A Cal State San Marcos anthropology professor and her students are developing a native plant garden that is helping them cultivate their understanding of other cultures and how indigenous people's use of plants fits into modern-day medicine.

Dr. Bonnie Bade and students in an upper-division medical ethnography class she teaches at the university started the CSUSM Ethnobotany Garden last spring on two of six terraced plots just north of the campus' Kellogg Library.

Ethnobotany is the study of humans' relationship with plants, and Bade's class has students doing field research in the history of various ethnic groups' uses of plants for medical purposes.

So far, the garden has only a few dozen plants ---- including mint, rosemary, several kinds of sage, oregano, aloe vera, and gordolobo ---- that have to be watered by hand.

Bade last week said the group is already getting valuable information from the garden and from Erasto Camacena, an herbalist and healer from the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico, who is sharing his own knowledge of the plants with the group.

Bade and her students are compiling the information into an online ethnobotany database that catalogs the garden's plants and their medicinal and food uses.

The list includes everything from flavoring meals to curing sore throats, easing stomachaches and easing health problems such as diabetes.

Tyler Lamb, a senior nursing student who took the ethnobotany class last spring, said last week he was pleasantly surprised to learn about the natural alternatives to modern-day medicines.

"In nursing school, you have a pretty narrow scope of practice (and) you treat the disease," he said. "With this, you kind of step out of the box. And I think it gives you the best of both worlds."

Expansion plans

The garden is an offshoot of a larger community native garden that the Binational Indigenous Organizations Front maintained on borrowed land in Vista for several years. That garden closed last spring because the owner of the site needed it for another purpose.

The indigenous group represents members of the Mixtec communities in California and Oaxaca. "Mixtec" refers to people from roughly two dozen different ethnic groups indigenous to the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Bade said each group is autonomous and has its own language, religious practices, cuisines, dress, calendar and social structure.

Camacena, who helped start the Vista garden, was unavailable for an interview. Bade said the herbalist acquired his knowledge of plants from his mother, who also was a Mixtec herbalist and healer.

The professor said such healers rarely share their knowledge with those outside their own circles. Camacena is willing to work with her and students, though, because they have a long-standing relationship of mutual trust and respect, Bade said.

That relationship enabled the professor and her students to use the Vista garden as a laboratory, with Camacena as a master instructor.

Lamb said he felt humbled and honored to be a recipient of Camacena's knowledge, which included esoteric information about plants' spirit-calming effects and life-balancing powers.

"The things he knows about plants and the different ways they can be used are just amazing," the nursing student said. "And he's a really delightful guy, very intuitive. As much as he teaches people, he wants to learn as much from them about what they do and what (they've) got going on, which makes it a pretty good relationship."

He and Bade's other students stepped up their cataloging efforts and began digging up and moving plants to CSUSM's new garden when they learned the Vista garden was closing.

Bade and Tyler said the group managed to save only a small percentage of the original garden. Some of the transferred plants eventually died.

The rest have been carefully labeled by students, who took turns maintaining the garden over the summer.

"These are students who are not even in the class anymore who continued to water the garden by hand," Bade said. "That's how dedicated they are to it."

The students continue to take care of the native plant garden. Plans call for spring 2010 ethnography class students to expand it.

Lamb said he hopes to see the garden grow into a thriving site that attracts people from throughout North County.

"Hopefully, if we can get this thing rolling and get a few (more) people into it, it'll grow into something that the university can really be proud of," he said.

Call staff writer Andrea Moss at 760-739-6654.