From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. This is John Gallagher.
My guest today is Tom Elpel. In the herbal world, Tom Elpel is most famous for his books, Botany in a Day and Shun Leyah's Quest, which are wonderful guides to learning plant families. However, Tom has written many books and produced DVDs on wilderness survival skills, environmental education, green living, and living close to the earth. His latest book, Roadmap to Reality, Consciousness, Worldviews, and the Blossoming of Human Spirit.
And you can see all of Tom's creations at hops press dot com. That's h o p s press dot com. Hops stands for Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School, which is the school that Tom runs in Montana.
He has an excellent retail site for all things nature education at granny store dot com. And, of course, there's a lot more than this that Tom and all the helpals do there in Montana, and you can see everything in one shot at hollow top. That's h o l l o w t o p dot com. Well, Tom, that's a lot of stuff you do there, and welcome.
Thanks, John. Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah. It's great to have you. And, you know, there's a lot of places that we can go here because you do so much. You do so much there.
And, you know what? I'd like to start, you know, with your with your, you know, life up there in Montana and what you've created and it's, so inspirational for folks to know, you know, what's possible what's possible when you follow your passions in life. And, you know, sure things may may not look much like what you set out to do. Right?
I mean, you know, I've been wilderness awareness school for nearly around there nearly twenty years, and you're around doing that even before that. And, did you grow up there in Montana, or how did you first get involved in wilderness survival and all these all these skills?
Okay.
Sure. My, family is from this area, and I actually lived in California, when I was a kid, and then we spent our summers in Montana. And so we'd be up here for two or three months every summer living with my grandmother.
And, she was the one who really got me started on these, on these types of skills.
She had taken some herbal classes and some edible wild plants classes.
And every day without fail, she would go for a walk and I loved to go out hiking with her and we would pick peppermint and red clover and yarrow and all these kinds of things and dry them for tea.
And, she cooked on a wood cook stove and every day there was a pot of herbal tea there and so, you know, I just grew up drinking that, you know, every day that I was with her. And then, when I was twelve, we moved to Montana.
And so I got to spend a lot more time hanging out with my grandmother.
And she had an interest in the survival skills and she had some survival skills books and sort of I picked up a lot of that from her.
And, you know, wanted to learn the survival skills and wanted to learn all of the plants that kind of led to some of these other things, including botany in a day was very much a quest to answer some questions for me. Mhmm.
And, you know, it's, and your work there, you know, really seems to that you've done really seems to be a role model, you know, for people kinda I think, you know, if it was for me too, wanna do their own thing. I I found it really inspirational because I kinda look at you and what you're doing. I'm like, wow, you know, Tom's doing what he's really interested, what he's passionate about, and he's figuring out how to to to to do this, have a family business, and and and also, you know, can live anywhere you want. You know, you live way out there and you're not too far from Yellowstone. You said eighty miles from Yellowstone.
Mhmm. And, you know, when you know, you worked at this many years, but, you know, was it your intention to also spread, like, out your your, you know, what's possible to do in your life to folks, you know, following their passions and whatnot?
Well, I was very much interested in well, to me to me, there's there's a wilderness survival skills but there's also the survival skills that we do every day. Yeah. It's really the same thing that we're working to, you know, keep a roof over our heads and keep the place warm and so forth. And so, that was an interest as well as necessity as I became an adult that had to address some of those things. And I was also very interested in sustainability and wondering, you know, I had become ecologically aware at an early age. So I was, you know, wanting to find out, well, is it possible to, you know, make a living and to meet one's needs in a way that's environmentally friendly and is, you know, and can it be more profitable to do so?
And so had how how to do that and not much experience which was helpful because, you know, we were sort of ignorance of what wasn't possible and so we just went and did things.
And so it never really occurred to me that I had to have, you know, a steady job to be able to, you know, buy, to be able to build a house or, you know, I didn't have to have money or it never really occurred to me that I had to have money or a steady job or anything like that to to go out and follow our dreams. And so we, bought a little piece of property and moved into a a tent and started building our house and, didn't really know what we were doing, but, we learned as we went and, kept our expenses really low.
And not having any money made it possible to build a house that didn't cost very much.
Mhmm. And and that actually turned out to be sort of our our path to freedom because, you know, we've never had a mortgage payment, and so we never really the fact that we didn't need work, not that we could follow our dreams. And you know, for myself, I was pursuing a path as a writer, and well, you know how it goes with writing. It's not necessarily profitable when you're starting out. So I spent many years probably making a dollar an hour for my time and before before the business really took off. Mhmm. And, you know, my writing became successful.
Because because he it's really interesting because being in learning about the Internet and marketing and everything, you know, and you're always listening to I'm always listening to see what people are, you know, doing and and, you know, they come out with various systems of marketing and making money online and all.
And and, there's and there oh, the the people report back. Oh, these are the success stories that I heard back from people using my system. You know? I'm wondering, like, you know, you wrote that book directing the direct direct pointing to Real Wealth. Right?
Mhmm.
And, it was Thomas j Elphill's field guide to money. And I'm wondering, like, have you heard back, like, stories in the in in in in the types of folks interested in what we do, like, coming back and saying, yeah, Tom. You know, I I did your followed your program and, gosh, you know, I'm really making it, you know, as far as their lifestyle.
