Cascara
Halq’emeylem Name
Q’ÁYXELHP
Latin Name
Frangula Purshiana SSP. Purshiana
Pronunciation
About Cascara
Tree 6 to 10 metres high, with the trunk 20 to 30 cm across. Grey-brown bark with small cracks and holes. Leaves up to 15 cm long, almost smooth edged, with prominent veins. Small greenish flowers in May, dark blue berries in late summer.
Location Found in open forest.
Uses The bark is used as a laxative, either chewed raw or made into a tea. Used by many in the spring to clean out the system. Cascara is used to produce Cascara Sagrada, an ingredient in many commercially sold laxatives. AR
Connections
Shakespeare
There is no direct Shakespeare connection, but Cascara is part of the woods. The former Shakespeare garden featured A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was the first Shakespeare play that the UFV theatre program did at the old UFV campus. The middle parts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream take place in the forest. It’s in the forest, a place associated in the play with theatre, the imagination, and the dreamworld, that the mismatches at the beginning of the story are further mixed around, then come out right.
Indigenous Knowledge
Cascara is in the woods part of the garden. Elder Mary Gutierrez reminded us in Winter 2020 that when you go to the woods, you feel good.
Cascara bark can be used to. read a green dye that is effective on wool; if used correctly, it can have beneficial health effects but there is also risk of significant digestive upset (https://www.stolofoodways.com/plants-their-uses).
Some Stó:lō people collected and sold Cascara earlier this century. The berries are edible but not commonly used for food. AR.
Cascara bark “was valued as a tonic and laxative by the coastal First Peoples where it occurred” (Turner, Food Plants, p. 144).
Gallery
References
Sound: Latin binomial nomenclature pronunciation by Alan Reid
Images & Description: Alan Reid
Elder Mary Gutierrez, class communication, Winter 2020, CEP.
“Q’áyxelhp (cascara),” Íhtelstexw Te Shxwelí (Feeding the Soul): Stó:lō Foodways. Stó:lō Elders and Knowledge Keepers. Curated by Teresa Carlson. University of the Fraser Valley, 2022. https://www.stolofoodways.com
Turner, Nancy (2009). Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples.