Life-saving, snooze-inducing Thuja occidentalis
Thuja occidentalis—Eastern White-cedar, Arborvitae
I’ve spent two months deep-diving into the most boring landscape plant I could think of. In this case, it is the shrub known to landscapers as arborvitae and to botanists as Thuja occidentalis. I have always thought that this was the most boring possible plant to have in a yard, but it turns out that when you learn enough about a thing, it becomes unexpectedly fascinating.
Let’s start with the common name arborvitae. In the winter of 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were sheltering in a camp along what is now called the St. Lawrence River, as part of his second expedition to claim Canada for the French. There was an outbreak of scurvy, but the crew was saved because they learned from the neighboring St. Lawrence Iroquoians[1] that a tea made from the bark of a tree called annedda would save their lives (Rousseau, 1954). The fun part of history is that we’re not entirely sure what kind of tree annedda was. The most common candidate is Thuja occidentalis, eastern white-cedar, but there are numerous other options, and many evergreen trees contain Vitamin C (Durzan, 2009). My unanswerable question is, could the word annedda have referred to multiple trees with scurvy-treating properties instead of identifying a single species? Was annedda a general term, much like how we say ‘eat your vegetables’ without specifying which ones?
Annedda may be the tree's oldest recorded name, but it's not the only one. Before Linnaeus invented binomial nomenclature, botany was closely tied to medicine. As a result, doctors first named this tree arborvitae—“the tree of life”. Of course, it’s not the only plant that was labelled arborvitae, so the scientific name, Thuja occidentalis, can help us be specific. Let’s take a quick look at that scientific name. Thuja is derived from a Greek word meaning “a sacrifice”. This refers to the resin which was used for ceremonial incense (Martin, 1950). The specific epithet occidentalis means ‘Western.’ That label seems inappropriate from here in the PNW where we have a completely different species of Thuja entirely, but it’s western from a European viewpoint when you compare it to the three other species that are native to Asia.
Do I think arborvitae is more fascinating than I had previously given it credit for? Absolutely. Am I going to plant one in my yard? Absolutely not. It may have a complex history, but it’s still the beige wall of the plant world.
References:
Durzan, D. J. (2009). Arginine, scurvy and Cartier’s “tree of life.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 5, 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-5-5
Gagne, M. (2013, February 26). St. Lawrence Iroquoians. The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/st-lawrence-iroquoians
Martin, P. C. (1950). A Morphological Comparison of Biota and Thuja. Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science, 24, 65–112.
Rousseau, J. (1954). L’annedda et l’arbre de vie. Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 8(2), 171. https://doi.org/10.7202/301648ar
[1] Iroquois is an outdated name for a group of people who call themselves Haudenosaunee and whose ancestral lands encompass much of the Great Lakes region. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians, however, were an entirely different group of people who spoke a common language with the Haudenosaunee, but were not part of them. They disappeared from the St. Lawrence valley between 1541 and 1603, taking their autonym and any certainty about the identity of annedda with them. (Gagne, 2013)