I I do hear back and, you know, on all of my books, I hear back things from people and, that oh, it's always a feel good thing to know. Oh, wow. People are actually reading that and getting something from it. And so, like in the case of my Living Homes book, when people send me pictures of houses that they built from reading my book, I said, wow, that's pretty amazing. And, Wow. And then as far as the direct pointing, probably my favorite one is the, the school teacher who who wrote to me and said how he was deeply in debt and he read my book and he moved into a chicken house and he paid off all of his debts because he had no expenses. And then he was free to pursue his dreams and, I actually heard back from him not too long ago and he's over in Thailand, I think, teaching right now.
But that was his path to freedom was to move into a chicken coop and to think, well, I wasn't really what I imagined, you know, helping people.
Yeah. You gotta you gotta do like a late night infomercial like Tom Elpils, a guy, the field guide to, you know, and have the guy win his chicken.
You too can pay your debts off.
Okay. Yeah.
It's be great. But it is excellent book, by the way.
You know Oh, thank you.
I really got a lot out of that and a and gosh, participating in nature. There's living homes. And the guys, there was any way that I can turn my, like, suburban, my cookie cutter rectangular box suburban house into a living home? I mean, there is I never really looked deep into the living homes book. Is there is there like, you know, I'm just gonna I know I I have these questions to ask you, but now I got to your ear. I'm just like, hey.
So so is it just kind of houses from this the ground up or is it can you convert houses too that kind of, Oh, well, the book is definitely oriented towards building stone log and straw bale houses.
Oh, okay.
Making them as efficient as you want them to perform on the budget that you have. Mhmm. And with, with, well, with all of my books, I tend to write a little bit of this is what we've learned and this is what I would do next time.
Mhmm.
And then, of course, when I reprint the book, they add to it again. So, we've been building an intern house for our Green University program and testing out some of the ideas in living homes. And one of the key things that we're working towards is making a house that hopefully will not need either fossil fuels or firewood to keep it warm in the winter, which is of course the kind of challenge in Montana.
But, you know, we're trying to do that with some very simple ideas as far as going with super insulation, which in this case is all free off of junk file at the factory. And then we have airlocks on all the doors so that instead of having one flimsy little door between the inside and the outside, you're always going through two and of course having the passive solar and then being able to run some solar hot water through the floor.
So, things like that to is what we're testing out at the moment with the living homes process. And as far as remodeling, it's not really geared toward that, but you could certainly apply that and we've been we do energy efficiency projects on our bookstore, which is a hundred year old building every year.
Yeah. That looks really cool. Granny store.
Mhmm.
Yeah. It's great. Wish you can visit virtually at granny store dot com. That's really great. I was I'm really thankful that you take all of these this hard one knowledge that you and all your experimentations through life and all the things you're curious about and turning them into books and DVDs for the rest of us, you know, and helps them.
It's been it's awesome.
So, you know, we've both been, involved in, years in environmental education, you know, and I and I and I think that you'd agree that, maybe you won't agree, but maybe see, I I shouldn't say things like that now, but may maybe you'll agree that, that, often you see people kind of interested in one particular kind of skill to begin with. You know, they might be passionate about birding or tracking or maybe survival skill. Like, I call it, like, the gateway skill. You know?
So, do you do you, do you see this in people? Like, It seems to be plants and herbs, you know, that is a big one. It seems to be plants and herbs, you know, that is a big one.
Sure.
Through our Green University program, which is our adult program, we have people that often come for one thing and then end up finding that they were actually more interested in something else. So it might come specifically to learn the primitive survival skills or to learn botany, but then they'll find that they'll get excited about something like house building or consciousness, you know, it's a very, very informal program and it kinda goes wherever the interests go. And Wow. So, you know, people tend to find something that they're not necessarily looking for.
That sounds like an awesome program, the Green University program. Wow.
I would like to do that. Can I move to you know you know what time I talk to, like, really interesting people like yourself, like, every month and every month? I'm like, I wanna do your I could spend my whole life just going around and doing.
But, but anyway, but since we have you here and and of course this is our mentor, so I wanna, at least for now in the conversation, lean a little more towards plants here as the as the thing to talk about. And as you can imagine, like, on our site, and probably maybe in your students is is as well when they're starting out if it's if it's a newer thing to them. You see kind of a, a bit of overwhelm when a person begins, kind of a blank stare when you start talking to them about plants. You know, they're there because they really wanna learn, but it's like they're like, oh my god.
And you can see their kind of brain is calculating on how they can kinda, you know, make it simpler to learn or put a box around it or you know what I mean? You know? Because there's because there's because it's, and and I find that a a lot of that, I I was finding, you know, when I was running the Kamana program, before I kinda went out to try to remedy this very thing, that, it would sometimes that would that would drive that overwhelm would drive some people away, you know. Mhmm.
And, so anyway, I, on on herb mentor dot com, I the members, they they can do the the plants path part of the Kamanu program, you know. And but we were designing our course in ninety seven, that course in nineteen ninety seven.
We got to the plan section and and we just kinda deflated, you know, all this, you know, John Young and myself and a couple of the people writing it. And because, you know, it teaches various elements of the natural world, you know, journaling, using field guides, learning about relationships between species and families, you know, just real enough, you know, enough of the talk taxonomy stuff just to to make it to make the field guides more alive and and all. And, you know, all the stuff we hated in biology class because we we found no use for it, but now we now we kinda find it fun, you know.
And, and, know, it's it's easy. It's much easier, all this stuff for mammals and birds, because a lot of the times, you know, it's located in one field guide and there's not just so much information because of plants and trees. You're like, every ecosystem, all those plants and trees, it's like people just get, like, paralyzed in a way. So we were having people, you know, go to the library and find lists and this and that.
