He searched the Pan-Himalayan region to find the grass for the lamb chops.

Speaking of Labiatae

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What are Lamiaceae plants?

What are its characteristics?

Where are they mainly distributed?

What is the function?

today,

Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Researcher Wang Qiang

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The story of the Lamiaceae family.

I am Wang Qiang from the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, a researcher engaged in the taxonomy of aromatic plants in the Lamiaceae family.

▲Nepeta cataria

I would like to share with you a photo of a very beautiful grass. It has small blue flowers in clusters, and its name is Nepeta. What is Nepeta?

Do you have a cat? If you have a cat, you may go to a pet store to buy a toy for cats called "cat grass". After the cat smells or eats the "cat grass", it will become as cute as shown in the picture.

Catweed has a hallucinogenic effect on cats because the plant contains a special chemical called nepetalactone. Nepeta, not only is it very important to cats, it is also a member of the Lamiaceae family that I study.

▲“Cat Grass” Family: Lamiaceae Plants

Currently, there are more than 7,000 species of Lamiaceae plants in the world. The term Lamiaceae is a bit too academic, so let's call it the "cat grass" family.

Cat grass on the dining table

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I did some taxonomic research on the Lamiaceae family when I was doing my PhD about 15 years ago, but I really decided to study them in depth and comprehensively about 8 years ago.

▲Left: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Right: Mike Gilbert

At that time, as a visiting scholar sent by our country, I spent a year studying at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK. I had a very good friend at Kew, an old botanist named Mike Gilbert.

During the Spring Festival of 2016, when I first arrived in the UK, he invited me to his home and prepared a family feast to welcome me. The first dish was French roast lamb chops. Before eating, he asked me a question, "Dr. Wang, guess what kind of plant is this small plant leaf on the roast lamb chops?"

I was a little confused at the time. It was so hard to recognize it after being baked in the oven. Mike reminded me, "Your family." He meant that I had studied this plant family.

I suddenly realized that it must be the Lamiaceae family. The leaves look like the leaves of coniferous trees, such as spruce and fir. But spruce and fir cannot be used to grill lamb chops. They are too greasy and will definitely not taste good when grilled.

▲Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis)

There is a plant called rosemary in the Lamiaceae family. Its leaves are a bit like spruce and fir. Rosemary is also very fragrant. Using it as a spice to grill lamb chops must be extremely delicious.

▲Left: Pizza sprinkled with basil; Right: Basil (Ocimum basilicum)

During the year I lived in the UK, in addition to conducting scientific research, I also tasted a lot of local delicacies. There was a pizza that impressed me. It was sprinkled with small green leaves and had a lemon scent. Later, I saw this thing being sold in the supermarket. It was called basil and belonged to the Lamiaceae family.

▲Left: salami; Right: thyme (Thymus mongolicus)

In my hometown of Sichuan, spicy sausages are delicious, but I can't find such sausages in London. I went to the supermarket and found a kind of sausage wrapped with leaves, called salami, which is a traditional Italian delicacy. I was curious about what plant the leaves were from. After looking at the ingredient list, I found out that it was thyme, also a plant of the Lamiaceae family. This plant is very beautiful. On the right is the thyme I took in the Himalayas. Its leaves can make the flavor of sausage "elevate ten levels".

▲Lavandula angustifolia

Everyone knows that lavender is very romantic. There are patches of "purple ocean" in Provence, France. Usually, we know that lavender can help you sleep and calm your mind. Whether it is lavender essential oil or lavender dried flower sachets, you will sleep well after smelling them.

▲Left: Lavender steak; Right: Lavender lemon milk wine

When I was in London, I found that it was delicious. The steak grilled with lavender was not greasy and had a unique aroma. It was also accompanied by lavender lemon milk wine. The feeling was really wonderful. So in this year in the UK, I tasted a lot of food made from plants in the "cat grass" family.

After returning to China, I have been paying attention to the application of aromatic plants of the Lamiaceae family in food. I found that this type of plant is widely used in China. For example, mint is used in Europe and in China. You can drink mint-flavored cocktails in bars, and chewing gum and mouthwash are also inseparable from mint.

▲ Perilla frutescens

Perilla is widely distributed in China, and my country has had the habit of tasting perilla for thousands of years. Some time ago, there was a very popular TV series, in which a plot was that "Zhao Pan'er" in the play made a perilla drink, which was called Perilla Drink.

▲ Fried snails with basil You may have heard of the phrase "time flies". In fact, another name for basil is "time flies". After returning to China, when we went to Guangxi with friends to investigate plants, I also tasted fried snails with basil. The taste of this dish is comparable to the famous Liuzhou snail rice noodle in Guangxi.

