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Rheum australe
On Garima's first day at the Harvard Herbaria, Anthony had laid out a few specimens for her to look at. Among them was Rheum australe. She remembers being struck by the extraordinary detail of each part—the flowers dried into tiny black specks, the large leaves with their veins standing sharply against the paper. She didn’t quite know what to make of it, so she drew it in her small green notebook.
That drawing became the first note of Home-sick. And quite unwittingly, this artwork became the first in the Home-sick series.
Known colloquially as Padamchal, Rheum australe is a powerful medicinal plant, widely used across the Himalayan belt for a range of ailments. As Garima began travelling through the region, she kept returning to that specimen. The stratified matter of the higher altitudes—the layers of rock, soil, fossils, and plants—began to resemble it: meandering, rising and falling, dense in some places and almost skeletal in others. At times, the landscape itself seemed like a specimen: an accumulation of what the Himalayas have been, and a record of oceanic matter from the ancient Tethys Ocean. -
Aconitum heterophyllum
As far back as Garima can remember, she and her family always had a bottle of Aconite tincture at home. In homeopathy, highly diluted preparations of the poisonous Aconitum napellus plant are used for conditions including sudden anxiety, fever, and inflammation. Aconitum heterophyllum, while belonging to the same genus, is considered less toxic, though it too contains toxic compounds.
This particular specimen from the Herbaria drew her in because of its crumpled, folded state. Even mangled, every part of the plant remained recognisable—the stem, leaves, and flowers holding their distinct forms. It reminded her of a fossil: a record of a living thing, altered by time, far from its original geography, its colours now oxidised, yet retaining its identity in the marks and traces left behind.The work depicts the blue-violet flowers of Aconitum heterophyllum, a Himalayan plant whose medicinal use centres on its root. Traditionally known as Ativisha, the root has been used in Ayurvedic and Himalayan medicine for fever and digestive ailments, while the flower offers the visible form through which the plant is encountered and identified.
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Delphinium vestitum
Delphinium vestitum, which grows in Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Nepal, and Bhutan, contains toxic compounds. At Ney village, an Amchi showed Garima its blue-violet flowers—tender, fragile, almost papery and wispy. He told her that the earth that gives us medicine is also home to poison. The distinction, he said, lies in the knowledge of how to handle it. What is potion is also poison at times.
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Herbaria Folders
These drawings in Herbaria folders attend to the fragile, broken, folded, infested, and missing parts of botanical specimens—details often overlooked in the pursuit of the whole. By focusing on these aberrations and signs of deterioration, the drawings turn specimens into records of climate vulnerability.
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Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora
Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora is widely used as a substitute for Picrorhiza kurroa, commonly known as Kutki, which is now classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
In Basgo, an Amchi sat Garima down with a very sugary cup of chai, and for three hours they debated something another Amchi at the Ladakh headquarters had told her a week earlier: “If a plant goes extinct, we can find a replacement for it in some other plant.”
Garima rarely argues with government officials. But she has no qualms in having long arguments with people whose lives, practices, and knowledge systems are affected when a plant disappears. Anecdotally, people across the region have spoken to Garima about plants that were once essential to traditional medicine, including for surgeries and specific ailments. When these plants disappeared, practitioners had to travel farther and higher to find them—or abandon certain treatments altogether.
Extinction means different things to different people along the long chain that sustains a knowledge system. For some, it is a change in the availability of a species. For others, it is the loss of a medicine, a practice, a piece of knowledge, or the ability to pass that knowledge on.
Home-sick: Garima Gupta
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