And and it was really kind of a complicated part of the Kamanu program that we're like, this is just too complicated.
And then what should arrive in the mail that very week but a review copy of Botany in a Day and we just kinda, you know, thank the heavens.
Okay. Well, it's interesting to hear.
You know, because it's helped so many people because we immediately made it the, you know, the required book for that section. I was just like, here's the answer right here. This is gonna make our job a lot easier.
So, you know, what, what what folks might wanna know listening here is, what was it that drove you to write that book and it's probably something similar to what I'm talking about here that right?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, I always thought it was kind of funny because a lot of people look at the book and they assume that, you know, I work in some botany lab and wear a white coat and, you know, all my hair is gray from doing this all my life. But no, it was more the fact that I didn't know anything about botany and, you know, being young and kind of naive and not knowing what couldn't be done, I just thought, you know, I'm gonna write a book about botany. I'm gonna call it Botany in a Day and make an easier way of learning plant identification. And of course, I had no idea how to go about doing that, but I think it was just something I intuited or felt that, you know, I needed to go do that.
And anyway, we had our initial business, Holotab Outdoor Primitive School, we were doing some herb classes, had an herbalist here that was taking us around in the woods looking at plants.
And I noticed some patterns to the way that she talked about plants that, in particular, we have a lot of members of the rose family here and she would point out how all of these plants have five petals and most of them have numerous stamens and they tend to have similar medicinal properties, they're astringent and it's good for tightening up tissues.
And so, I thought that was interesting because I'd never really heard of these patterns before and although I'd seen the family names in my field guides, it didn't mean anything to me. And so after listening to her refer to these patterns for several of the families, it kind of became a quest to learn all of those and to, you know, to write it down because I hadn't seen that in any of the books.
Right.
And so, you know, I've never taken a botany class and I learned my initial plant identification with my grandmother.
You know, we go out and pick some flowers and bring them back and I just page through the color photos in a book trying to match up the flowers to to the pictures.
And, you know, being a kid, I had all the time in the world. I was very nontechnical, I didn't know any plant terms, just, you know, really looking at the pictures and seeing if they matched.
And so, even though I had names for a lot of the plants and had read what they were, what their uses were, I had really never even looked at the plants in a way and didn't, and I realized when I got into the patterns thing that I really didn't know anything about plants but there was a lot more to this.
And so, this, you know, led to the whole botany in a day thing is learning to understand those patterns.
And it's kind of exciting because, you know, you can, it doesn't matter where you are, you can be in Siberia and come across some flower that you've never seen before. And if you know these patterns that are covered in Botany in a day, you can know immediately something about that plant, who it's related to, and even make a reasonable guess as to its uses based on who it's related to. And so, suddenly, the names aren't so important. You know, we have this thing that we think we know something if we have a name for it, but it's just an arbitrary tag that we use and it doesn't mean we actually know anything about it. And so, it's getting into the patterns, it really becomes a tool that when you come to a plant, you might not know its name but you might know what you can use it for. And that's that's pretty exciting. I never get tired of, experiencing that.
Yeah. It it's revolutionized, you know, how I look at plants. I mean, I find that that having a tool like this just makes it gosh. It's almost like you don't feel like you need to know every plant that's out there because any plant you come across, you can have a gateway into immediately figuring out where you can look it up and find it out if you need to.
Mhmm.
You know?
Exactly.
So can you give me give us example for those, you know, if not because, one of my one of my many reasons of wanting to have you on here is that, I I I get folks on on this site.
They want they wanna know about herbs and remedies and they wanna make stuff and they, of course, are interested in plants but I I it there's it's trying to do what I can to get people wanting to learn all the plants that are growing in the wild right outside their door. I mean, that's my objective.
Sure.
So, and so anyway, it means possible. And so being that they're such as friendly resource And so an example, you're going out and you don't know, you know, you don't know what a certain plant is and and and how can you use your book to discover something about it?
Okay. There's two aspects to that. The first one is learning the most common patterns.
And when I first wrote the book, I did a lot of plant walks, often just two hour plant walks, get a group of people together and we go look at some flowers and introduce some of these patterns and then instead of, you know, you know, instead of coming to each plant and I tell them what it is, we'd be coming to it and then I'd ask them what it was. And it just kind of see people get really excited about, you know, having a tool that they can use like that.
So a number of families that are very important to learn first that way. And then once you know those, you'll see them everywhere you go and you'll be able to recognize them immediately.
And that sort of gives you a foundation to work from. And then with the lesser known families, there's keys in the book that you can go through that are very simple, that, you know, the whole book is written from the perspective of somebody who is not trained in botany, you know, not, didn't have years and years of schooling in this, so it's written from the perspective with the questions in mind from a person who doesn't know botany because I didn't know it when I started the project. And so, you know, it was sort of my quest to learn all this and then it became, you know, by doing it that way, it actually became a tool that's used in universities nationwide now as a textbook because it really approaches it from the perspective of the student.
And anyway, there's so there's these core families and I always thought it was exciting doing these plant walks because, you know, see the light come on in people's eyes and they're nodding their heads up and down, you know, as they as this clicks together in a way that makes sense to them.
And so then, sort of incorporated that plant walk into the more recent editions of Botany in a Day. There's a tutorial that's in the front, has something that's very close to what we do on our plant walks.
I gotta get that upgraded copy then.
I'm gonna order that.
And then, and then we took it to the next step which was, you know, how can we teach this to children?
