Satureja Douglasii

''Clinopodium douglasii'', (synonym ''Micromeria douglasii''), yerba buena, or Oregon tea is a rambling aromatic herb of western and northwestern North America, ranging from British Columbia southwards to Southern California and from the Pacific coast eastwards to western Montana.BONAP's North American Plant Atlas
Clinopodium
The plant takes the form of a sprawling, mat-forming perennial. The name "yerba buena" derives from Spanish for "good herb" and is applied to various other plants.

Description

''Clinopodium douglasii'' is a decumbent perennial herb. Leaves are in an opposite arrangement along the stem, and each leaf is subtended by a petiole, is relatively small in size, and ovate to almost triangular in shape, with the leaf margin being shallowly toothed. Flowers occur at the leaf axils, and are solitary (occasionally a cluster of 2-3 flowers) on a short pedicel. The flower consists of a tubular calyx that subtends a lobed, bilaterally symmetrical, labiate corolla typical of the mint family, white to lavender in color, and typically 3-8 millimeters in length. The inner flower, found under the upper "lip" of the corolla, consists of 2 fused styles with a 2-lobed stigma and 4 exserted stamens arranged in 2 pairs. The fruit is a tiny nutlet with a smooth surface. The leaves and other parts of the plant are strongly aromatic and have a minty odor.

Distribution

''Clinopodium douglasii'' is native to the western United States and Canada, ranging from western British Columbia to southern California and parts of the interior mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest and northern California. The coastal and interior mountain distributions of this species are largely disjunct, and it is largely absent from the dry interior regions between these areas, such as the Interior and Columbia Plateaus and California's Central Valley.

The northern limit of the natural distribution of this species is in British Columbia, in the eastern and southern part of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, as well as nearby mainland areas along the Salish Sea. In western Washington and Oregon, ''C. douglasii'' ranges from the western side of the Cascade Range westward through the San Juan Islands, the Puget Lowland, and the Williamette Valley to the Olympic Mountains and Pacific Coast Ranges, though it is relatively less frequent near to the Pacific coast. Southward from southwestern Oregon and into California, the distribution gradually becomes more coastal, ranging from the Pacific coast into the Klamath Mountains and California Coast Ranges. It is commonly found as far south as the Santa Monica Mountains and Santa Catalina Island. There is also a single collection of ''C. douglasii'' reported from Juneau, Alaska, Mirrored at
Alaskaflora.org
/ref> but this is thought to be the result of an introduction, and this species is not otherwise found that far north.

''C. douglasii'' is also found in the moist western ranges of the interior mountains of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Columbia Mountains, the westernmost subranges of the Rocky Mountains, and the Blue and Wallowa Mountains, ranging from the British Columbia Interior south to northeastern Oregon and as far east as northern Idaho and western Montana. In California, it occurs occasionally in the western side of the northern Sierra Nevada.

History

''Clinopodium douglasii'' was widely used by the indigenous peoples of California and the Pacific Northwest Coast, generally in the form of a tea, both as a medicine and as a beverage. Ethnobotanical records of use of the plant are recorded among many indigenous peoples ranging from the Saanich of British Columbia to the Luiseño and Cahuilla of southern California. Mirrored at: Later Spanish- and English-speaking settlers learned of the uses of this plant from native peoples and incorporated it into their own folk medicine traditions. Spanish missionaries gave the name ''yerba buena'' or ''hierba buena'' (good herb) to the plant, a Spanish common name for spearmint and other edible mints.

The herb has had a long association with the history of San Francisco. In 1776, Pedro Font, the Franciscan chaplain of the de Anza Expedition, noted the abundance of ''hierba buena'' around the expedition's encampment at Mountain Lake, near to the Presidio of San Francisco, for which the expedition was tasked with finding a site. (Spanish original)
English translation
In the Spanish and Mexican eras of San Francisco, the undeveloped northwestern corner of San Francisco, where the plant was abundant, was given the name ''El Paraje de Yerba Buena'' (Place of the Yerba Buena). The area included Yerba Buena Cove, a favored anchorage, and the name was later extended to the ''Isla de la Yerba Buena'' (Yerba Buena Island), which faced the cove. In 1835, the civilian ''pueblo'' of Yerba Buena was founded on the shores of the cove, which would later grow into the American city of San Francisco. p. 141. "Yerba Buena" is still used for many place names in the San Francisco area.

