The fruit or seed grows from the base of one of these leaves. Flower is first whitish green producing the fruit red and resembling a strawberry, maturing last of July and the first of August.
The berry contains from fifteen to twenty small oval black shinny seeds. Only a portion of the stalks ever bear seed. From the middle to the last of September the stalks die down and when winter comes on the hydrastis bed appears the same as a Ginseng bed.
The root stalk or rhizome is thick, rough covered with rounded indentations or eyes, dark yellow in color and having many long threadlike bright yellow fibres branching in all directions. It has one and sometimes as many as four buds which will produce the next season's stalks. Besides these there are many latent buds and little plantlets on the runners of fibrous roots.
The root and all of its fibres is the part used in medicine.
I presume it will be difficult to fix a date when this plant was first used in medicine. But it is known that the Indians used it in healing diseases and in preparing stains and paints when first observed by the white man. Dr. Rafinesque first makes mention of it in a medical work in 1828 and the elective physicians adopted it in their practice in 1847. The Pharmacopoeia of the U. S. in 1860 made Hydrastis an official drug and described the manufacture of different preparations.
It has since gained in favor and in extent of application until at present it is almost the specific in the treatment of certain catarrhal conditions. Thousands of pounds being used by the physicians in different parts of the world variously estimated from 200,000 to 300,000 pounds annually, more extensively, as you see, than Ginseng.
The price has advanced as given by the Drug Reporter, from 1894 of 18 to 23 cents a pound, to 1903, of 52 to 75 cents a pound, since 1903 to 1906 it has advanced to $1.10 to $1.30 a pound. The figures representing the highest and lowest quotations of those years. The price of the plant has advanced first because investigation has proven the value of the plant as a drug in the healing art increasing its consumption, second the consumption of and destruction of its habitat is limiting its supply. It is used in all countries, but not found in all countries in its wild state. The United States supplies the majority of the root.
Its cultivation is very promising and profitable because only very few have entered the industry yet, the wild supply is becoming exhausted, the drug trade demands it and its consumption depends upon a sound demand.
There is a promising opportunity in this industry and when I am speaking I am not offering inducements to get the rich quick individual, but to the careful, painstaking, plodding individual who is willing to give at least some labor for a handsome compensation. I have been one of the pioneers to begin the investigation and cultivation of this plant, and shall tell some of my experience in handling the plants.