And so took out, kind of stripped it down to some of the core elements and put it in story form in this chandelier's quest, the botany adventure for kids ages nine to ninety nine. So it makes it kind of a friendly story.
And then to sort of integrate, you know, there's the big concern is the in one ear, out the other thing. And to really integrate these principles, we developed the card game, the chandelier's quest patterns and plants card game.
And this is fun. I use card game with kids and adults and it's really fun because you get to practice your identification skills, you learn the pattern and then you play games. We typically start out with just a simple memory game. So, like memory, you turn up one card and, you know, you have a flower and you turn up another card and what you're looking for is not two identical flowers but any two flowers from the same family.
And so, you do this pattern matching and so you turn up a card, you name the family, you turn up another card, then name the family, you know, and if they're the same, of course, you get those. And then we have a bunch of other games like Wildflower Rummy and Crazy Wildflowers, Slap Flower, as well as we have sort of an original game. All of these have their spin off for the wildflowers, but we also have a totally original game, I would call Sean Leer's Harvest and in the card game, you go out and you collect things from each of these families.
So, they're a lot of fun for kids and adults and it just cements the, it cements those basic patterns in very quickly.
And, yeah, also an example, like, for example, when I go out and I and I see something opposite branching square stems as that certain kind of flower, I know it's the mint family.
At least I know there's not gonna be any poisonous in there. But if I see something with lacy leaves, alternate branching with a humble flowers, and I think that's in the carrot family, then I if I don't know what it is, then I should just research it first, you know, before I know because it could be poisonous.
So Yeah.
That's exactly right. But there's some families like say, the mustard family, it has four petals and they have six stamens, four tall, two short, and if you see that, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can eat that plant. There's three thousand of them. So, with that much information, if you can remember that much information, four petals, six stamens with four Tall, two Short, anywhere in the excuse me anywhere in the world that you see that pattern, you've just identified an edible plant.
And so that, you know, that works that right there, you've learned three thousand edible plants, whereas there's other families like the parsley family or what you refer to as the carrot family, then it has the compound umbels, like an umbrella, and at the end of each little spoke, there's another little umbrella.
And when you see that, it's really a warning that, you know, hey, you need to need to know absolutely what you're dealing with here. Mhmm. Because there are some edible plants in the family, but there's also some of the deadliest plants, including water hemlock, the deadliest plant in North America, and poison hemlock.
So, you know, if you have to be very careful that you know which specific plants that you're dealing with there before you go sampling things. And so, that's really the pattern there helps you know right away that okay, you gotta be more careful on this one.
And not just be one hundred percent sure of what you've identified. You also have to be right. And that's one thing a lot of people don't realize is that there's a tendency, it doesn't matter whether you're in the wilderness looking at a topographic map trying to figure out where you're at or whether you're holding a flower and you're trying to identify it in a book. If your goal is to find an answer, you'll find that answer whether it's right or wrong. And so, you know, people have many people have died thinking they found a wild carrot, when in fact, they had found water hemlock or or poison hemlock.
So the patterns tell you that, okay, here's the family where you need to pay extra attention and, you know, make sure that you've got it right.
Part of that is that it doesn't matter what we learn, it could be learning, you know, if you're learning algebra, there's only one way you can do that and that's to build up a neural network to process it that, you know, you're starting with some basic material and it's all, at first might be overwhelming, but you learn the bits and pieces and then you start to wire a neural network to process algebra until you can do it. And plant identification is is the same way, is that when you start out, all these plants look kind of green and so there's the risk of mixing up with plants like a wild carrot with a water hemlock.
But as you develop that neural network, you start finding out that, oh wow, these plants actually look very different, you know, the more that you grow that neural network. So, what I advise people to do is, you know, kind of stay away from those parsley family plants at first, identify them but don't use them. And then, you know, with other families like the mustards or the mint, you know, identify those, use those and then as you develop your neural net and for identifying green things, then you can go into the parsleys with more confidence and accuracy you know, to to make sure you've got the right ones.
You know, I we've, taught it through wilderness awareness over the years that caught the the the wall of green where it's just like everything just looks like one big wall of green.
And then you start to, you know and, like, I was just teaching at the residential program yesterday and, talking about how we slowly develop relationships. Kinda it's not too different than meeting people, and this is what's so cool about this. It's, you know, I talk about how, you know, you you might learn the names of a bunch of plants like learning the names of a bunch people at a party, but you're only gonna really establish relationships with a handful of them, those, people as you would even plants, you know, that you get to know deeper. But what's cool is that even in people, you can see similar traits in their family. So you can actually learn a lot from learn knowing other people in their family. You know? So it's it's great.
So and what what people might be interested in knowing too out there is, what I really appreciate too in bonding you today at least what what addition are you up to now? I mean, I have the third here.
I don't even know where you're up to.
Oh, third. Oh, wow. That's way back. Yeah. We have the, the fifth, which is very different.
Tells you tell tells you how long I've been using it.
Okay.
I am gonna order it. I yeah.
But but you go over, what's great is I I just love, the whole I'm sure you get this in the current edition, but in the beginning, how you kinda really, in a nutshell, go over, make, you know, the the all of the plants. Like, you know, you're going showing all the the the the kingdoms and and and and everything and and the different kinds all the way to the the mosses, algaes, and and everything and, the ancient plants conifers and, you know, just just showing their, place in the overall scheme of things like the percentage of flowering plants to the percentage of of of of of the, the the the conifers, like the naked seed division and the divisions, you know, and and then, like, you know, and which is really helpful to kinda get the the scope of of, you know, the the plant kingdom in general before you kinda move on to the family level. So it's almost like you did this quick introduction before you move on and and get to the to the families.