Taxonomy

Early collections and type specimen

In 1816, the ''Rurik'' expedition visited San Francisco and its chief botanist, Adelbert von Chamisso, made the first scientific collections of this species. These botanical specimens were eventually sent to George Bentham, a botanist specializing in the mint family, for botanical diagnosis. p. 72, 80. Bentham examined these specimens for his initial publication of this species and in latter work on this species, also examined collections made by Archibald Menzies, David Douglas, and John Scouler, among others. By the 20th century, the initial collections made by von Chamisso were lost, and in 1927 Carl Epling selected an early collection made by David Douglas in 1825 at Cape Disappointment, near the mouth of the Columbia River, as the neotype specimen. This type specimen is currently deposited in Kew Herbarium.

19th and 20th centuries

George Bentham examined von Chamisso's 1816 collections from San Francisco and made the first publication of the species name in 1831, initially recognizing the samples as belonging to two related but different species, ''Thymus Chamissonis'' (named for von Chamisso) and ''Thymus Douglasii'' (named in honor of David Douglas). In 1834, Bentham transferred the species from ''Thymus'' to ''Micromeria'' and merged the two species under the name ''Micromeria Douglassii''. Bentham had initially separated the two based on small differences in leaf shape and position, but after examining more specimens, decided that what he had called ''Thymus Chamissonis'' was simply an ecotypic variation caused by growing in a more open environment than the specimen of ''Thymus Douglasii'' that he'd first examined. In 1842, Friedrich Ernst Ludwig von Fischer and Carl Anton von Meyer described a collection of yerba buena made at Fort Ross as a separate species, ''Micromeria barbata'', based on the hairy inner surface of the corolla tube. This differentiation has not been generally accepted by later authors, who regard it as a synonym of ''Micromeria'' or ''Clinopodium douglasii''.

When Bentham transferred this species to ''Micromeria'', he placed it in a newly described section, ''Micromeria'' sect. ''Hesperothymus'', alongside other species such as '' Micromeria Brownei'', based largely on the arrangement of flowers (mostly solitary pedicellate flowers found at the leaf axils), as well as the presence of more or less dentate leaf margins and the often prostrate, spreading habit of the plant overall. The subgeneric classification of this species in sect. ''Hesperothymus'' was adhered to by botanical authors through the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the generic classification of sect. ''Hesperothymus'' varied considerably between authors, leading to this species being placed in a number of genera over its history. In the 1890s, Otto Kuntze and John Isaac Briquet argued that many of Bentham's mint family genera were poorly defined and pursued a lumping classification strategy, with Kuntze placing all sections of ''Micromeria'' within ''Clinopodium'' and Briquet placing them in ''Satureja''. While Kuntze argued that the name ''Clinopodium'' had priority due to its use by pre-Linnean authors, Briquet's classification system proved more popular with later taxonomists.

For the next century following Briquet's publication, the names ''Micromeria douglasii'', ''Micromeria chamissonis'', and ''Satureja douglasii'' were all in use by various botanical authors. Usage depended on whether the author accepted Bentham's concept of the genus ''Micromeria'' or Briquet's broader concept of ''Satureja'', and also on some disagreement as to whether the species epithet ''chamissonis'' or ''douglasii'' took priority, as both names had been found in the original publication of this species. New discoveries of Lamiaceae species through the 20th century that did not fit well into Bentham's generic concepts led to more plant taxonomists (particularly in North America) embracing the broader genus concept of ''Satureja'' by the latter half of the 20th century, and use of the name ''Satureja douglasii'' for this species overwhelmingly predominated in field guides and regional floras as a result.