Although so many delicious dishes come from the "cat grass" family, there are less than 400 species of the "cat grass" family that can be effectively used in the world, including other aromatic plants. The "cat grass" family is very large. As I mentioned earlier, there are more than 7,000 species in the world, and there is still a huge treasure trove of aromas waiting for us to study and develop. So I decided to do my best to study the "cat grass" family in the world.

A journey of discovery with both surprise and delight

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Due to the large number of "cat grasses", I need to find a breakthrough that is most worthy of research.

▲Microtoena
So I thought of this little guy, it is called the crown lip flower. The crown lip flower is named because of its appearance. Its corolla is divided into an upper lip and a lower lip. Its upper lip usually has red, purple, purple-red spots or patches, like a small hat.

▲The distribution range of the genus Corona is very rare and it is difficult to find it in the wild. It is mainly distributed in the southwest of my country, in the Hengduan Mountains, the southern slope of the Himalayas, extending southward to the Indochina Peninsula, and then to Java Island in Indonesia.

When I started my research, many people didn’t know about this type of plant, and didn’t even know how many species of the genus Coronet were there in the world. Some people thought there were 40 species, while others thought there were only 25. There was no consensus. So I wanted to investigate all of its producing areas.

First, I went to the northern section of the Hengduan Mountains, Erlang Mountain in Tianquan, Sichuan. Tianquan has a relatively rare crown-lip flower called hemp-leaved crown-lip flower. It blooms in summer, so I spent three days in the hot summer looking for it, climbing a lot of mountain roads, sweating profusely, and getting sunburned.

Unfortunately, I didn't find any. I was very frustrated and had to change to another possible distribution point to look for it again.

▲Ya'an Patchouli Crucian Carp After leaving Tianquan, I passed Baoxing and returned to Ya'an for a short break. During the break, I ate a dish like this, which is a specialty of Ya'an, called Patchouli Crucian Carp. Cut up the Patchouli leaves and sprinkle them on the crucian carp, which is very delicious. Patchouli is a relative of the crown lip flower, and can be said to be a "cousin".

After eating this dish, my mood turned from gloomy to cheerful, and I forgot the pain of not being able to find the crown lip flower in an instant. This is the wonder of aromatic plants.

After leaving Ya'an, I regrouped and went to Mount Emei in Sichuan to look for another endemic species. It only grows in Mount Emei and is called Emei Crowned Lip Flower. The altitude difference of Mount Emei is very large, from 500 meters at the foot of the mountain to more than 3,000 meters at the top of the mountain. It is impossible to walk all the way in one day. I quickened my pace and took some dry food to climb Mount Emei to look for Emei Crowned Lip Flower.

I encountered many dangers in Mount Emei. There were many monkeys on the mountain. I was besieged by a group of monkeys and they took away my dry food. I carried my computer and camera and climbed about 40 to 50 kilometers of mountain roads, but I didn't find a single Emei crown lip flower.

I was going down the mountain in a depressed mood. On the stone steps on the way down the mountain, there was a very poisonous pit viper, called the cauliflower iron head. I didn't notice it at first, and when I walked in front of it, I almost stepped on it. I was scared and jumped back. When I calmed down, I saw that it was a poisonous snake. After calming down for a while, it found that I was not a threat to it, so it slowly swam to the side. This was a "near miss" in Mount Emei, but unfortunately I still didn't find the crown lip flower.

But I couldn't give up. Then I came to Jinfo Mountain in Nanchuan County, Chongqing. The plant diversity here is very high, with thousands of plant species, and many endemic species, one of which is Nanchuan Crown Lip Flower, which is also a species of Crown Lip Flower.

▲Jinfo Mountain Cliff in Nanchuan

If you want to find Nanchuan Crowned Lip Flower in Jinfo Mountain, you can't take the tourist route. It's hard to see rare wild plants near the tourist stone steps. So we walked through the uninhabited area and climbed the cliff. This is the cliff of Jinfo Mountain that I climbed. After climbing up, I turned to the other side of the cliff. Fortunately, I finally found Nanchuan Crowned Lip Flower in the valley behind the cliff. This was my first harvest.

▲Microtoena prainiana

The characteristic of Nanchuan Crown Lip Flower is that the flowers gather into a head-like inflorescence. After going through various difficulties, I finally found this Nanchuan Crown Lip Flower. When I saw them, I was so excited that I almost jumped up. I finally found you!

