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Written by Dan England, for NEXTnc
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Wednesday, 13 September 2006 |
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Dan England |
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"Cattail" Bob Seebeck shows a class a Golden Currant berry, one of the tasiest wild and edible plants. Seebeck of Estes Park teaches what plants you can eat and what to avoid and has written a book, "Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies." Seebeck gave a class to a group sponsored by the Greeley Recreation Center in August and will give another one Sept. 16.
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 Watch a video of Cattail here. |
“Cattail” Bob Seebeck was in the middle of warning his students about Water Hemlock, what many call the most toxic plant in North America, when one raised his hand.
“What does it taste like?” the student asked.
The question still baffles him. How would he know?
Hemlock, after all, is one of the few edible plants Seebeck won’t eat. And it’s one of the few times Seebeck has ever been baffled by a question about plants.
Seebeck splits his time between two homes, most of it in Estes Park, the rest of it at a solar-powered home he bought in 1982 in the foothills of Drake, surrounded by more than 200 plants. It’s not only a second home, it’s a classroom.
Seebeck teaches classes on plants most of the year. He started in 1975, when he taught for Survival Unlimited, an off-shoot survival class of Colorado State University, and continued to teach survival on his own after 1980. In survival, it’s best if instructors find a niche, like the guy who can tell you how to build a shelter from pine cones and the woman who can teach you how to avoid and even repel a bear attack. Seebeck figured early on that his niche would be plants, especially what can help you recover from illnesses or injuries, what to eat and what to avoid.
If you read his book, “Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies,” you shouldn’t get sick, with specific ways to identify even plants that look alike (the veins of water hemlock, for instance, end at the notches rather than the tips of the teeth on leaflet edges).
Seebeck, who will cover as many as 85 plants in a single seminar, can tell you what plants your kids will like the best. He can give you spicy, like mustard, or sharp, like cilantro, or cool, like the many mint plants. All of those are on his land.
The land, in fact, would look wild to the untrained eye, like Seebeck just let it go.
Hardly. He can tell you exactly where, say, the wild asparagus is in the thick jungle of plants, and though some he just happened to discover on his property one day (like the asparagus), he worked hard to nurture, nuzzle and establish other plants on his land (and a few others, like the asparagus, which is tasty stuff, he protects from deer by putting wire around it). And what he calls his hospital, plants that have medicinal qualities, grows by what could be his back porch (he has a grill in the corner).
“One of my favorite ways to relax,” he said, “is to walk around my property and just check up on all the plants.”
Seebeck is thin and a bit wiry, partly because it’s safe to assume plants aren’t as fattening as value meals and partly because he advocates fasting occasionally. He has taught for a living most of his life, though he also acts as a backcountry guide (“wherever you want to go,” he said), fought fires for 10 years for Larimer County and also worked in search and rescue.
Although he may seem like it, Seebeck is hardly a hippie. He is not above promoting himself. He gave himself the nickname “Cattail” because he wanted people to associate him with plants and therefore remember his classes. He self-published his first book at Kinkos in 1996 and went with Westcliffe Publishers for his book because it offered him the most money. He also once wrote to “Survivor” producers and hoped to be a consultant for the show if it ever came to Colorado.
Also, he doesn’t eat as many wild plants as you might think. He likes to munch on them during class and have a few on his burritos. But if he ate all the plants, he wouldn’t have any to teach with. And that’s not the only reason. He has dozens, maybe hundreds, of recipes in his head (including how to eat cattails, like corn on the cob with butter and salt), but preparing wild plants can take hours, even days, to get them right.
“It’s a lot easier to go to Safeway and buy groceries,” he said. “But it is fun to do occasionally.”
There are many other plants that are supposed to help all kinds of aliments. That’s Seebeck’s next book. He may have to do three separate volumes there are so many.
It will be a lot of work. Seebeck will have to seek out the plants himself to snap their photos.
“I’m hoping to have it finished next spring,” he said and laughed. “But I say that every spring.”
But Seebeck doesn’t mind the time it takes.
“It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of what I do,” he said. “I really love searching for all the plants.”
Seebeck picks an especially spicy, strong plant. Swanson’s daughter, Rochelle Foiethman, remembered it well. Swanson gave it to her once when she had the flu.
“Ugh, Mom, why did you do that?” Foiethman said.
“It’s healthy,” Swanson answered.
“I probably would have recovered on my own,” Foiethman said.
“No, you had to go to school,” Swanson said.
Even if Foiethman was annoyed by that, the lesson must have stuck: She’s a pharmacist now.
By the end of the day, Seebeck wandered up his driveway, pointing out a plant that grew in the corners that cured his son’s flu once, calling it a miracle herb. Then he wandered up the dirt road, pointing out plants left and right.
The sun was frying the horizon and he paused. It had been a long day, with dozens of plants.
“Your brains are probably fried,” Seebeck said.
But no, not this group. They, like Seebeck, were eating up the knowledge, just like they consumed the roughage he put before them all day long. | Only registered users can write comments.
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