Sure. Botany or plant classification is very much a filing system. And a lot of times it's introduced instead of looking at instead of starting on the outside of the filing cabinet, you tend to just pick up one file out of the inside at random and, you know, study that file and then you put it back and sort of give another one at random and not really have a context to put them in. And so, that's really what I've tried to do in Botany and Bay is that, say, okay, here's the whole filing cabinet and there's this drawer and there's this drawer and there's this drawer and then there's these dividers and then you get down in here and you have these folders and each folder is a family and there's a hundred of them across the northern latitudes And so you've got a hundred different folders to look in to find the answer, you know, that it's going to be in one of those.
And so that just greatly simplifies it for that instead of in the world there's about three hundred thousand species of plants and then there's about three hundred families which in the northern latitudes basically the frost belt of our country and pretty much the same families in the frost belts around the globe. There's about one hundred families of plants. And so, there's one hundred patterns and if you know those patterns really need to know a lot less than that too for most of the plants, there's a few major families and then a lot of obscure ones. But so, you know, one hundred different patterns that'll teach you, you know, that'll help you identify just about anything you run into anywhere in the northern latitudes wherever you have cold winters.
And this, of course, also applies farther south as well. There just happens to be additional families, some of which are covered in the book and some that are not. But I've had people using botany in the Bay in Australia and Africa and South America, so, you know, people have found it to be useful all over. In fact, I thought it was kind of funny, if part of the identification I have described for one particular family that the flowers are always these various colors but never yellow and I got a message from South Africa a few weeks ago that their species has yellow flowers.
There's always an exception to the rule, isn't there?
I guess I gotta go back and, you know, make that little modification. But, people are constantly sending me notes like that, and so I continuously upgrade the book and incorporate those kind of things.
It's like if we we could say that every plant with opposite branching and square stems was a mint if there wasn't if it wasn't for nettles.
Alright. Yeah. I mean, fig figworts, there's a handful of figworts that look like that too.
As well. Yeah. See, there's always those.
That's that's great. So exactly. So it's those it's having those filing card that that's such so great because that's really how our our brains are patterned to learn in this culture. So it's matching up a way of learning that that that and then and then I tell folks that, you know, and then it's the the file cards that you actually remember are the ones you actually go ahead and take or process or eat or make medicine or do something with, you know, unless they're the poisonous ones.
And there's Yeah. Not a whole lot of poisonous ones. They're pretty easy to remember, easy to remember, but when it comes to, you know, the other ones. But which leads me to, also really liking how it's very helpful to see that with properties of plants, that another thing that can make herbal books overwhelming is when people go and they and they say, okay. Through this condition, you can use one of these twelve herbs. And if you're starting from that level and not and it's almost like you don't know why you're using those herbs. Let's say you need a a a mucilaginous plant for a sore throat, and it lists all these plants, right, for for its demultant qualities.
Or maybe something for a coffer and expector and qualities and it has all these plants and and you're not quite getting why. And but if you know some basics just first about properties of plants, you can often then look to find a multitude of plants that might be growing even in your area that aren't even in that book that have those qualities. So do you do you have anything you wanted to, the examples or wanted to add to that? Because that was really helpful for me too.
Just kinda made it a lot simpler learning plants, identifying them in books and then trying to memorize the uses, it's, there wasn't any rhyme or reason to it.
It's, you know, this is used for this and this and this and this, but it wouldn't say why or what about the plant that made it useful for that or the fact that the other ones that are related to it had the same uses.
And now, like sometimes on my plant walks, I'll bring along herb books that are organized like that so I can show my class how, you know, here's these different plants from the same family and they all, you could pretty much cut and paste the uses from one to the other. Mhmm. And it's like, you know, instead of trying to memorize those from each plant, it's just so much simpler if you can memorize it for the whole group, the whole family together, but this is the patterns that they tend to have.
So, for example, the mint family plants have volatile oils that is they're aromatic. So you've got these volatile properties that if you brush against the mints, you can smell the aroma in the air, those three properties. And so it's no coincidence then that, that the mint family, if you look in your spice cabinet at home, there's about half of the spices come from the mint family.
Exactly.
I think basil and thyme and oregano and marjoram and a whole bunch of them.
But it comes from the mint family, they're all highly aromatic spicy plants.
And so they have similar properties, they have similar uses and medicinally, that would be that they tend to be diaphoretic, that is they they make you, they tend to make you sweat. So, and that's useful, say, if you have a cold or you're trying to, and you know, you've got a fever and you need to break that fever.
Fever is sort of like the body's way of cooking microorganisms and once you have killed them, then the body cools back down.
So you can sort of break a fever with, by having kind of a spicy tea, something perhaps in the mint family Right.
That, is gonna make you sweat, gonna warm you up all over and then and break that fever. So you can kind of sum up the uses of entire families of plants sometimes that way. And then find that the similar properties will be common to other aromatic families as well. And so, you know, you sort of learn that, okay, the mints have this property, but so do some of the medicinal members of the parsley family are very similar.
And other aromatic plants also, like yarrow, some of those properties as well.
Right. So then you're looking at the the, volatile oils in in there. And then and then things like, oh, just so many constituents when you're looking either tannic acids, seeing about helping connective tissues.
And a lot of woody plants just have tannic acid in it, you know, like, that are helpful.
You know, and it and it goes on and on. It's just, it's it's just really great. I just I just I read through it again the other night just as a refresher. I was just like, oh, yeah.
