Dundas, Ont. — Inside a glass cupola its promoters rhapsodize as the Taj Mahal of Canadian greenhouses, the possible future of herbal medicine in this country and maybe the world grows in quiet rows.

With a football field length's worth of echinacea to the left and St. John's wort to the right, gregarious greenhouse owners Andrè and Pascale Harster wend their way between the plants and describe a contradiction.

"What we want to do is create the Rolls-Royce of plant-based medicine, something that is really out of this world," Ms. Harster says, smiling at the aptness of her metaphor. But Rolls-Royce doesn't necessarily mean the greenest, largest and healthiest-looking plants.

"The poor pitiful starved ones may turn out to be the best ones because they have more of the good things in them," Ms. Harster says as she gestures toward a table full of water-deprived St. John's wort so pale and frail that the plants look as though they will be dead by tomorrow.

What the plants don't indicate is what is driving the Harsters and their University of Guelph collaborator, biologist Praveen Saxena, on their $2-million quest to have the first place to systematically develop and grow medicinal plants that are uniform in their qualities, predictable in their growing time and harvestable year-round.

One key impetus to their research is the ecological recklessness with which medicinal plants are being gathered in large parts of the world. Last year, the World Wildlife Federation completed an analysis of the sad state of the planet's natural medicinals. "Some 150 species are reported to be threatened in at least one European country as a result of over-collection from the wild," it concluded. "Looking further afield, well-known North American plants at risk of extinction in the wild include some species of and varieties of echinacea, goldseal (hydrastis canadensis) and American ginseng."

Part of what is fuelling what has been likened to a potential holocaust is a medicinal-plant industry that has been growing by about 10 per cent a year in the developed world. This means that instead of the traditional happenstance harvesting, plants are now gathered thoughtlessly and en masse.

"Someone comes from the nearest town and deposits 25 bags and says, 'Fill them up, and I will be back next week and I will give you 25 rupees each for them,' " Alan Hamilton, who co-wrote the WWF report on endangered medicinal plants, says in describing a situation he is familiar with in Nepal.

The pressure on the wild plants is so intense that the federation has been pushing for regulations requiring manufacturers to indicate that the material they are selling has been gathered in an environmentally sound and sustainable fashion.

A logical substitution for the harvesting of wild plants is the cultivation of medicinals. While this is almost non-existent in the Third World, in some parts of the developed world as much as half of the medicinal plants may be cultivated.

Farming medicinals may reduce the human pressure on at least some wild plants, but what you can harvest may not be what you want. Secondary metabolites, the chemicals that give the plants their special qualities, are often produced by plants in response to stress. While animals can flee inclement or dangerous situations, plants have evolved to release biochemicals to counter the effects of such things as drought, heat, cold and insect attack.

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Old medicines
Echinacea
Also known as purple cornflower, it is a perennial plant native to the southern Great Plains of North America. It has a long history of use in native medicine as an antidote to toothaches, mumps, smallpox and measles. But it also has an deep tradition as a cure for poisonous insect and snake bites. In today's world, while it is sold as a general immune-system stimulant, its main advertised uses are the prevention and treatment of colds, flu, respiratory ailments and urinary-tract infections. Echinacea is sold in tinctures, tablets, liquids or pills, which are in turn made from roots, leaves, flowers and seeds. While there are nine species of echinacea identified in nature, only three, Echinacea angustifolia, Echinacea pallida and Echinacea purpurea, are used in herbal medicine. It is grown commercially in several U.S. states, Germany and Switzerland. The main growing provinces in Canada are Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan, but only a few hundred hectares are currently being sown.
St. John's wort
In use as a natural medicine for at least 2,000 years, it was promoted both as a tranquillizer and as a protector against ghosts or demonic spells. Its name comes from early Christians who sought to honour St. John the Baptist. Over the centuries, it has been used to treat colds, menstrual cramps, diarrhea, fever, asthma, snakebite wounds, burns, tuberculosis, colds and chest congestion. Today, it is most commonly used as a natural treatment for mild depressive states, and has been investigated for use in the treatment of HIV-related ailments. It is found on all continents except South America and Antarctica, and is considered an "introduced weed" in Canada. Its ability to spread promiscuously has caused it to be been declared a noxious weed in Manitoba and British Columbia. Its main medicinal part is its flowering tops, which bloom in the summer.

One result is that while plants may look the same, the stress they have been under can give them radically different biochemical profiles. For example, Prof. Saxena recently looked at 450 specimens of the Chinese medicinal known as huang-qin. He found that what is believed to be the key medicinal chemicals in the same species of plants varied by 7-to-10-fold. "This is just nature being naturally variable," he observes.

