Plantain is perhaps the most “down to earth” of all plants: it chooses to grow where people walk the most—beside roads, on field ridges, between cart tracks—its leaves hugging the ground in a rosette. Wheels roll over it, cattle trample it, and still it stays green. This unkillable toughness caught the attention of the ancients three thousand years ago.

Fuyi: The Gathering Song of the Book of Songs

In the Book of Songs, the Odes of the South has a piece called “Fuyi”: “Gather, gather the fuyi; here we gather it.” Fuyi is plantain. The whole poem repeats the act of gathering in a light, quick rhythm; the scholar Wen Yiduo called it a “nursery-rhyme-like” work song—women gathered plantain while singing, all in high spirits. Why did the ancients love to pick it? First, it was food: the tender leaves were wild greens that saved many in famine. Second, it was medicine: plantain seeds promote urination and brighten the eyes, a standby remedy among the folk.

— Book of Songs, “Odes of the South · Fuyi” —

Gather, gather the fuyi,

lightly we pick it.

Gather, gather the fuyi,

lightly we have it.

(Pick and pick the plantain, gathering as we sing.)

Plantain: A “Road Bully’s” Survival Technique

Botanically, plantain is a perennial herb of the Plantaginaceae. Its basal leaves are oval or elliptic with several parallel veins; in summer it sends up slender spike-like inflorescences and sets tiny seeds. Its most special gift is “trample resistance”: the leaves are thick and tough, the roots well developed, and because it hugs the ground, however much carts, horses, and feet crush it, as long as a root remains it keeps spreading. The ancients saw it thriving wherever wheels passed and named it “before the cart” (cheqian); because it also grew in cattle tracks, they called it “cattle’s trace.” It asks for no rich soil and contends for no high place, yet in the humblest spot it lives out its most tenacious form.

• How to know it: Basal leaves in a rosette with arcuate veins; flower stalks erect, spikes slender; seeds extremely small.
• Medicinal use: Plantain seed enters medicine as cool and sweet: it promotes urination, clears heat, and brightens the eyes; folk practice boils the whole herb to clear heat and ease urination.
• As food: In spring gather the tender leaves, blanch them, and serve cold, use as filling, or cook in soup—with a faint fresh scent; older leaves are coarse in fiber and not good raw.

Great Meaning Hides in the Grass

Plantain never enters gardens and rarely appears in painting or verse; it belongs to the fields and to common folk. In years of famine it was life-saving wild greens; on ordinary days it is an unnoticed roadside weed. Yet it is exactly this plant that has been sung from the Book of Songs down to today, that walked from the cart tracks into the pharmacopoeia—reminding us that the value of a plant never lies in where it stands, but in how, however it is treated, it can hold its roots and grow its green. Resilience in the humblest place: that is probably the plainest lesson plantain teaches us.

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Keywords: plantain · fuyi · Book of Songs · plantain seed · wild vegetable