Pliny (Natural History 16) writes of picea, the pitch-bearing evergreen of the north. Romans boiled the resin into pitch to seal wine casks and coat ships.
Gwich'in and other Dene peoples used spruce for food, shelter, fuel, and tools. They boiled cones and young tips for tea, chewed the tips, and kept sticky gum in jars. Inner bark was eaten raw, boiled, or dried and ground. Pitch went on burns and sores as a cover. Upper Kuskokwim people carved spoons from dead spruce root.
Cook's navy brewed spruce beer on northern voyages as a scurvy ration. Southeast Alaska harvest guides still list spruce tips in tea and jelly, and melted pitch as a wound cover.
No Greek or Roman name survives for this shrub. Cree, Dene, Inuit, and Gwich'in steeped the leather leaf as a camp tea. USDA forest records list it as a tea and infusion across much of Alaska.
Hudson's Bay posts in the 1700s sold it as Labrador tea when China leaf ran short. Linnaeus later placed the plant among the ledums. European herbals after contact copied that northern cup rather than inventing a Mediterranean one.
Dene medicine booklets record the leaf steeped for sore throat, chest congestion, headache, and as a wash. On this homestead it goes in the winter pot, a short steep with a lid.
The Greeks called the plant achilleos. Pliny (Natural History 25.19) writes that Achilles, taught by Chiron, found it and used it on the wound of Telephus. Romans called it millefolium, thousand-leaf. Dioscorides listed it among wound plants in De Materia Medica.
In China, dried yarrow stalks were used to cast the I Ching, not as a drink. Early Slavic herbals kept it in the house against lice, fleas, moths, and mosquitoes.
Alaska Native records (NPS Denali; Southeast harvest lists) name boreal yarrow as a medicinal plant. Upper Kuskokwim people kept it with nettle and wormwood in the medicine bundle. Dene camp kits held the leaf.
Pliny (Natural History 16.30) calls birch a Gallic tree, white and slender. Gauls used it for magistrates' rods of office, bent it into hoops and basket ribs, and boiled bitumen from the wood. Scythian and later Siberian peoples wrote on the bark. Buddhist manuscripts from Gandhara survive on birch bark.
Koyukon and other Athabascan peoples selected hillside birch for sleds, canoe frames, and snowshoes. Bark covered canoes and made baskets for water and berries. Inner bark was dried so fish would not slip during processing. Finns and Sami took spring sap and kept bark for vessels.
Dioscorides (De Materia Medica 1.104, itea) listed willow among Greek army medicines. He describes leaf and bark drunk for colic, bark tea for spitting blood, and a burned-bark vinegar rub for corns. He packed hot willow leaves for gout. Pliny (Natural History 24) counts fourteen willow preparations in the Roman materia. White willow is named as an antipyretic in that Greek-Roman line.
Cree and Dene used inner bark and young wands for cordage, nets, and baskets. USDA records list Alaska willow for edible spring leaves, dye, rope, and medicine. Southeast Alaska harvest guides note bark and roots in baths for pain and swelling, and leafy branches in the steam bath.
Nineteenth-century chemists later isolated salicin from willow.
Pliny (Natural History 24) treats poplar (populus). Greek story tied white poplar to Heracles. Balsam poplar is the northern cousin.
Gwich'in used poplar for medicine, fuel, and bait. Koyukon burned the bark as a mosquito smudge, peeled slabs for smokehouse floors, and carved net floaters. Pitchy buds were boiled with spruce needles, or with rose hips, then mixed with grease as a salve for sores, rashes, and frostbite (Koyukon ethnobotany; Upper Kuskokwim plant gathering).
Later traders sold the bud as Balm of Gilead.
Pliny (Natural History 21.73) writes that the rose cools and binds. He separates petal, flower, and head. Rose juice, he says, was used for the ears, sores in the mouth, gums, as a gargle, for headache in fever, to bring sleep, and to settle nausea. Rose heads in drink were listed to check diarrhoea. He also describes rose wine. Dioscorides kept rose (rhodon) in the Greek pharmacopoeia and named dog-rose kynosbaton.
Romans used rose oil and garlands. Gwich'in ate the hips as food. USDA lists Alaska rose for edible shoots and hips, and for bark and leaves in camp medicine. Dene booklets steep petals as tea. Hips as a winter kitchen fruit show up more in northern camps than in Pliny's garden rose.