Other studies have shown that the active ingredients in St. John's wort, often described as nature's Prozac, can vary up to 50-fold between plants grown in the summer and those grown in the winter.

The swing of chemicals can also be related to different soils and temperatures. In Russia, the active ingredient in belladonna was shown to be 1.3 per cent when grown on the Crimean Peninsula and 0.3 per cent when cultivated near Leningrad. Renato Iguera, head botanist with Idena SpA, the Milan-based company that is the largest processor of herbal medicine in the world, said he once looked at the echinacea his company processes and found roughly a six-fold variation in key biochemical products.

But medicinal quality isn't the only variation in the ingredients found in cultivated plants. They also pick up various potentially dangerous elements from their growing environment. A study Prof. Saxena has done with Goldenseal, a Canadian medicinal plant used to treat a cascade of disorders ranging from eye infections to stomach aches to hemorrhages, shows that when grown in fields, the plants suck up a variety of heavy metals including dangerous lead, aluminum, mercury and aluminum.

Taken together, this means that while they might be more efficiently grown in fields, the plants may not be as biologically active or safe as wild plants grown in very specific settings.

When all the vagaries of present medicinal plant production are lumped together, the Harsters and Prof. Saxena believe that the greenhouse and its controlled environment and genetically selected plants will not just augment, but in some places may replace medicinals grown either wild or cultivated in fields.

There is a three-step process to the research. Prof. Saxena's Guelph laboratory has been growing pure lines of plants in a nutrient-water mix. "Because it is a sterile environment, you are not dealing with soil, meaning that you are not dealing with metals, herbicides, pesticides, glass, fungi, bacteria, small animals, large animals, anything else associated with normal agriculture," he says.

The plants are then transferred to the Dundas greenhouse, where they are grown in a variety of soil, water and fertilizer conditions. They then go back to Guelph, where Prof. Saxena and his associates analyze their chemical profiles. The two-year goal is to sell plants to the herbal companies that have a variation of only about 5 to 10 per cent in the amount of active biochemicals.

Prof. Saxena also hopes that the greenhouse operation will break the back of one of the biggest riddles in plant medicine. "I am interested and confused and perplexed that one plant is used for five different treatments in China and India; obviously traditional healers are looking at a subset of chemicals," he says.

Maybe, he reasons, the same plants grown in different conditions have such different chemical profiles that they indeed might be used to treat different illnesses. "If one plant has 90 per cent of a certain chemical and another only 30 per cent, they might have a very different effect in terms of antidepressant treatment versus cancer cure," he says.

Standardized plants with very different chemical makeups will let scientists test for that.

While helping to save the world's endangered medicinal plants from extinction and producing a plant with a uniform biochemistry would seem to be virtues unto themselves, both the Harsters and Prof. Saxena admit that the Taj Mahal of greenhouses is as much a creature of government policy as it is of environmental consciousness.

As of the first of this year, the Natural Health Product Regulations started altering forever Canada's herbal medicine industry, estimated to be worth $1.1-billion to $1.8-billion.

The Canadian regulations, whose full effects will come into place over five years, aim to provide access to natural products that are "safe, effective and of high quality while respecting the freedom of choice, and philosophical and cultural diversity."

While much of the change will revolve around the uniformity of the manufacturing processes and new information about the product the makers must put on labels, industry representatives believe that the regulations will inspire a revolution in the "science" of medicinal plant cultivation.

Clearly, in a regulatory regime where you must tell the buyer what he or she is purchasing, the industry requires a product whose biochemical makeup remains consistent over time. "Without it, how are you going to going to guarantee the therapeutic effect of what you are selling," asks David Skinner, head of the Non-Prescription Drug Manufacturers Association of Canada.

"And if standardization is the wave of the future, I think this [the Harster approach] has a huge potential," says Gary Leong, vice-president, scientific and technical affairs, for Jamieson Laboratories, Canada's largest natural products company.

Indeed, even though their greenhouse hasn't grown a single commercial crop, the Harsters have already received inquiries about how much echinacea it can provide.

But as in all things where science, technology and the marketplace merge, success is not certain. The Harsters' pure and perfect echinacea may cost two or three times as much as today's product -- a price difference Pascale Harster says still means that natural product pills will cost only a few pennies more each.

A larger issue may be the cachet of the wild plant. The users of natural products often argue that the effectiveness of the medicine isn't a function of the operation of one or two bioactive substances, but represents an ineffable mixture of what may be hundreds of different plant chemicals.

"I think you are always going to have a significant slice of the market which believes nature provides the best sort of stuff no matter what is in it. That is part of the reason that in Asia wild echinacea sells for 30 times more than a cultivated plant," says Susanne Schmitt, a plant conservation officer with the WWF.

Stephen Strauss writes on science for The Globe and Mail.

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