I arrived in Topanga, a town in the Santa Monica Mountains, in 1979, attracted to the canyon’s beauty and serenity and the idea of rural living. I moved into a house on Colina Drive and I shared it with a girlfriend. We had a little land where we could garden and raise chickens.
Topanga is the name the Tongva bestowed upon the place millennia ago. The word means “above” or “heaven” in the Tongva’s Shoshonean language. I would soon deem Topanga a fitting name—but first I would have to endure some challenges.
I had landed a job in Santa Monica working as an assistant to the president of an environmental consulting firm. Santa Monica was about 12 miles away—half of that on a narrow, windy road—and I had to be in the office five days a week. The commute was stressful and the job even more so. With the stress depressing my immune system, I picked up an eye infection. I was in agony: my eyes were sore, bloodshot, and so itchy that I wanted to scratch them out. There was never any relief and I couldn’t sleep.
I made an appointment at a world-renowned eye institute in Los Angeles, confident the eye doctor could help me. He looked at my eyes with a slit lamp—a specialized microscope with a bright light that allowed him to closely examine the front structures of my eye, including the cornea, iris, and pupil. He was clearly intrigued by what he observed. In short order, a procession of medical interns took turns looking at my eyes under the scope. I heard many oohs and ahs. I felt special, but also a little used, like a guinea pig. The doctor kept me in the dark about what was wrong with me until I protested. “Please tell me what I’ve got,” I pleaded. He finally told me I had a rare but not serious eye infection.
He didn’t ask me about my comfort level and didn’t seem to be concerned when I told him that I was in agony. He said my symptoms were likely to worsen as the disease progressed. “At some point,” he said, “your vision will become so impaired that it will be unsafe to drive.” He hastily wrote me a doctor’s note to excuse me from work for a month and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. “There is nothing more I can do for you,” he said, “you’ll just have to ride it out.” And then he sent me on my way.
When I returned home, my eyes were still driving me crazy, but I wanted to have some semblance of a life while I could still see reasonably well. I decided to go to a costume party being held that evening at the Topanga Community Center. I wore sunglasses as part of my costume to hide my hideous eyes. Part way into the evening I went into the restroom to pee and assess the condition of my eyes. When I took off my sunglasses at the sink, the woman next to me gasped. “What have you been smoking?” she blurted out. “Nothing,” I replied. “I have an eye infection. The doctor says it is rare but not serious.” She took me by the hand, genuine sympathy and concern in her eyes. “I know just the person you need to see,” she said. She led me into the kitchen and introduced me to Gail, who I learned was an herbalist. “This woman needs help with an eye infection,” she told Gail before disappearing into the crowd. I lifted my sunglasses briefly to give Gail a glimpse of my eyes. “Say no more,” she said. “Come see me tomorrow morning around ten.” She scribbled the directions to her house on a slip of paper and handed it to me with a smile.
The next morning, I drove to Gail’s house a couple of miles up the canyon. From the moment she greeted me at the door she showed much more kindness and compassion than the medical doctor had the day before. She was deeply concerned about alleviating my pain and discomfort, in addition to restoring my health. I felt like I was under the wing of a relative who would take care of me.
The first thing Gail did was trim some wheatgrass leaves from a tray in her sunny window box, place them in a wheatgrass juice grinder, and turn them into an bright green fluid which she beckoned me to drink. The taste was as intense as the color. She opened the doors of a tall wooden cabinet. Inside were shelves lined with many kinds of homeopathic remedies, herbal tinctures, extracts, and supplements—treasures from the plant and mineral worlds. I felt transported back in time, before botany and medicine were parted and each became a science under the purview of male experts trained in schools, a time when women used a vast knowledge of plants to heal people in their communities.
Gail pulled a goldenseal tincture from her collection, handed it to me, and instructed me to place an eye dropperful under my tongue several times a day to boost my immune system. I would learn years later in my work as an ethnobotanist that goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) was part of the U.S. Pharmacopoeia as early as 1860. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Iroquois, and other tribes regarded goldenseal as a specific for sore and inflamed eyes, and the plant was a very popular remedy with the pioneers of Ohio and Kentucky, who learned of its virtues from the Indians.
Gail instructed me to go to the local herb store and get the powdered leaves of the herb called eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis), a small annual herb native to the British Isles used by herbalists as a wash for sore and inflamed eyes since the Middle Ages. I was to steep a tea with it, strain the liquid through a cheesecloth, put it in a shot glass, wait until it cooled to lukewarm, and then wash each eye with the concoction. She instructed me to do this many times during the day and night.
