Larry Harding left his 12-gauge shotgun propped by the door that September night. He feared that otherwise he might shoot the thieves if he stumbled on them in the dark. Instead, he grabbed his camera and went out across the road where they’d raided his ginseng patch the week before. He suspected the bandits would return, and sure enough, flashlights bouncing around the woods confirmed it.
“I backed up, and I called the law, and I said: They’re here.”
Harding asked the officer to meet him on a hill near his house in Friendsville, in western Maryland, a pastoral town of about 500 a few miles south of the Pennsylvania border. Then he phoned his grown sons, Tyler and Derek, to help round up the crooks.
“After the cops came, we went down the ridge, and there they were, digging with headlamps,” he said, thumping his fist on the countertop in the small farm store where he sells herbal products. Photographs showing his dad Kenneth in his early days of cultivating ginseng decorate the walls. “We yelled, ‘Police! On the ground!’ and they just bellied right down.”
The police identified the men as Terry Blankenship, 46, and Daniel Warren, 32, from Kentucky, and charged them with theft and trespassing. They were each fined about $3,700. The theft took place in 2014, but “I’ve never seen a dime, and I ain’t gonna ever receive a dime. Because that’s what happens a lot of times. A lot of these people stealing ginseng don’t have anything.”
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Today demand in China is so great that U.S. wildlife managers worry that wild American ginseng could be on a path toward extinction, although other than common anecdotal reports of ginseng being more difficult to find, no one knows exactly how much exists in the wild. “Anyone in the trade will tell you that compared to when they started, it’s getting harder to find these plants in the wild, and the ones they do find are smaller,” said Randy Cottrell, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Pennsylvania. “The days of finding large roots are pretty much gone.”
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If collecting wild ginseng sounds easy, like casually plucking hundred-dollar bills from the forest floor, it’s not. The plant grows tightly rooted to steep, rocky hillsides in mountain woodlands thick with snakes and black bears, often in patches of briars and nettles that shred clothing and skin. It takes skill and patience to extract the roots intact.
“You want the whole thing, including all the little hairy roots. They make it more valuable,” said Eric Burkhart, a Pennsylvania State University botanist and renowned ginseng expert.
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“A root like I just dug, which a local buyer here in Pennsylvania might pay $10 for, might sell for $10,000 in mainland China,” he said. “In the ginseng distribution areas in northern China, I’ve seen these things in glass cases for $220,000 a root. You think, who would ever consume a root for $220,000? They don’t. It’s a status symbol.” They hang it on the wall, frame it, or present it to a government official or a business partner. “They don’t put it in chicken soup—they use that Wisconsin cultivated stuff for that. The high-end stuff goes to collectors. They treat it as art.”
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