I need to look through this again. I remember how, you know, helpful that was. Especially flavonoids, you know, talking about all the fads and antioxidants, you know. Like, you're like, oh, buy our, you know, MLM vitamin package because it has antioxidants, and it's gonna help you be cancer preventative.
And then and then, you know, you look down here, there's a, that that pretty much, you know, any I mean, there there are tons and tons of of plants that fruits and vegetables and everything that have these flavonoids and antioxidants and you don't necessarily need that fancy vitamin. Right?
I mean Oh, sure.
Yeah.
But, one one there's some really great stuff too when you're reading through here and you're learning that I had a lot of moments.
Like, like, I always wonder why I had a weird I could only eat so many cashews or I I can only eat, like, a mango or something and I would get this kinda weird twinge and, like, sensation in my mouth that You must you must be allergic to poison ivy.
I am. And I did not notice I did not that made sense. And now, I when I see a bowl of cashews, I don't touch them because when I was a kid, boy, you think I'd have some kinda by now, I'd be immune or something with the amount of times I had it when I was a kid.
I mean, I I remember time being out of school for a month with my face puffed out and everything Oh, wow.
And and everything because I had the worst, reaction. But when I saw that, I, you know, I had a trip to Hawaii a couple weeks years ago, and I didn't I didn't eat any mangoes.
Okay. Yeah. Good plan. A friend of mine, is, yeah, just a kind of allergic reaction you described poison ivy that goes on for weeks and she she does react to mangoes.
Not so much eating them but getting the juice around the outside of her mouth, she breaks out.
Mhmm.
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so when I saw that, I was like, That's why. It all makes sense now, you know.
And it goes on and on. I mean, you read all the little, little, you know, paragraph or two in the beginning of, all of the different families, and then you start to see all these connections. And and you also really start to see the connections. It it helped me to see, like, plants are plants.
You know? Like, whether we categorize them as vegetables or herbs or spices or or whatever. We have all these little categorizations that, oh, it's a vegetable. It can't be even a medicinal plant, you know, and and and then this this definitely takes all those labels away and just says, nope.
These everything here is a plant and and these are the relationships between them. And it's good. It's it's great. So I just, you know, wanted to give you that, you know, at least how what what it's what it's done for me in my learning and and I'm sure That's great.
And I'm sure it can do a lot for other people's as well, of course.
And, you know, when I've traveled to different places, I had a little harder time in in Hawaii, but when I'm in the northern areas, you know, going back east to where I'm from in New Jersey or, traveling around there, It was easier to get reacquainted with the plants that I used to know anyway. You know? I'm I'm really rusty on, like, wild carrots, queen anne's lace, and poison hemlocks and whatnot because I live in such a wet area in Western Washington. We don't they don't just grow everywhere like they do on there.
You know? So I was like, oh, yeah. Which one's which? I'm like, alright. I'm not gonna mess with it.
So let's see.
So anyway, that for folks out there definitely botany in a day.
If you're planning on doing the the plants path on the of the command section within Urbinter, you can, it's, you will use this book to its fullest. I mean, literally going through and journaling. I mean, sometimes you need a little extra nudge to actually get you through to to to use something completely. And I was really thankful for that because it it helped me, like, actually go through, like, every single family I've listed in here and journal it, you know, and and Mhmm. It kinda put and it put my whole all of the plants in my ecosystem into perspective. Because after I did that, then I journaled all of the species.
I listed all the species that are in my area and then fit into what family and then, you know, took about fifty of those and journal those, and then which really helped me kinda get a good lay of the land and and, you know, and it's it was excellent. And, so you did talk a bit about Shunlei's quest, and I was gonna ask you about that too in the cards as well. And and, I just wanna give you the feedback there that, yeah, it's been great. I mean, not just for my own learning, but with the kids too, you know, and they so they see the different different islands goes to. And and, so what what a bit about that? How do you have that organized? Like, this is a great storybook to Sholayah as she goes to, you wanna talk a little bit about that?
Sure, sure. It's, the world that Shandlai lives in is a place where time is water that sort of in the creation of the world, it was decided to make time pass as water, so if all of the falling rains mark the passage of time.
And so then as sort of the scheme of evolution, if you look at like a diagram of an evolutionary tree, you've got it in like the central trunk and then it branches out to all these different plant families.
And if you were to take and make a cross section in the tree across all those branches, then you have what looks like islands, and then a little, all those branches cut off become little islands. And so we have this world where this evolutionary tree is growing. This is kind of a network of islands that are connected together under the ocean of time that just keeps getting deeper and deeper.
And so, in this world that Shania lives in, she is on this quest to learn about the plant families. And it just so happens that each family of plants lives on a different island here because of the way that they're all rooted together, how they have diverged away from each other over time as these separate branches that became separate islands.
And so, she goes to the islands and each island has a guardian that, you know, some are nice and some tester and she learns the basic patterns for identification and the uses of these particular families, which covers really the most major important families, about forty five thousand species of plants that are covered in the eight families that are in the book. And so it's kind of a fun way to get an overview, get the, kind of get a sense of the story of the plants, the whole background story and sort of a metaphorical sense in the story, as well as the details on know, how do you identify these patterns, what do these families tend to be used for. And then of course, if you play the card game, then you get to actually put those skills to the test in some, really fun games.
And, and I've gone through it, read it through. And, you know, and and any parents out there with with kids that you read to, you know, that they don't mind hearing the same book over and over again.
