Bark is Beautiful

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Food and Medicine

Although its aesthetic beauty may escape some, we humans have long recognized tree barks usefulness. Indeed, archaeologists say, we eat the stuff up: For centuries, people from around the world have eaten tender, sugary inner tree bark for nutrition. In this country, pines, aspens, cedars and cottonwood are among the species Native Americans used in their diets, especially during winter. They would peel back the tough outer bark and carefully cut out the inner bark, leaving the vascular cambium intact to generate new growth. Tree-bark soups, breads and puddings were among the items on the menu. Dont turn up your nose too much; we still use bark in foods. For instance, cinnamon both true cinnamon and the cassia marketed in most stores as cinnamon is peeled, dried tree bark.

Another common use for bark among Native Americans was the crafting of canoes. Most tribes preferred strips of white birch bark sewn together over a frame of cedar branches using cordage made from fibrous tree roots.

Bark has played a role in our countrys industrial history, too. Resin extracted from the inner bark of conifers has long been an important source of raw material for quality varnishes and shellacs. In the Appalachians during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, countless native hemlocks were toppled and peeled by tanning factories for their high-tannin bark, the logs left lying in waste.

Of all the human uses for tree bark, though, medicine figures most prominently. Lists of traditional American tree-bark remedies are so long and varied, they read like pharmacopoeias or A-to-Z field guides to North American trees. The remedies range from the well-known (slippery elm or black cherry bark for sore throat) to the imagine-that (beech-bark tea for rheumatism; black-haw bark for hot flashes) to the outright odd (oak inner-bark tea for smelly feet).

Though some may seem merely quaint, many old-timey medicaments have become important modern therapeutic drugs. Centuries ago, the Greeks and Romans sipped a tea made by steeping willow bark to ease pain and relieve fevers; Native Americans and early settlers used the same drink to soothe sore muscles and aching heads. In the 1800s, scientists determined that the active ingredient in willow bark was salicin, a substance later synthesized as acetylsalicylic acid, better known as aspirin.

For decades, quinine extracted from the bark of cinchona trees in South America was the only known treatment for malaria. Even today, natural quinine is used to treat strains of the disease that are resistant to human-made treatments. In the 1980s, it was discovered that paclitaxel a drug produced from the bark of the Pacific yew and now marketed under the name Taxol was effective in controlling lung, breast and ovarian cancers. Unfortunately, it takes roughly 70 years for a Pacific yew to reach maturity, and stripping the bark kills the tree. In the 1990s, yew bark harvests for paclitaxel production threatened large stands of the trees. Fortunately, recent advances now allow the drug to be produced from the needles of nonendangered, cultivated yew species.

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