Ethnobotany of the Himalayas: The Nepal, Bhutanese, and Tibetan Himalayas
Plant use in the Nepal Himalaya, recorded in the 6500-year-old text of the Rigveda, ranks among the earliest uses of medicinal plants (Malla and Shakya 1984). Another early account, the Saushrut Nighantu, is perhaps the oldest Nepali medicinal plant book,
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The Nepal Himalaya Plant use in the Nepal Himalaya, recorded in the 6500-year-old text of the Rigveda, ranks among the earliest uses of medicinal plants (Malla and Shakya 1984). Another early account, the Saushrut Nighantu, is perhaps the oldest Nepali medicinal plant book, which was produced during the rule of the Great King Mandev in the fifth century, and records the uses of 278 Nepalese medicinal plants (Subedi and Tiwari 2000; Gewali and Awale 2008). Later compendia of herbal pharmacopoeias such as Chandra Nighantu and Nepali Nighantu published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, described 750 plants and 971 articles (IUCN Nepal 2004). R. M. Kunwar Ethnobotanical Society of Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal B. P. Subedi Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources, Kathmandu, Nepal S. R. Baral Maijubahal-7 Chabahil 7, Kathmandu, Nepal T. Maraseni University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Lanzhou, China C. LeBoa Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Y. P. Adhikari Chair of Biogeography, BayCEER, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany R. W. Bussmann (*) Department of Ethnobotany, Institute of Botany and Bakuriani Alpine Botanical Garden, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia Saving Knowledge, La Paz, Bolivia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Kunwar et al. (eds.), Ethnobotany of the Himalayas, Ethnobotany of Mountain Regions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45597-2_5-1
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During 1802–1803, a French botanist Francis Buchanan-Hamilton who visited Nepal was the first foreigner to catalogue the useful plants of this country. Later the books Prodromus Florae Nepalensis by D. Don in 1825 and Tentamen Florae Nepalensis by N. Wallich were noteworthy in presenting the records of useful plants of Nepal. Due to its geographical location and the isolationist policies of its Rana rulers, Nepal remained inaccessible to much of the outside world and became known as a “land of mystery.” After the Anglo-Nepalese war (1814–1816), the government made slight concessions and allowed a few British botanists to visit Kathmandu, but the area remained mostly off limits to outsiders (Bhatt 1964). The inaccessibility of Nepal to foreigners was well versed by Hooker (1855) and Heim and Gansser (1939). The situation changed in 1950 when the Rana rule came to an end. While the collection of plants for different purposes dated back to centuries, the research on medicinal and food plants from eastern Nepal by ML Banerji in 1955 (Banerji 1955) was considered to be the first publication on Nepal’s ethnobotany. Since then, many researchers have studied the medicinal and edible wild plants of Nepal. The seminal early works on medicinal plants of Nepal come from BD Pandey (1964), PR Pande (1964), Devkota (1968), and Malla and Shakya (1984), while the paper by Singh (1968) on wild food plants was also influential to the field (Rajbhandary and Winkler 2015). T
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