Molecular phylogenetic work and current status

Beginning in the 1990s, the growth of molecular phylogenetics led to the findings that existing concepts of ''Satureja'' and ''Micromeria'' were polyphyletic and led to more circumscribed monophyletic definitions of these genera. In 1995, Philip D. Cantino and Steven J. Wagstaff, carried out the first molecular phylogenetic tree that included this species, based on a restriction site analysis. They concluded that ''Calamintha'' and a number of New World Mentheae genera and species, including then-''Satureja douglasii'', formed a distinct clade separate from ''Satureja'' sensu stricto (represented by ''Satureja montana'') and from ''Micromeria''. In 1998, they recommended use of ''Clinopodium'' as a synonym for ''Calamintha'' and that the former was the older name that took priority, and that species of sect. ''Hesperothymus'' also be transferred to a new, broadly-defined genus ''Clinopodium'', specifically listing ''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze as the preferred name for this species. This concept of ''Clinopodium'' was endorsed in later synoptical works on the family Lamiaceae and the genus ''Micromeria'' published in the 2000s.

In 2010, Christian Bräuchler and coauthors published a large scale molecular phylogenetic analysis of the subtribe Menthinae based on DNA sequencing of both nuclear ITS and several regions of chloroplast DNA. The resulting phylogeny showed strong support for three distinct clades within the Menthinae: ''Satureja'', ''Micromeria'', and a "''Clinopodium'' group" that included a "New World" subgroup that in turn included ''Clinopodium douglasii'' along with a number of other New World species, variously under the name ''Clinopodium'' and the names of 22 other genera. The relationship of ''C. douglasii'' to other members of the New World group was not well-resolved in this analysis. The polyphyletic nature of ''Clinopodium'' was acknowledged, but no further name changes were recommended until systematic nomenclatural work was carried out on this complex group. In the 2010s, further molecular phylogenetic work on the subtribe Menthinae by Bryan T. Drew and Kenneth J. Sytsma using various chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences more clearly resolved the cladistic structure of this group and the relationships of ''Clinopodium douglasii''.

The phylogeny depicted below is based on those outlined in Bräuchler (2010), Drew & Sytsma (2012), and Drew, et al. (2017), and follows the cladistic terminology given in Bräuchler (2010):

The New World group includes ''Clinopodium douglasii'' and a large number of other species of ''Clinopodium'' sensu lato, as well as 22 named genera. Within the New World group, the phylogenetic trees in the papers by Drew, et al. suggest a relationship between ''C. douglasii'' and several South American species currently classified as ''Clinopodium'', such as '' C. sericifolium'' and '' C. taxifolium'', as well as the South American genus ''Minthostachys''.

, Plants of the World Online continued to place the species in the genus ''Micromeria'', though databases such as the Jepson Herbarium eFlora, iNaturalist, Calflora,Calflora
''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze
/ref> and the USDA PLANTS DatabaseUnited States Department of Agriculture PLANTS Database, Plant Profile
''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze
/ref> place the species in ''Clinopodium''.

Uses

This species was used by native groups throughout its range of occurrence, from Southern California to western British Columbia, both as a beverage and a medicine. The most widespread use was as a mint-flavored tea consumed as a beverage, a use that was taken up by non-native settlers as well. The herb was also used as a medicine, particularly as a treatment for colds and fevers, for abdominal pain and colic, and as a " blood purifier" or as "good for the kidneys". Prepared in the form of a strong decoction or infused in goat's milk, yerba buena was used as an anthelmintic by the Rumsen and Mutsen Ohlone and the Chumash, as well as by Mission Indians and Californios in the Central Coast area of California. epublished as: /ref> The Hoopa and Karuk peoples are reported to have sometimes worn vines of the plant around their neck or in their hair as a fragrance, while native people of the Oregon coast are said to have used the aromatic plant to disguise their scent when hunting.

See also

* '' Clinopodium chandleri''
* '' Clinopodium mimuloides''

Notes

References

External links

(Databases not listed under "Taxon identifiers")
* BONAP's North American Plant Atlas
''Clinopodium''
* Jepson eFlora
''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze
* Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria
''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze
* Oregon Flora
''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze
* E-Flora BC
''Clinopodium douglasii'' (Benth.) Kuntze
* Montana Field Guide
Yerba buena (''Satureja douglasii'')

{{Taxonbar, from1=Q10752340, from2=Q14924309, from3=Q39082438

douglasii
Flora of California
Flora of the Northwestern United States
Flora of Western Canada
Natural history of the California chaparral and woodlands
Natural history of the California Coast Ranges
Natural history of San Francisco
Plants described in 1831
Taxa named by George Bentham
Adelbert von Chamisso
Herbs
Herbal teas