So it's a great one if you're gonna be reading a book over and over again to them. And and it starts to pattern your kids on this and and as well, you know. And so when you walk outside with them in places, you can say, hey, what what island do you think this plant would be on?
And, Oh, yeah.
And kids pick that kids pick that up amazingly quickly. And, you know, and you might find if you're playing the card game with your kids that, you know, they might be ahead of you and recognizing these family patterns, they just absorb it so quickly.
Exactly, exactly.
So And we actually, on our website, we have, you know, of course, we sell all of these things on our website, but we also have discounts if you buy them together that for the Shonlei's Quest book with the card game plus the bot in a day, you can save ten dollars on the whole the package of the three books together.
And another great thing I noticed, a discount you had on your I wanted to ask you about next, talk to you about next, was your survival DVDs because, yeah, I I really like those. They're great. They're the so so they basically they they're they're the first one is three three days at the river with nothing but our bare hands, and it's you and your daughter going out and and, just going out with, well, with your bare hands and a video camera.
Yeah. Pretty much.
Yeah. That was that was fun.
We thought, you know, to make the first video in the series, we really needed to do it with nothing but the bare hands. So, yeah, we didn't have any knives, no matches, no sleeping bag or tent or anything like that. And we just went out for three days on a ranch along the river and we just documented all of the skills to meet our basic needs. So, you know, we went out, we made stone tools and we used those to make a bow drill set and start a fire and we built a shelter and then we went looking for food and got some plant foods and killed a porcupine and just documented the whole experience.
And I went into it with this kind of super serious mood that, you know, or sort of a rigid vision of, you know, I gotta make this real professional presentation that want everything to come off, you know, just so.
And what I ended up coming up with was even better really.
It's kind of just such a human element to it.
Definitely.
That, my daughter was thirteen years old when we filmed that. And, you know, she's hungry and tired at times and it's very homespun and that actually sort of became the sort of the formula, I guess, if you will, for the series that we try to make it not just informational, but also kind of fun that people can connect with is, you know, here's a couple of ordinary people going out and doing this.
And I actually, I've heard from a lot of families that have young kids that like to watch these videos over and over again, you know, six years old or so.
And kids just wanna see these again and again. The adults, love them and watch them over and over and they've been played at even a number of schools, like, after school program type things.
And and I love I just love the the interaction between you and your daughter at the end when you're eating your meal out of the cottonwood.
And you're at the chopsticks and and she's just like, dad, I just wanna go to McDonald's. And you're just like looking at it like, it's really good.
Yeah.
But I bring that up because in every one of those videos, you can see how you use, how you harvest some wild plants, which is great. Mhmm. Going out there and get some in the first video, you're getting some burdock and nettles and and really great. So I just wanted to bring those up too, like all the various plant, you know, related resources that you come up with and milkweed and and others. So, that that is great.
So let's see where we're at here. Oh, looks like we're, about to almost out of time. But but, you know, I I, let's see here. See what I wanted to do here. Because this is also very professional production as you can tell.
And I you know, your your your ways of doing stuff and and everything has been a real inspiration to the way that our family does our runs our our media.
It's just way more. And people connect with it a lot more, you know, because it's like, let's just not let's just be ourselves, you know. Yeah. So, I was wondering here since we had a few minutes here.
I know you, came out with your your latest book, and and I I just wanna give you a, you know, a chance, of course, to talk about that if you if you if you'd like to, the road map to reality. And and I know there's a lot in there, but I mean, mean, what what is what what had you put that together? Because it seems like you've gone through things in your life and you've observed things or you've done things hands on and you and you're really wanting to share with people, like, you know, things you've discovered living out there out in the, you know, middle of Montana and and things you discovered about the world and how we can move forward.
And and what do you what is is is that kind of what, what was this book?
What inspired this book? Sure. Okay. Well, in some ways it really has some ties to botany in a day because it's really about looking at patterns and that's, instead of looking at patterns of how, you know, among plants, it's really looking at patterns in the way that we think. And so it's really been a fascinating process, one that is you know, unfolded over quite a number of years.
And in some ways, it's really a quest to find out. It's really to find out what reality is. And I thought it was interesting. Just a couple of days ago, I saw this little article saying how a hundred years ago, pink was considered a man's color, a manly color because it's, you know, sort of intense and vibrant, whereas blue is a lady's color because it's, you know, kind of a fair color.
Mhmm. And now, of course, it's, those roles are reversed and, you know, people that are looking for clothes for their daughters walk into the store and everything is pink pink and they can't find anything that isn't. And so, you know, it's sort of this cultural bias that you might think that, you know, you would expect that we're so conditioned to thinking of pink as a girl color and blue as a guy color that you would think that it's some genetic tenant leaning or something, but it's totally cultural. And so the, you know, the question then gets to be is, if we sort out all the cultural distortions, what, you know, what is actually real because our perceptions are so distorted.
And so one of the things that comes out of this, it's very interesting, is that sort of the link to technology that if you look at Stone Age technology that it is linked to particular sizes of groups that is, you know, the groups of people, you don't have hunter gatherer bands with ten million people in them, you know, that hunter gatherer band is going to be very small and so that sort of the technology that people use for production dictates the size of the groups and then that in turn connects to how they are socially and politically organized and ultimately connects to their perception of reality. In other words, how does the world work?
And so, you can look at that Stone Age, Stone Age cultures and see a particular pattern, a broad pattern that you'll see it again and again in the way cultures express their views of reality. And then if you move to an tilt the fields and plant the seed to grow crops, that it's linked to another very specific and predictable way of perceiving the world that affects everything from the way parents raise their children to the way the education philosophies, to, the way governments carry out policies.