▲Left: Microtoena insuavis; Middle: Microtoena delavayi; Right: Microtoena patchoulii

After our first success at Jinfo Mountain, we went to the southern part of Yunnan. Fortunately, we climbed a lot of mountain roads and found more crown lip flowers. We found crown lip flowers in Tengchong; we found Yunnan crown lip flowers in Dali and Lijiang; we also found southern Yunnan crown lip flowers in Pu'er, and it is also distributed in Xishuangbanna.

▲The family tree of the genus Lipaceae I became more and more confident, and I went to all the places in the world where Lipaceae were distributed. Finally, I collected all the materials needed for scientific research, extracted the DNA of these Lipaceae, analyzed their genetic relationships, and constructed the family tree of the entire Lipaceae genus.

Finally, all our research results were summarized into a book, "Taxonomy of the Genus Corymbose of the Lamiaceae Family", which was published in the form of an English monograph by Science Press. Once published, it quickly attracted the attention of the international community and was reprinted the following year by EDP Sciences, a publishing house founded by Marie Curie in France.

Through my research, I found that there are not so many species of lip flowers in the world, unlike the 40 or 25 species mentioned before. Through phylogenetic analysis, it was finally concluded that there are only 19 species of lip flowers. We have recorded the distribution and characteristics of each lip flower in the book, and welcome everyone to pay attention to this lovely lip flower group.

The “Snow Fairies” of the Pan-Himalayan Region

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In addition to paying attention to special groups, we should also pay attention to hotspots of plant diversity when studying the "cat grass" family. Conservation International (CI) has evaluated the biodiversity hotspots around the world, and there are 35 biodiversity hotspots in total. In the Pan-Himalayan region in southwest China, there are 3 biodiversity hotspots, which account for about 1/10 of the world's biodiversity hotspots.

▲Friend of the Snowy Plant Elves——"Himalayan Black Brother"

I was particularly interested in understanding the members of the "cat grass" family in the Pan-Himalayan region, so I have been in the Himalayas for many years, investigating in Tibet, Yunnan, and Sichuan, and became friends with these "snow elves". The solar radiation in the plateau is very strong, and I was tanned very dark, so everyone gave me a nickname called "Himalayan Black Brother".

▲Pan-Himalayan region

The Pan-Himalayan region includes the Himalayas, the Hengduan Mountains, the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan to the west, and the Gaoligong Mountains bordering Myanmar. This can be said to be a holy place in the hearts of every plant taxonomist.

The biodiversity here is really high. Preliminary statistics show that there are about 20,000 plant species here, which is equivalent to 1/15 of all vascular plants in the world and 2/3 of all vascular plant species in China.

▲Left and middle: Rheum nobile Right: Mani pile There are many famous alpine plants here. For example, Rheum nobile, its appearance is very similar to the Mani pile in Tibet, it is a very lovely plant.

▲Saussurea obvallata There is also the famous snow lotus. The one in the picture is Saussurea obvallata, which also grows in the Himalayas.

▲Himalacodon dicentrifoli We have also discovered a new type of plant called Xumi ginseng. The Himalayas were formerly known as Xumi Mountain, hence the name of this plant. It grows on the cliffs on the southern slope of the Himalayas, and it is very difficult to collect it.

▲Neottia pinetorum This plant with green flowers that looks like it is imitating wild bees from a distance is called Neottia pinetorum, and it also comes from the southern slope of the Himalayas. I suffered a lot when I collected this specimen. It imitates female bees to attract male bees to pollinate it. When I went to collect it, the bees thought I was attacking their own kind and stung me all over.

▲Monotropastrum humile

There is also this plant, which looks like a blue light camera and grows in the rain forest on the southern slope of the Himalayas. It is called Pseudo-Sand Orchid of the Cone. It has no chlorophyll and cannot photosynthesize. It survives by absorbing nutrients through saprophytic means.

This is the Pan-Himalayas with so many unique plants. I want to look for the "cat grass" family in such an area.

▲Extreme habitats in the Himalayas

In order to find members of the "cat grass" family, we went to the Mount Everest Nature Reserve, where the air is thin and the altitude is more than 5,000 meters. We also went to the southern slope of the Himalayas, which is full of cliffs and poisonous insects and ferocious beasts.

▲Left: Tibet Peigucuo Right: White flower branch flower (Dracocephalum heterophyllum)

During this period, we also gained a lot. For example, when we went to Yadong, we passed by Peigucuo, a beautiful alpine lake like a sapphire on the plateau. By the Peigucuo Lake, I found a plant with a bunch of small white flowers. Its name is white flower branch flower. It is very fragrant and is a member of the "cat grass" family. Tibetan friends told me that this plant is used as tea in the local area. I tasted the tea brewed with white flower branch flowers. It has a light lemon scent and is sweet and refreshing. Only in this area can you enjoy this benefit. You can't drink white flower branch flower tea in other places.

