With such a lofty endorsement, ginseng’s use became sufficiently widespread that by the 1700s most of the wild ginseng in China had been consumed, and what little was left had become so expensive it was used mostly by members of the royal court. Enter a Jesuit priest named Joseph-François Lafitau, who had recently taken a posting in a settlement near present-day Montreal. In the fall of 1715, he happened to read in a Jesuit newsletter an article by another Father stationed in China, who described a vermillion-berried plant that produced a root highly valued for its medicinal qualities. Lafitau, who was nothing if not determined, decided to find out whether the plant existed in New France; for the rest of that autumn, and all through the ensuing winter and spring, he was fixated on finding the root. For three months, he organized search parties deep into the inhospitable bush, only to find the herb growing next to the house he was having built on the south bank of the St. Lawrence.
Soon the New World was crawling with French merchants, all eager to buy ginseng to sell to the Chinese, who quickly fell in love with the higher potency and flavour of American ginseng. Foraging for wild ginseng thus became popular in forests all through Quebec, Ontario, New England, and the Appalachian Mountains; it was particularly popular with fur trappers, who needed something to do in their off-season, and who knew how to wander into the bush without getting lost or starving to death. For this reason, ginseng became inextricably linked with the fur trade — Daniel Boone was an early and prodigious seller of ginseng root — and for more than two centuries, the buyers of ginseng were also fur buyers.
In 1897, an Ontario farmer named Clarence Hellyer was visiting his wife’s family in Michigan. During his stay, he picked up a magazine for hunters and trappers, and saw an ad placed by a fur broker in New York City — the broker was appealing to readers for ginseng. Hellyer, meanwhile, had seen the plant growing in the forests back home in Norfolk County. On his return, he tromped into the local woods, uprooted some ginseng, dried it, mailed it to New York, and received a cheque in return. This gave him an idea: if ginseng grew wild in Norfolk County, couldn’t it also be farmed?
Early attempts at cultivating ginseng in Ontario were characterized by an admixture of caution and determination. Hellyer quickly discovered how finicky the plant was, and devoted only a small plot to it, to supplement his income. Seeding was done by hand, and the shades were made of used railway fences. When a crop did survive, the fur houses in New York were only too willing to buy the root at a price significantly higher than that paid for apples or soybeans. Other local farmers followed Hellyer’s example, only to see the First World War and the ensuing depression wipe out all non-essential farming in the county. In the 1940s, Clarence Hellyer’s nephews, brothers Audrey and Russell Hellyer, again planted some seeds culled from wild ginseng, and for the next forty years were the leading growers of ginseng in the area. Doug Bradley, for instance, remembers cutting through Hellyer land on the way to school, and tromping around plots of this strange, red-berried plant that was said to rid Chinese people of illness.
That all changed in the 1980s, when the price of tobacco began to drop and Norfolk farmers began looking for other ways to make a living. By the late 1980s, the Ontario government embarked on its first tobacco reduction programs, whereby it offered to buy back tobacco quotas, leaving tobacco farmers with large infusions of cash and nothing to do. Many turned to ginseng, which then was trading at upwards of $80 a pound. Bradley, meanwhile, had just lost his foreman’s position at the Massey Ferguson plant in Brantford, Ontario, which, after years of declining revenue, had finally closed. In 1986, he planted a small plot of ginseng on land owned by his wife’s family. He also took a job with a factory in Hamilton, though he told his employer that with any luck he would be quitting sometime in the next three or four years.
The wait, he told me, was interminable; he had grown tired of working in factories and yearned for the outdoor life of a farmer. His ginseng plot, whether by skill or providence, did not succumb to grub worms, cylindrocarpon, rust, rudimentary shading, damp feet, or even the plant’s mercurial tendency to go dormant for no reason other than a certain inbred orneriness. In the fall of 1990, he began harvesting his crop; at that point, he was still plucking out the root by hand. As he was working, a car pulled over, and a Chinese fellow stepped out. He introduced himself, and offered to buy Bradley’s ginseng, right then and there, for $52 a pound. Bradley later did a quick calculation, and realized that his lone acre had just garnered him a net profit of about $60,000, a figure so high he felt staggered.
After waiting about ten minutes, I meet Marcus Cheng, a principal buyer who currently purchases much of the ginseng grown in Ontario. He is younger than I’d expected — he’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a fashionable T-shirt — and is prone to sudden eruptions of high-pitched laughter, not unlike Dave Thomas’s helium-pitched character from the old sctv series. He also speaks perfect English; during the anxiety surrounding Hong Kong’s return to the Chinese, he immigrated to Toronto with his family, where he studied first at Jarvis Collegiate and then at the University of Toronto. During his summers, he worked for the family business, slowly learning the vagaries of ginseng buying and selling.
The first thing he says is that he cannot show me the ginseng stored inside the warehouse, tell me how much ginseng he has in stock, or divulge how much he buys and sells each year. Nor could he tell me what other traditional Chinese herbs and powders he keeps on the premises. “It’s an insurance thing,” he says. “It’s a security thing. Before, when ginseng was very expensive, people were constantly breaking in and stealing it. Today we really try to keep things low key.”
This degree of secretiveness seems to be the rule in the world of ginseng; Clarence Hellyer was famously tight lipped a century ago about his new, odd-looking crop, and for the longest time rumour had it that the Hellyer family had an exclusive licence to grow ginseng, when in fact such a licence never existed. Many decades later, when Doug Bradley started farming ginseng, none of the other farmers would offer him advice or growing tips, no matter how badly he needed them. “Everybody wanted to keep this good thing to themselves,” he told me. “It was understandable, in a way.” The industry is still sufficiently unknown that a year ago, the Ontario government introduced a law making it illegal to pick ginseng, and other endangered native species, in the province. Though the law was clearly intended for poachers of wild ginseng, representatives of the Ontario Ginseng Growers Association nonetheless had to travel to Toronto and inform surprised bureaucrats that they actually farmed the stuff, and, as a result, they had to pick it. An exemption for field-cultivated ginseng was in place last June when the law came into force.
