longer at their peak, we're usually taking the seeds from them. Dandelions are a good example. We almost never pull dandelions on this land. They're allowed to grow freely wherever they set seed. In the spring, we eat a lot of dandelion greens. It's a spring tonic for us, and we use them in the salads just directly out of the garden. It has a definite laxative effect, which most spring tonics should have, because this expels toxins built up from a winter food supply that's often coming from further away. I'll have dandelions daily for three or four weeks while they're really in good shape, and then later I go out and pick the dandelion fluff and rub that out into seed. I've always said that I must be really fortunate to be able to make my livelihood from picking the fluff of Dandelions.

Greek Mullein (Verbascum olympicum)

I think that any herb or food is going to work best during the peak ripeness. If you start to rely on something and the use becomes really habitual, then it becomes less effective over time. So that's one of the benefits of this kind of diverse diet including medicinal herbs, is that then we can switch it out to something else.

Arty Mangan: Generally speaking can you describe the different categories of seed saving?

Richo Cech: Well, we were just out there checking the Physalis peruviana, the Peruvian Goldenberries. These are seeds in a soft fruit, so one of the categories of seed collection would be to be harvesting these fresh, fleshy fruits and then smashing them and floating the debris out from the smashed fruit by adding water and then decanting. The heaviest seed, for the most part, is the most viable fraction. So the heavy seed goes to the bottom of the bucket of water. Then, this is usually either dried on a screen or it may actually be saved in moist coir medium and refrigerated, especially in the case of seeds that take on dormancy when they dry.

There are actually a lot of good examples of this. Another one would be the wild grape, Vitis riparia, which we've recently begun to work with as a great permaculture plant. It's really excellent for planting in riparian zones and in shelterbelts. The grapes are small, round, and loaded with the constituents that are excellent vascular tonics. These we never allow to dry out, because when you dry them out, the germination percent goes way down. We call them multi-cycle germinators. They require multiple cycles of freezing and thawing before they'll germinate, whereas if we keep them fresh, they'll germinate readily in the spring.

Pale-purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida)

Hops (Humulus lupulus)

Another obvious category would be dry seeds in capsules. Our method of working with those is to wait until their seed is really ripe in the follicle or ripe in the capitula of the plant. Then we just go out with buckets and we overturn the plants into the bucket and give a shake, and the seed falls out. So there could be multiple harvests on plants of this nature. Figwort is an example of this that we just harvested. It's a plant that carries its seed in dry capsules. If you tip it over, its seed just pours out. It's part of some of the historical anti-cancer formulas. It has some strong anti-cancer activity, tumor reducing potential. So we would harvest these plants numerous times over a period of three or four weeks, and then combine all of the seed from all these shakes. Then clean them and make one lot of seed, which we would characterize and number and put in our records and package up and make ready for sale throughout the winter and early spring, when we sell most our seeds.

So that leaves us with dry seeds that do not readily come out of the capsule. These require more processing on our part. We need to physically break open the seed-heads. Echinacea would be a good example. We don't get much by shaking the ripe plant. In fact, if you let it go long enough so that the seeds is shattering, then the goldfinches will have probably come in and get the best seed anyway. So you harvest it when the seed is ripe, but not really shattering from the plant. Then we take those seed-heads dry them and run them through a chipper. What we come up with is a mass of seed and broken chaff. Then we screen and wind winnow it to get a pure seed. In most cases, I aspire towards one hundred percent purity. But in a situation like Echinacea seed that has a huge amount of chaff intermixed, then I would be satisfied with 98 percent purity.