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Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America's Most Valuable Plant. By Kristin Johannsen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. 224 pp., $24.95, hardback, ISBN 0-8131-2384-4.
Among the many plants that have been harvested commercially in North America, ginseng is an enduring anomaly. Cultivated largely for the lucrative Asian market, where ginseng has some five thousand years of documented use, ginseng has fueled dreams of sudden riches within Appalachian communities since the earliest Euro-American settlement of that region. Even as the fate of timber and coal industries have risen and fallen, ginseng harvesting has been a persistent cottage industry among Appalachia's rural residents. Moreover, ginseng is a particular plant, seldom thriving outside of the mature forest understory. Commercial cultivation has proven challenging at best. Adding to the challenge, traditional Asian medicine seeks gnarled roots that are seldom found outside of these native forest environments. Thus, while American ginseng use is considered mainstream in China, the process and provenience of its cultivation remains on the cultural, economic, and ecological margins of American agriculture. Cumulatively, this has fostered a proletarian tradition of wild plant gathering in Appalachia that...