My first encounter with Lycium barbarum was earlier this year, in the far South-west Scotland, at a place called Port Logan. I was busy trying to photograph Sea Beet for my blog (see https://wordpress.com/post/botsocscot.wordpress.com/4736). Growing alongside the Beet, on the foreshore, a rather pale green bush caught my eye. What plant is that? It was like nothing I’d seen before, but examination of the flowers suggested the family was Solanaceae. To my surprise, this plant turned out to be Lycium barbarum, a shrub that produces the red Gogi berries I’d seen in China. My Chinese friends had offered me gǒuqǐ several times, and suggested I have a taste: “John, just pour boiling water on the berries”. I still have two packets of these berries, given to me as parting gifts, and I’ve started putting them on my porridge instead of sultanas. The species has been part of Chinese medicine for a thousand years. A wide range of health benefits are claimed for it, although many are probably bogus (see below). I feel neither more nor less healthy following my use of the berries.
The species was introduced to British Gardens in the 17th Century, and became known as the Duke of Argyll’s Tea Plant (some say Tea Tree). The third Duke of Argyll was Archibald Campbell (1682 –1761), a man of many parts. He was well-educated (Eton, Glasgow University and Utrecht University). He studied Law. Afterwards, he became a soldier for a while before rising to high office. By I705 he was already Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in Scotland and the first governor of the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1727. He was an enthusiastic gardener and he especially liked to grow exotic plants at his estate at Whitton Park in the south of England, quite near to what is now the Twickenham Rugby Football Ground (but quite far from Argyll). Someone in China sent him a ‘tea tree’ which was not actually a tea tree but Lycium barbarum. Was it an unscrupulous dealer who had run out of proper tea plants (Camellia sinensis). Or was it a joke? I like to think it was a joke.
The Duke’s plant was not the first of its kind to come to our shores. The date of introduction to Britain from China was earlier, 1696, according to Symes et al (1986). William .J. Bean, in his great work Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles (first published 1914) refers to Lycium halimifolium, a plant raised from seed in 1752 by Bernard de Jussieu, collected in China by the Jesuit missionary d’Incarville, near Peking (now Beijing). However, later it was shown to be the same species as Lycium barbarum (Bean 1973). Coats (1963) refers to one in the Royal Gardens of St James in 1698 and two in 1709 and 1712 grown by the Duchess of Beaufort (Coats 1963). We may conclude that there were several early introductions.
Names of introduced species are often troublesome. The plant’s Latin name Lycium was given by Pedanius Dioscorides (date ca. 40-90) and the full name Lycium chinense was given by Linnaeus in the 1750s. There is a closely related species called Lycium chinense which is said to be ‘less spiny’. When I typed this name into the BSBIs ‘Maps’ database I saw the distribution is much like L. barbarum. I think these two species are now regarded as the same, and some taxonomists recognise the aggregate species Lycium barbarum agg. This is more or less in agreement with what W.J. Bean said about the status of L chinense in the Eighth Edition of his book (the one I’ve been looking at).
There are several English names. Bean calls it the Chinese Box Thorn and so does Alice Coats. Sometimes it is Wolfberry. These days, it is almost always Duke of Argyll’s Tea Plant.
In Scotland and Ireland the species is mostly coastal, more abundant on the East than the West. In the rest of the UK the plant comes inland, and is found in hedgerows, with an eastern bias. In JD Hooker’s Student’s Flora of the British Islands, published in 1884, it appears only in the Appendix as ‘A cottage ornament’. Again, it has an eastern bias. I delved into the BSBI’s data base to explore the history of the species. It has now been recorded 9567 times, with 23 records before 1900. The earliest records are from North Somerset and Mablethorpe on the coast of Lincolnshire where in 1890 it was growing on ‘a sea bank’.
In 2003 the UK government launched a project to protect traditional countryside hedgerows, and specifically mentioned Duke of Argyll’s Tea Plant as one of the undesirables. In 2008 the importation of mature specimens was banned due to the fear that the plant may harbour disease that could infect potatoes and tomatoes.
