permaculture

["H. Marshall" <eco@gaianlife.co.uk>]

Hi folks, I am sure many of you have seen this database but in case not I
wanted to bring it to your attention...

http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/

It doesn't include ecological data, but it has ethnobotany/phytochemical
data and it does that with great detail. It is possible to search for which
plants contain the highest amount of a specific chemical or even list all
the chemicals (and concs) in a certain plant. Dr. Duke is also the author of
many 'plant/herbal medicine' books.

It has been an invaluable tool for me whilst researching....for example the
reason why rosemary is a good companion plant to legumes may be that
rosemary produces large amounts of apigenin (a nodulation signaller), which
acts to enhance nodulation by attracting the rhizobium in the soil towards
it (the perfect soil conditioner!).
Once you get started it's quite addictive and fairly simple to pinpoint
chemical allelopathic reactions, not to mention finding which plants you
need to grow to get any other results you want. An example of that would be
my mother's (now cured) high blood pressure. I simply searched for plants
with high concs of anti-hypertensives then narrowed down the list by what
she was prepared to eat. Dosage was obtained with a quick web search. After
6 sticks of celery a day for 2 wks her blood pressure was perfect and has
stayed that way even though she has now lowered the dose (aparently you can
learn to dislike celery quite fast).

This evening I was searching the database for plants which produce high
amounts of fatty acids to see if there was a realistic permaculture
biodiesel source and thought some of you guys may find the Duke database
interesting too.

Cheers
Helen

ps. In case anyone is interested, unsurprisingly avacado fruit comes out
highest for fat content (61,000 - 864,000 ppm) followed by African oil palm
fruit, Macadamia seed, pecan, java olive etc
(http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/duke/chemical.pl?FAT)
For tri-glyceride fatty acids, interestingly the cork of the Cork Oak comes
in highest at 380,000 ppm.



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