And so we can look at these, patterns as we go through the technologies to, what we call industrial technology and informational technology, and even begin to speculate a little bit with changing technologies, how that influences the way people will see, will perceive reality in the future.
And it's a very helpful tool because a lot of times what people butt heads against, you know, with each other is when, just to give an example would be sort of a creationism versus evolution debate. Mhmm. And, you know, you hear these, you'll hear either side say that the other is not being logical about, you know, how they're arriving at conclusions.
But from the inside, they're both being logical.
It's a different type of logic. And so as you begin to understand these patterns, you'll actually hear it, you know, because first of all, we are a society in transition and so, you know, we always are. And so, if, say, you go back to the 1850s, Thoreau's time, Henry David Thoreau, it was our roots at that time, even though it was very much an agricultural society, are there's still enough of sort of our Stone Age background lingering there that, which is associated with a very magical interpretation of reality, that it was a common belief for people, for Americans that believed that while most plants grew from seeds, it was there were plants that inexplicably came up where there weren't any others around and that, you know, that it was still believed that plants could magically sprout from nothing.
That was a popular belief among American citizens.
And so, Thoreau, who was sort of more of a scientifically oriented, had wrote a book on the dispersal of seeds which was eventually published under the title, Faith in a Seed. And he was showing how seeds could get around, you know, that, you know, hey, this isn't magic, but these things, you know, actually come from things. And so, you know, it's kind of an example of going from what I call the sort of magical thinking.
And then, in agricultural societies tend to be have more mythical explanations for things that things, you know, based in principles and, and sort of like here's the story and let's make the reality fit the story. So there, it doesn't matter whether it's biblical, I mean, whether it's creationism or, Islam Islamic fundamentalists that tend to sort of look for, read the version that they have in the Bible or the Quran and then go out and look in nature and make what they see fit with the story they see. And so you can begin to see these kinds of things when people are talking and realize sort of where their background is, that you can kinda understand where they're coming from and maybe, we'll work around some of those things.
One of my particular favorites is sort of at the beginning of the industrial age, the prior to trains, people had never really moved faster than animal power that, you know, however fast they could go on a horse, let's say, it's sort of a, you know, the top speed. And so when trains first came into existence and they could cross England at thirty miles an hour, they They described it as the annihilation of time and space because, their country shrunk and you could get to places in a third a third the amount of time. Now, one of the interesting things out of that is that as trains got faster and faster, you know, you'd think that people would appreciate this and like being able to get to their destination more quickly, But they actually found it tedious and boring and started reading trains rather than, you know, really paying attention to what's going outside.
And what happened was a shift in perspective because for people that were, when you were traveling in a buggy, going along in the bumpy roads, you got the smell of the manure, you're in that sort of first person experience and you're connecting with, you know, whatever what's going on in every field, the farmers are working there, and sort of this whole story, this whole journey, you're, it's an experience from going from point a to point b. And what happened is when the train started picking up speed there, is that the foreground was too blurry. It just went by too fast. So what you have is this kind of a static background the And that changes things throughout our society.
So for example, if you go into your old time grocery stores, your very first person experiences, very intimate with all the products. And if you go into your grocery stores or your Walmarts today, you really what you're looking at is train tracks. You've got you've, you've got this train track running down the middle, the panoramic view of all this stuff, and you go sailing by it and get this kind of big picture deal.
Right.
And so, and it really changed our preferences as well because now people really couldn't stand the first person experience of, you know, we're so wired to it, we've grown up with this third person perspective or experience, so we can't really, it's hard to appreciate that, you know, okay, now we're going to do our yearly trip to town, the thirty miles. It's gonna take us all day to get there on bumpity bumpity bumpity bump and, you know, snow and horse manure and flies all the way there. People don't like that experience. They want to get there quickly.
And so, you know, these kinds of changes completely rewire the brain so that we see reality and experience it, the things in a completely new way.
Way. And so, it's in the book you'll find a sort of a quest and an adventure to unravel all this and sort of get a different perspective on what reality really is.
Wow, you tackle a lot in your book. That's great.
Oh, I have a have a book about everything.
So Yeah. It was a a challenge to write for also a fun project.
And I should also, you know, point out that when you're these books are not only written by you, they're self published. And you're and that's a whole another thing. And, and also, you know, on your own website and all folks are, wanting to pick up up on you today or Shonleo's quest or any any of the DVDs or cards, whatever that, you know, supporting the author directly is we always encourage that on our mentor radio. So simply go to hollow top dot com and, h a l l o w t o p dot com.
H o l l o w t o p dot com if that's not what I just said. And and, and, there's a good portal to all TOMS sites, including wildflowers and weeds dot com, which is off of there as well. You can link to, from holotop dot com. And there's a lot of extra resources for the bottom unit day reader photos and that sort of thing.
And I wanted to point that out too.
So Tom, thank you. I mean, I not only can't thank you enough for what you created in your books and resources. It's been a huge influence on me and my style of teaching and learning and everything. But I also wanna thank you for joining us today on our Mentor Radio.
Oh, well, thank you, John. I really appreciate the invites and, I had a good time.
Thanks. And we'll have you back at some point. And, and if you are ever in the Silver Star Montana area, not too far from the North Yellowstone part, you can visit actually visit the real granny store there.
So, and then just tell them tell tell them John sent you now.
So thanks again, Tom, and we'll see you we'll see you soon. Have a great day.
Okay. Thanks, John.
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