It was not until the demand was created for Golden Seal by the eclectic school of practitioners, about 1747, that it became an article of commerce, and in 1860 the root was made official in the Pharmacopoeia of the United States, which place it has held to the present time.
Habitat and Range.
Golden Seal occurs in patches in high open woods where there is plenty of leaf mold, and usually on hillsides or bluffs affording nature drainage, but it is not found in very moist or swampy situations, in prairie land, or in sterile soil. It is native from southern New York to Minnesota and western Ontario, south to Georgia and Missouri, ascending to an altitude of 2,500 feet in Virginia. It is now becoming scarce thruout its range. Not all of this region, however, produced Golden Seal in abundance. Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia have been the greatest Golden Seal producing states, while in some localities in southern Illinois, southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and central and western Tennessee the plant, tho common, could not be said to be sufficiently plentiful to furnish any large amount of the root. In other portions of its range it is sparingly distributed.
Common Names.
Many common names have been applied to this plant in different localities, most of them bearing some reference to the characteristic yellow color of the root, such as yellow root, yellow puccoon, orange-root, yellow paint, yellow Indian paint, golden root, Indian dye, curcuma, wild curcuma, wild tumeric, Indian tumeric, jaundice root and yellow eye; other names are eyebalm, eye-root and ground raspberry. Yellow root, a popular name for it, is misleading, as it has been applied to other plants also, namely to gold thread, false bittersweet, twinleaf and the yellow-wood. The name Golden Seal, derived from its yellow color and seal-like scars on the root, has been, however, generally adopted.
Description of the Plant.
It is a perennial plant and the thick yellow rootstock sends up an erect, hairy stem about a foot in height, around the base of which are two or three yellowish scales. The stems, as they emerge from the ground, are bent over, the tops still remaining underground, and sometimes the stems show some distance above the surface before the tops are brought out from the soil. The yellow color of the roots and scales extends partly up the stem so far as it is covered by soil, while the portion of the stem above the ground has a purplish color. Golden seal has only two leaves (rarely three), the stem bearing these seeming to fork at the top, one branch supporting a large leaf and the other a smaller one and a flower. Occasionally there is a third leaf, much smaller than the other two and stemless.
The leaves are prominently veined on the lower surface, and are palmately 5 to 9 lobed, the lobes broad, acute, sharply and unequally toothed. The leaves are only partially developed at flowering time and are very much wrinkled, but they continue to expand until they are from 6 to 8 inches in diameter, becoming thinner in texture and smoother. The upper leaf subtends or encloses the flower bud.
Early in spring, about April or May, the flower appears, but few ever see it as it lasts only five or six days. It is greenish-white, less than half an inch in diameter, and has no petals, but instead three small petal-like sepals, which fall away as soon as the flower expands, leaving only the stamens — as many as 40 or 50 — in the center of which are about a dozen pistils, which finally develop into a round, fleshy, berrylike head. The fruit ripens in July or August, turning a bright red and resembling a large raspberry, whence the common name ground raspberry, is derived. Each fruit contains from 10 to 20 small, black, shining, hard seeds.
If the season has been moist, the plant sometimes persists to the beginning of winter, but if it has been a dry season it dies soon after the fruit is ripe, so that by the end of September no trace of the plant remains above the ground. In a patch of Golden Seal there are always many sterile stems, simple and erect, bearing a solitary leaf at the apex but no flower.