An enduring panacea: a lucrative export for nearly three centuries, American ginseng--like its Asian cousin-continues to be a popular herbal remedy for a wide range of ailments.

• Author: Werner, Louis

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THE GINSENG PLANT is known by many names--"green gold," for its monetary value as an herbal medicine; "tiger of the plant world," for its elusiveness and rarity; "separated limbs" or garentoquen in the Iroquois language, for its resemblance to the human body; "man essence" in Chinese, for the Asian belief that it contains in concentrate everything man needs to stay healthy.

The Asian ginseng (Panax ginseng), whose root is more properly called a rhizome, has been known to Chinese herbalists for thousands of years as a cure-all--thus the name of its Latin genus Panax, based on the Greek word "panacea." Marco Polo mentioned its Chinese uses in tea and syrups (although he confused it with ginger root) and thus became the first in a long line of Westerners to sing its praises.

In northeastern North America, the Iroquois and other indigenous peoples made similar medicinal use of its close cousin, American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius)--either chewed or smoked--in poultices, infusions, and decoctions. It was a remedy for palsy and convulsions, headache and colic, open wounds and shortness of breath, feverish sweats and tape worms, poor appetite and eye sores, earache and obstructed labor, laziness and asthma, gonorrhea ... and everything else when other cures had failed.

Above the ground, ginseng is easily overlooked, growing ten to fifteen inches high, with five long-stalked compound leaves, modest greenish white flowers, and red berries in season. The authoritative Missouri Botanical Garden's plant guide judges it to have little ornamental interest--"not particularly showy."

Its roots, however, are another matter--"thick, aromatic, and swollen," according to the Botanical Garden. A fully developed and unbroken multi-lobed root, called a "hand" for its finger-like members, commands a top price in China and is given there as an expensive gift between lifelong friends.

Ginseng is in the Araliaceae family of the plant kingdom, which includes carrots, parsnips, and celery--all notable ingredients in Chinese cooking--as well as English ivy and "Siberian ginseng," which despite its misleading name is outside the Panax genus. True Asian ginseng was so valuable that the Qing Dynasty, also known as the Manchu, rose to power as its exclusive trader, using the proceeds to finance everything from its gunpowder production to its opium addiction.

Native Americans knew nothing of Asian ginseng lore, nor did the Chinese know that the Iroquois preferred theirs smoked or chewed, until the French Jesuit Father Joseph-Francois Lafitau, living in Sault Saint Louis near Montreal at the turn of the eighteenth century, happened upon an illustrated account of Asian ginseng written by a fellow Jesuit stationed in China. Lafitau had a theory that northeastern Asia and North America were closely related by climate and botany, and thus thought that whatever plants were found in one place would be found in the other.

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He was not far wrong. Geobotanists think the origin of the ginseng plant goes back tens of millions of years, to when the Northern Hemisphere's paleocontinent Laurasia broke apart to form northern Asia and North America, thereby separating what had once been a single ecological zone. Over time, the Asian and North American biospheres became fully isolated from one another, even though more than half of plant species in both zones are closely related.

Father Lafitau thus set out in search of a plant he had never seen, based on faith and a hunch about a hypothetical link between East and West. It was something akin to the idea that had both driven and confounded Columbus, and to one that has in fact proven to be correct--the Bering land bridge. Lafitau asked his informants among the Huron, Mohawk, and Abenaqui tribes about the plant, describing it to them and sketching its leaves and root shape based on the Chinese illustrations.

No one seemed to know it by his description alone, but he continued to search, and in 1716 finally found it. His native interpreter then recognized it as their standard treatment for childhood ailments. Later, other Jesuits documented the specific ethnobotanieal uses of it and its close cousin Panax trifolius, known as dwarf ginseng. The Iroquois used the latter less as a cure than as black magic--for so-called "lacrosse...