Arkansas Master Naturalists

Tree Replacement Project

 By Kate Spontak

Nature Ramblings

By Lynn Foster

This is the time of year that some of us water our gardens. Grumpily, grudgingly, knowing that if we don’t, some of our plants may die. Plants whose roots are not established yet, or plants that we fell in love with and bought even though a little nagging inner voice told us at the time that we were crazy to buy that plant for our yard. This is the time of year my Bigleaf Magnolia and Wild Ginger communicate with me. They start to droop when they need water. I appreciate them reaching out.

Every day while watering, I repeat Theo Witsell’s blog statement like a mantra: Just because a plant is native doesn’t mean it will do well or look good in your garden without supplemental water during dry periods.

As someone who can’t have too much wildlife, I try each year to improve my succession of blooms. I still have a long way to go, but the numbers of my blooms and bees reach their peak this time of year, in the late summer and fall. Wingstems, goldenrod and asters are on the verge of blooming, and Common Sennas, Late Figworts, Sweet Coneflowers, and Yellow Giant Hysssops are going strong. Not to mention the huge numbers of this year’s volunteer annual, Partridge Pea.

Walking in the garden last night just before sunset, I saw a bumblebee clinging to a Yellow Giant Hyssop leaf. It was most likely a male. Once they leave the nest, they don’t return. Most bumblebees resting on plants overnight are males. The Bee Guy, based in Ireland, wrote the following about what he calls their “tragic” lives:

They spend their short lives seeking sugar and a mate.
Most don’t get to mate.
Those that do never meet their offspring.
No male has a son.
Oh and they can’t sting!

My guess is this bothers The Bee Guy more than it bothers male bumblebees.

But enough about sleeping bees. This morning, I had an early morning meeting so had to start watering at 6:45 am. Ugh! What made it all worthwhile, though, was when I walked out to my strip of garden by the road, filled with those volunteer Partridge Peas, I heard a noise that I could not identify at first. Then I realized it was bumblebees. A LOT of bumblebees. On the partridge peas. More than I’ve heard all year. That rush of joy is still with me as I write this.

May your garden have many (native) bees!

The pawpaw is the largest fruit native to North America, weighing up to two pounds (1 kg). Pawpaws taste like a mixture of bananas, mangos, and pineapples. They’re like a tropical banana mango custard but found in temperate forests across the eastern United States, nourishing humankind for thousands of years and now complete with their own pawpaw festivals. Papayas are sometimes called pawpaws, but they’re completely different fruits. The real pawpaw is also known as the dog banana, false-banana, Indiana banana, prairie banana, poor man’s banana, Ozark banana, Banango (I like that one), Indiana banana (has a nice ring to it, too), and the Kentucky banana.

Pawpaws are my favorite fruit, or should I say were my favorite fruit. One of the reasons I moved to rural Virginia was because the property had a whole grove of pawpaw trees. I was going to be set for life—that is, until I ate a few too many on the first harvest, became quite ill, and actually looked them up. Pro tip: in the future, look to see if a food is toxic before you eat lots of it. Little did I know, the pawpaw belonged to an infamous family of fruits that contains three different types of neurotoxins. I had actually done a video years ago warning people not to eat soursop, also known as graviola, but didn’t realize pawpaws were related.

The family includes soursop, guanabana, sweetsop, sugar apple, cherimoya, and custard apple, which are all linked to a neurodegenerative disease called progressive supranuclear palsy, which is like a treatment-resistant Parkinson’s, with hallucinations, widespread brain atrophy, and dementia. And consumption of these fruits is associated with about 20 times the odds of having this kind of atypical Parkinson’s syndrome. Expose rats to even a fraction of the dose the people were exposed to, and they develop the same kind of brain lesions you see on autopsy in human victims. And in several patients who stopped consuming these fruits, the progression of their condition ceased, and in one patient the symptoms even disappeared after a change of diet. There is an urgent need to raise public awareness about the neurotoxicity of this family of fruits, which are often ironically praised for their taste and medicinal values.

In fact, you can find dietary supplements containing these plants, promoted for their purported anticancer effects. And a soursop extract can inhibit cancer cell growth in a petri dish, but only at concentrations much higher than the amount that kills off brain cells. Even a low cumulative consumption may worsen disease severity and cognitive deficits in degenerative Parkinson’s type disease, as in 0.2 fruit-years, so that’s just one-fifth of a fruit a day for a year, or a single fruit a month for six years or just one fruit a year throughout your entire life. The bottom line is that these fruits could contribute to the development of degenerative Parkinsonism in humans, and so as a precaution, more restrictive public health preventive recommendations should be made regarding their consumption.

So okay, consumption of these tropical fruits potentially constitutes a serious public health problem, but what about pawpaws? Here’s the amount of the primary neurotoxin in soursop, aka graviola. Pawpaws have ten times more. So why aren’t pawpaw eaters getting sick? Well, it’s only ripe for a few weeks a year, so unlike the tropical fruit that can be eaten year-round, people may not have a lot of exposure to them. Fresh pawpaws aren’t really even sold commercially either since they bruise so easily, but now the fruit’s available in any season, sold as frozen pulp or jam, and there are the supplements out there too. Not to mention, if you’re like me, trees in your backyard.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was asked about them, they noted that pawpaw has a long history of food use, and it didn’t have any evidence that the fruit was unsafe to eat. You’ll hear things like: “Currently, there have been no reports of neurodegenerative diseases linked to the consumption of the pawpaw fruit,” until of course, there are. Progressive supranuclear palsy and pawpaw: Poor guy had trouble speaking and walking as his brain was atrophying in his skull. Tragically he actually died before they figured it out, but his wife disclosed that they owned pawpaw trees, and he had been eating dozens a year. And when researchers started looking, they indeed seemed to find a link between this neurodegenerative disease and pawpaw consumption in the United States. So alas, no more pawpaw for me.