Something old, something new

"I've dug it in places where the sun hardly ever hit it. You'll really find more of it in dark coves and dark ground than anywhere's else"
...Lake Stiles, an old sang hunter in the 1973 edition of Foxfire





This year I've dug alot of really old ginseng. These three roots from this picture are from todays walk in the woods. You see every year the bud that produced that years top leaves a scar till you eventually end up with the long "necks" as ginseng hunters call them that you see here. After a while these seem to smooth out and become hard to count on the really really old ones and I'm never sure enough to say "well this ones 25 or this ones 50" like some guys do. I once found an ancient root with a neck over six inches long but half of it was just sorta bumpy and impossible to count. Though I could count 50 at least on the half I could count. If I ever dug a hundred year old root that was it. It was growing about halfway up a cliff I had no business being on and nobody else had ever been dumb enough to ginseng hunt there I guess. It seems every trip has produced a few old timers like these in this photo. Not really giant roots this year just old ones. Old enough to make me have a twinge of guilt in the digging. But not real "lose sleep over" guilt though, because for every plant I've dug this year I've planted a dozen seeds. Some in patches tucked away in out of the way places to return to someday, but some just scattered throughout my ginseng haunts to insure ginseng for the future. For a while there in the eighties I thought ginseng might end up extinct someday but play stations and world of warcraft changed all that. I'm a youngster at fortyfive around here in the ginseng hunting world. All the others are getting too old to get out or are already gone. Give it another decade or two and at least here in Ohio wild ginseng will be coming back strong. A long line, a tradition dating back to the 1700's is fading out, replaced by MP3's and WEI games. In the last two years I've planted around 8000 ginseng seeds in the wild or, at 200 to 300 mature plants to the pound, maybe 25 or 30 pounds of ginseng if it were all dug and dried. As much or more than I've dug in my lifetime. I like the idea that there is more ginseng growing in the wild because I dig it rather than less. I've often wondered if the great patch in the thousand dollar woods didn't start out this way, some old ginseng hunter planting a few dozen seeds in the fifties or sixties and then forgetting about it, or dying even.