By Steve Chamberlain
Contributing Writer
I generally write about mineral topics or plant topics. This column consists of two stories about crossovers between minerals and plants.
American ginseng is a valuable native plant that grows in hardwood forests where the conditions of shade and moisture are appropriate. It is the ginseng root that is the valuable commodity, and most of it is exported to China.
In my mineral-collecting areas in northern New York, I don’t recall noticing a gingseng plant in the wild (because I really don’t recognize it), nor hearing anything about ginseng harvesting until just a few years ago. This is a secretive group, mostly because the locations of stands of ginseng are jealously kept secrets. The whole activity has the general aura of an illegal activity of some kind — harvesters only seem to have first names and don’t live anywhere in particular.
No one ever talks about what they are doing or where and when they are doing it. I don’t think anything shady is actually going on, it’s just the combination of the natural caution residents of this region have of strangers and the real need to protect one’s information. Some harvesters sell their roots undried for a lower price per weight; others dry them and sell them later at a higher price. My guess is that local harvesters sell their finds into a local network that funnels the ginseng to someone with the required export license for ginseng.
The crossover occurs when a mineral collector begins to hunt for ginseng and continues when a ginseng collector, who gets to know a mineral collector, becomes interested in minerals. Ginseng collectors are looking for mature plants with large roots. If the roots are ornate, they are more valuable. Those that look like people with arms and legs and a head are especially valuable. This sounds like the criteria for mineral collecting — undamaged crystals, larger crystals, etc.
The result of this crossover of interest to me is that very experienced mineral field collectors may explore different parts of the “wilderness” looking for ginseng than they might think to explore for mineral localities. Guess what? Several I know are finding new mineral localities while looking for plants. The reverse also happens. Several local collectors have asked me for detailed instructions to an obscure mineral locality, which might not have much left to collect, because someone mentioned that they recalled a big patch of ginseng there when they were collecting minerals years ago.
Thus far, several very interesting, previously unknown mineral localities have been discovered during ginseng hunts. I’m excited because some of them are in “blank” areas on the map, i.e. not close to any known mineral localities and thus off the beaten path for normal mineral collectors. This same kind of crossover used to occur when trapping for furs (almost extinct) and looking for minerals occurred together.
The second story involves direct interaction between mineral specimens and plants. Normally, a mineral collector might have to remove moss or lichens from a specimen found on the surface, or pick away a root here and there from pieces collected at the surface. Recently, a mineral-collecting friend found a gash vein in a road cut near Hailesboro. Normally, the minerals in such veins include calcite, dolomite, quartz, graphite, pyrite and goethite, and this gash vein had the typical species present.
Of interest, however, was one area where some large pieces of natural rust (goethite) had weathered loose and were in the dirt in the center of the vein. Once these were washed, they turned out to have exceptionally sharp cavities from the calcite crystals on which they formed. On the other side were pyrite crystals, now altered to goethite. The whole structure, however, was invested with lots of fine plant roots that ultimately had to be picked loose with tweezers (it took hours).
Why were they there? When pyrite alters to goethite, it release weakly acidic solutions, which is why the calcite was etched away. One can only surmise that the mineral-rich, mildly acidic solutions must have been favorable to some plant growing on the surface whose roots went wild branching through every nook and cranny of the specimen. Interesting. Crossover between minerals in the earth and plants with roots in the earth.
