Adventure in the Smokies

Guide to Western North Carolina PO Drawer 129 Waynesville, NC 28786 August, 2001 ‘Our Lady of the Forest’ teaches properties of medicinal plants From back aches to stomach aches, nature has a cure. By NANCIE WILSON Special to Adventure in the Smokies Identification, location and multiplication. Those are the three principles of foraging followed by true wildcrafters, individuals who collect food and medicinal plants to sell. Graham County resident Ila Hatter knows firsthand the importance of those three rules. Hatter is a well-known naturalist, teacher and wildcrafter whose search for knowledge about medicinal plants has taken her to South America, the Caribbean, Spain and all across the Southeastern United States. Recently, Hatter was featured in a program on healing roots and herbs of the Appalachian woodlands sponsored by the Yellow Creek Botanical Institute and the Tuckasegee Community Alliance. She shared her knowledge of the folk wisdom and oldtime remedies of the Appalachian mountain people and the Native Americans indigenous to the land sometimes called the “womb of the earth.” This pleasant, soft-spoken, middle-aged woman clearly revels in talking about the old times, telling old stories, passing along to her audience just a small portion of what she has learned in more than 25 years of researching and seeking out medicinal herbs and plants. Her husband, Jerry Coleman, proudly tells the audience that his wife is self-taught, that she has “no formal education in the field.” He said that both she and he have been informally “adopted” by a tribal elder of the Cherokee nation from whom both have learned so much about the land, plants and trees that grow...

New Living by Christine Harvey

Sports, Natural Health & Fitness News That’s Good For You (SM) PO Box 1519 Stonybrook, NY 11790 Ila Hatter’s Wild Edibles and Medicinals of Southern Appalachia Summer Series Part I & II offers the best educational tour of herbs found in the great Smoky Mountains, one of the great international biosphere reserves in the world. The Appalachian mountains are where much of the world’s American ginseng is harvested. Hatter is an interpretive naturalist who has lead herbal tours for the National Park Service for 14 years. Both videos offer herbal folklore, natural remedies, native wisdom, identification and harvesting guidelines on a variety of herbs and are a great source of information for campers, hikers, naturalists and gourmet cooks. Also included are the “Doctrine of Signatures” and the “Rules of Foraging.” Part 1 covers: Revolutionary Tea, lamb’s quarters, mullein, monarda, mountain mint, spearmint, plantain, purslane, jewelweed, yellowroot, ginseng and blackberry. Part 2 covers: elderberry, sassafras, basswood, bloodroot, Joe Pyeweed, Boneset, horse nettle, ground cherry and blueberry. Part 2 also features an interview with Amanda Swimmer, a Cherokee elder. Dr. Jim Duke, a regular contributor to New Living, has expanded his talents into songwriting on this video, providing an entertaining little ditty about ginseng. We highly recommend this video. Hatters “Fall Series” is due out May 2001. For more information contact: Wildcrafting with Ila, PO Box 2522, Robbinsville, NC 28771, call (828) 479-8999, visit www.wildcraftingwithila.com or...

The Brandon News

The Brandon News and Brandon Shopper January 16, 2002 GROWERS GUIDE Weeds, Ways of Days Gone By By MONICA BRANDIES Correspondent Ila Hatter was one of our excellent instructors when we went to our first Elderhostel last fall. She is a descendant of Pocahontas and was raised on natural remedies and a love and respect for nature. Her recipes appear in wild foods cookbooks and her – workshops have been featured on TV and in several national and international magazines. She currently lives and studies in the Snowbird Cherokee Indian community of western North Carolina. For five days we listened in fascination as she shared the richest nuggets of this lifetime of information with us. Ila showed us leather britches, beans strung up and hung to dry. The same method was used for cabbage leaves and pieces of pumpkin, apples, peaches and plums well before the people had canning jars or freezers. It still works. She had cornhusk dolls, buckeyes to put into our pockets to ward off arthritis and traditional tonics and medicines that many of us remembered. When Catherine Marshall’s book “Christy” was made into a movie and then into a series for TV, Ila Hatter was consulted to make all the medicines, hang the bunches of herbs from the rafters and to make sure these and the plants shown, like the bittersweet on the porch, were authentic to the times. She had a crazy quilt that had belonged to her mother’s Aunt Dora that was used in one episode where the youngster got sick and woke up under the quilt whose various patches, some velvet and satin,...