She told me that the right diet would help a great deal to fight the infection and keep my eyes healthy. I was to eat raw and steamed organic vegetables high in natural vitamin A such as carrots, spinach, and sweet potatoes. She gave me a list of organic vegetables to buy. She told me also to buy a high-quality vitamin A supplement that I should take with meals.
On the way home I stopped at the herb store and market. Once home, I followed Gail’s instructions to the letter. The next day I felt much better. The pain and itching began to subside. By the end of the day my eyes were almost back to normal and the infection seemed to have cleared.
I beelined back to the eye institute and asked the eye doctor to look at my eyes under the scope. He determined that the disease was 95 percent gone and said that such a rapid recovery was remarkable. When I told him that I never taken the antibiotics but had instead consulted with an herbalist and followed her prescription of herbal medicines, eyewashes, changes in diet, and vitamins, he simply nodded. “I am sure the herbs are what made the difference,” I asserted. He was completely dismissive of that possibility. “Pure coincidence,” was his conclusion.
Within a couple of days my eyes were back to normal and so was my life. I was immensely grateful to Gail for healing my eyes. But that would turn out to be the least of her gifts. The experience taught me about the healing power of plants and set me on a path toward learning more about long history of human use of herbs as medicine.
Some years later, that path would intersect with my study of Native Californians’ practices of burning and caring for the natural vegetation so as to sustainably harvest from it food, basket-making materials, and medicinal plants. Every California tribe, I learned, had a deep traditional knowledge base related to the tending and use of medicinal plants. When it became clear to me, however, that tribes’ traditional knowledge about native plant medicines was not mine to take or use, it was Gail’s identity as a white woman herbalist—someone who had heroically held on to and strengthened the threads of a rich European-based legacy—that prompted me to look into my own ethnic heritage for plant wisdom. I found that a relationship with healing herbs was an inalienable part of my identity.
My ancestry extends back to parts of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England on both sides of my family. Considering the long tenure of my people on the British Isles, I have no doubt that some of my ancestors used medicinal herbs native to those lands—including eyebright for eye infections. When I traveled to Ireland, the sight of eyebright growing wild in the countryside stirred a deep feeling of belonging and recognition.
How did my ancestors learn about the power of eyebright to heal eyes? According to folkloric tradition, people learned the virtues of eyebright by observing a little bird, the linnet, giving it to her own young in the nest. This is consistent with the belief that in pre-modern times European healers and Druid priestesses were adept at interpreting the meaning of animals’ behaviors, especially the actions and sounds of the birds that visited the groves and forests. Knowledge of the language of animals was deemed a marvelous gift.
Having read about how the linnet taught people about the healing power of eyebright, I made sure to go to the Museum of Natural History in Dublin during my visit to Ireland. I looked for the linnet among the museum’s large array of taxidermied bird specimens. I found it in a glass case, mounted to show it feeding its young in a nest in a tree. I imagined the bird placing sprigs of eyebright into the gaping mouths of the nestlings and thanked it for its gift to humans.
Animals, plants, and other phenomena in nature are considered by many earth-based cultures to be the original teachers. Such is the case in North America. This cultural legacy of having knowledge gifted to them may have been one reason Native Americans so generously shared their knowledge of food sources and medicines with early white settlers. When my relatives on my mother’s side settled in Kentucky they very likely benefitted from local knowledge of native herbs that had come originally from the area’s Native people. These ancestors of mine probably used goldenseal tincture to treat various maladies and help the liver.
I think often of Gail (whose full name is Gail McDonald Tune) and the mysterious woman who graciously took me by the hand at the Topanga Community Center that night long ago and how they opened my eyes to the ancient, mutually beneficial relationship between plants and humans, a relationship I now know to be a shared, universal human legacy. I have the utmost respect for the nurturing, wise women and men in our communities who, like Gail, know the plant world intimately and use their amazing knowledge of the earth to help humankind.
Edited by Eric Engles
References
Armstrong York, Louise. 1992. Editor. The Topanga Story, Topanga Historical Society.
Folkard, Richard. 1892. Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics: Embracing the Myths, Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore of the Plant Kingdom. Second edition. London, England, Sampson, Low, Marston and Company.