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Mushrooms, Mycology and Psychedelics > The Ethnobotanical Garden
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Stressed Sassafras?
    #16674935 -

Hey shroomery I'm trying to figure out if anybody has any knowledge on what effects stress have on sassafras?

I came across some sass trees growing on a piece of land that's getting bulldozed to build houses or something. What caught my eye about them is they were only like 2-4 feet tall but had about twice as many leaves as sass trees more than twice their size! Really they looked more like bushy marijuana plants than sass trees! (Just to give an idea of how bushy they were!) There's sass all over where I live but this is the first time I've seen them growing out of dry rocky dirt in full sun! Usually they're hiding in the woods or atleast by the edge of the woods...

I have a lot of pits in my area so I'm used to seeing that exact growth pattern in plants. (Short, many leaves, pretty mature but just with stunted growth.) I've found a 6 in. tall pot plant on its 1oth set of leaves so I'd attribute that to the dry soil conditions. It also had more rigid leaves than I'm used to seeing on them. A lot stronger. So I took a leaf and balled it up and it smelled super strong. Comparing it to a 'typical' sass leaf, from a tree 3x as big, the 'stressed' one smelled about twice as strong!

Well that got me thinking about something I read earlier in the day. A few different people on various forums stated that in the US the best time to harvest sass oil is in the fall. I may be wrong but I'm guessing the cold shock of fall stresses the plant and makes it produce more oil. I'm wondering if that could be happening with these sass only for different reasons.

I want to run a little test and see if these smaller bushy trees do actually have a higher oil % than the taller lanky sass growing in/next to the woods. Plants get their energy from the soil and the sun. I'm wondering if either of those sorces of energy play a more predominate role in sass's oil content?

Well I'm thinking about setting up a steam distill that I can fit like 5oo g's into and take root bark samples from sass in 3 different environments to compare.

The first sample will be (1) taken from sass in full sunlight with terrible dirt (2) taken from middle of woods where it recieves little sunlight but has great soil and finally (3) a sample that gets a fair amount of sun and has decent soil. If any differences are noticed the next step is figuring out how to induce those triggers. With only 6-1o% oil from dried bark every bit matters!

I'm only determining the oil precentage, not the safrole content. If anybodys already tested if environmental factors play a role in sass's essential oil production or has any relevent info plz share so I can tweak my test accordingly.

St0ned.crazy


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Re: Stressed Sassafras? [Re: st0ned.crazy]
    #16675985 -

I would say environmental factors play a lesser role than genetics.  This is just my first guess as to what i have observed in OTHER plants.

In order to actually have factual data however you will need to clone one tree into 6+ testing sunlight variables and nutrient/soil variables separately.

It just simply isn't as simple as going to different trees.

I hear temperature/season can play a roll in oil content, though i can't seem to find where i read that.


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Re: Stressed Sassafras? [Re: POWAtrippin]
    #16676812 -

Interesting project!

The role of essential oils in plants is not very well understood, but below are the generally known factors.

1. The oils are used as attractants for certain kind of insects.
2. Oils are used to protect against parasites or animals.(Safrole is known to cause cancer in rodents)
3. It's used as protection excreted when the tree is wounded, (more applicable to conifers)
4. Either involved in plant metabolism, or a wasteproduct of plant biosynthesis.
5. ?

Depending on which reasons Sassafrass produces essential oils will most likely determine when the oil content is the highest.

The effect on stressing plants is therefore quite interesting really, as it could both increase and decrease the essential oil content depending on what the plant uses its oil for.

The quote below is from a study in which essential oil production of Peppermint was monitored and compared with plants stressed by growing in salinated soil.
"Although, secondary metabolites in the medicinal and aromatic plants fundamentally produced by genetic processing but, their biosynthesis is strongly influenced by environmental factors [2]. It means biotic and abiotic environmental factors affect growth parameter, essential oil yield and perennial constituents [3, 4].
http://idosi.org/wasj/wasj11(11)/14.pdf

Meh, I don't really know where I'm going with this, but it seems like many factors can influence the production of oils and simply "harvesting in the fall" won't ensure higher content.

But based on the smell of the leaves that you posted about, it seems like you have some good oil producing conditions.

Will be waiting for your results!

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Mushrooms, Mycology and Psychedelics > The Ethnobotanical Garden
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