Korean Ginseng

Set a ginseng root in the palm of your hand, and it is clear at once why people call it what they do.

In the middle is a main root, spindle-shaped or cylindrical, plump at the top and tapering toward the bottom, like the trunk of a human body. From there one or two large branches split off and run down on either side, just where two legs would be. And from those branches spreads a dense mass of tiny rootlets, as fine as hair.

People long ago looked at that shape and named the plant after exactly what they saw. The word ginseng means a man-shaped plant, or a forked root. A letter written in 1711 described the root for readers in the West. Its writer, too, brought up the shape of a human being.

So for several hundred years, in places very far apart, anyone who picked up a ginseng root thought of the same thing.

The plant that grows this root looks quite ordinary. It is a perennial herb, about 30 to 60 centimeters tall, which means roughly knee height on an adult. It bears round red berries, and inside them are small kidney-shaped seeds. Someone walking past a bed of ginseng without knowing could easily take it for a bed of vegetables.

Its scientific name is Panax ginseng. The word ginseng, the one that means a man-shaped plant, sits right inside that scientific name. So the human shape that people saw long ago still travels with the plant today. In the wild it grows in the mountains of the Russian Far East, northeast China and the Korean Peninsula. It is a plant of cold country, of forests and mountains.

Those three regions lie close together on the map and share the same kind of climate, and the plant pays no attention to any border. It simply grows wherever suits it.

And now for the most remarkable thing about it.

It grows very slowly.

Growers usually wait until the plant is five or six years old before they harvest the root.

This work asks a great deal. Someone sows a seed in the ground. It is a small kidney-shaped seed, taken from inside the plant's round red berries. Then they tend it through one winter. Then a second winter. A third. A fourth. A fifth. In all those years, what shows above the ground is only a low plant, knee high, looking much the same from one year to the next. The valuable part lies underground where no one can see it, and no one is allowed to dig it up early just to check. The grower can only trust the plant. They trust that under the soil the main root is slowly filling out, the two leg branches are growing longer, and the hair-fine rootlets are spreading a little further.

A child born in the year that bed of ginseng was sown would be starting first grade by harvest time.

In a world where everything is pushed to go faster, here is a crop that makes its grower wait six years to learn whether they got it right. That, more than its human shape, is the strangest thing about ginseng.

Six years is also long enough for a great many things to happen. Six winters. Six rainy seasons. Six years in which that patch of land must stay as it is, with no change of use and nothing built on top of it. To plant this crop is to make a long promise to your own piece of land.

Today, most of the ginseng sold on the market is cultivated, in China, South Korea and Russia. South Korea grows mainly this very species. People grow it in the same countries where it is at home in the wild.

Wild plants, meanwhile, have become rare. They are so rare that in Russia and in China, the plant is on the list of species protected by the state.

That detail says a good deal. A species goes on a protected list only when people realize it is disappearing. And a species that grows this slowly disappears very easily. All it takes is for the forest to be stripped faster than the plant can grow, and it is gone. The plant needs six years to form its root, while a person needs only one morning to dig it up.

That is also why nearly all the ginseng that travelers see today is cultivated, not wild.

Held in the hand and looked at as a plant rather than as merchandise, a root shows everything described here. There is the main root. There are the two leg branches. There are the rootlets spreading out, waiting to be counted. And there is one question worth asking above all: how old is this root?

The answer will be a small number, five or six. But behind that small number lie that many real winters in a real patch of earth, and someone who waited all those years without digging it up early.