▲Salvia yadongensis
We also found a very rare new species in Yadong and named it Yadong Sage.

▲Top: Linzhi, Tibet. Bottom: On the way to find "cat grass"

There are also many members of the "cat grass" family in the Linzhi area of ​​Tibet. Of course, in order to find "cat grass", we have to sleep in the open air and usually eat bread and biscuits, but sometimes we have to improve our lives and make some instant noodles.

▲Nepeta hemsleyana

This is the Tibetan catmint we found, with its clusters of blue-purple flowers. Tibetan catmint is a close sister of the aforementioned catmint, so it also has the effect of making cats happy.

▲Elsholtzia eriostachya

We also found a plant called fuzzy himalayan mint, which has an English name of fuzzy himalayan mint. It is very cold in the area, and it is covered with fuzz to keep warm, and its leaves have a minty scent. These are members of the "cat grass" family that we found in the Nyingchi area.

▲Left: Prunella vulgaris Right: Herbal tea is also found in many places in the beautiful southern Tibet, such as the Prunella vulgaris found in Lhuntse County. People may not be familiar with Prunella vulgaris directly, but if you mention the herbal tea that people in Fujian and Guangdong drink in summer, you may understand. Prunella vulgaris has long appeared in our lives and is a very important ingredient in herbal tea.

▲Galeopsis bifida

We also found the weasel-petaled flower. We had a hard time collecting it in southern Tibet. Its calyx has many sharp thorns and is covered with very hard bristles. I had no experience in collecting it for the first time, so I just grabbed it. I was pricked and screamed, and my hands were covered with blood. This taught me a lesson: when collecting specimens of this plant, you must wear gloves.

▲Scientific expedition to the Dulong River Basin

The Pan-Himalayas also include northern Myanmar, Gaoligong Mountain and the Dulong River. This is a suspension bridge over the turbulent waters of the Dulong River. It looks very dangerous. But there are many little guys from the "cat grass" family living in this primitive environment.

▲Scutellaria lushuiensis

We discovered a new species in the Lushui area - Lushui Scutellaria baicalensis. Lushui Scutellaria baicalensis is very beautiful, with small white flowers. Scutellaria baicalensis is a traditional Chinese medicine used to treat colds and coughs. We have added a new member to this family that has never been discovered before.

Going abroad, looking for "cat grass" all over the world

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Now, our Chinese botanists are also going abroad to cooperate in scientific research with countries along the Belt and Road Initiative and participate in the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.

For example, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has established a China-Africa Joint Research Center with Kenya in Nairobi. Because of my participation in the work of this center, I have also visited Africa many times in recent years, focusing on tropical East Africa, which is also one of the 35 biodiversity hotspots in the world.

▲Savanna

We did a lot of research here and collected a lot of specimens of members of the "cat grass" family. At the same time, we also saw many landscapes that we had never seen before, such as the unique savannah in Africa.

▲Leonotis nepetifolia

At the edge of the savanna, I found a member of the "cat grass" family, called Nepeta lion's ear. Its inflorescence head looks like a lion's head covered with brown fur, and its small red flowers look like lion's ears, hence its name. We did a lot of investigation work here and collected many specimens of members of the "cat grass" family.

▲Nepeta azurea

Blue catmint is also found in the bushes near the savanna. It grows in East Africa and is a close sister of catmint and Tibetan catmint. It also contains nepetalactone, which has a hallucinogenic effect on cats.

▲ Vegetation in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa

We also inspected a lot of native vegetation in the East African Rift Valley, which has a very high plant diversity and is well-preserved.

▲Plectranthus laxiflorus

Here we found the sparse flowered spatholobi. From the name, you can guess that it has medicinal value in addition to its fragrance.

▲Stachys aculeolata

There is also the thorny stem water stachys. Our water stachys is a traditional Chinese medicinal material, but I didn’t expect that there is a close sister of water stachys in Africa.

The "Cat Grass" family is the seasoning of our beautiful life. I like them very much and will continue to go further and further on the road of research on the "Cat Grass" family, publish a world-class "Cat Grass Plant" monograph, let people all over the world know the types, characteristics, functions and distribution of the "Cat Grass" family on the earth, and make our home planet more fragrant.

Author: Wang Qiang