Lycium barbarum has increased in recent times, dispersed presumably by birds. It is widely available from nurseries in the UK and I’ve seen it on allotments. It has found its way across much of the temperature world. In other European countries and the USA it is considered invasive. I’ve watched You Tube movies from North America on how to grow it at home. Their message is: it’s easy, but mind the spines and give it a trellis.
The reason for its recent popularity is that it has been hailed as a ‘superfood’ in the West. Its reputation rests on its widespread use as in Chinese medicine. Get-rich-quick entrepreneurs in the Western World have sold it to the unsuspecting public by exaggerating its efficacy. It’s worth looking at what is known about its health benefits by interrogating Google-Scholar.
On Google-Scholar I employed the general principle that we should only look for evidence-based work. ‘Evidence’ in medicine, has a strict meaning. It is clear that when someone says ‘I took this medicine for four days and it made me better’ does not constitute evidence. They might have got better with no medicine at all. ‘Evidence’ requires reports from n cases, where n is a big number (ideally thousands but often this is impracticable and sometimes, for new drugs, it much less than 100). Secondly, there must be a ‘control’ to compare drug with no drug. For medicines, the ‘control’ may be a placebo which is something that looks like the drug but is effectively nothing at all, often a pill with the same shape and colour that looks like the pill itself. Thirdly, the experiment must be ‘blind’ wherein the patient doesn’t know whether they have taken the drug or the fake-drug. I had to search for a long time but did eventually find such a paper. Amagase & Nance (2008) gave their subjects Gogiberry juice or a placebo. The number of human subjects was rather small, but statistical tests of significance appear to have been done. I cannot access the full content on the internet without paying for it (grrr!!!); however, the Abstract says:
“Significant differences between day 1 and day 15 were found in the GoChi group (n = 16) in increased ratings for energy level, athletic performance, quality of sleep, ease of awakening, ability to focus on activities, mental acuity, calmness, and feelings of health, contentment, and happiness. GoChi also significantly reduced fatigue and stress, and improved regularity of gastrointestinal function. In contrast, the placebo group (n = 18) showed only two significant changes (heartburn and happiness)”.
Most of the papers that Scholar turns up are from Chinese laboratories, many of them searching for promising bioactive compounds which may, in the fullness of time, become pharmaceutical products. In China very many laboratories are well-equipped to do such work and they find plenty of compounds of interest. One theme that occurs is dry-eye disease in rats. Goji berry definitely cures laboratory rats suffering from dry eyes. Some claims have been made regarding cancer. The research has usually been on cell lines under laboratory incubations. Or, searching for anti-oxidants. If you haven’t studied chemistry you can skip the following paragraph.
According to many, the degenerative processes of aging and possibly cancer are caused by ‘free radicals’. A free radical is an atom with a missing electron in its outer shell. In this state, the atom is highly reactive and can damage cells of the body. Anti-oxidants are compounds which react with free radicals, rendering them harmless. Fruits and vegetables are rich in anti-oxidants. It turns out that goji has many, and there are hundreds of Chinese papers describing them. My issue with all this work is: sure, Goji has interesting anti-oxidants but lots of other fruits have them too. Why didn’t you compare gogi with blackcurrants or tomatoes? Perhaps these familiar fruits are just as rich in anti-oxidants.
For the last word on health benefits, let’s turn to a Swiss paper (Potterat, 2010):
“In view of the available pharmacological data and the long tradition of use in the traditional Chinese medicine, L. barbarum and L. chinense certainly deserve further investigation. However, clinical evidences and rigorous procedures for quality control are indispensable before any recommendation of use can be made for Goji products”.
China continues to develop production, and the species is no longer entirely wild – now there are distinct cultivars (Mi et al 2020). For a highly readable (but heavily romanticised) description of the industry in China, see the BBC’s article at https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200226-the-berry-that-keeps-asia-looking-young.
The BBC correspondent writes beautifully but seems to have been wearing her rose-tinted spectacles. I do not mind writers of popular articles taking artistic licence but I do object when suppliers in the West misrepresent the health benefits of Goji for their commercial gain (but isn’t that what food advertising does all the time)?
If you want to try the berries for yourself, then head for your local Chinese supermarket. I’ll keep putting Goji berries on my porridge.
References
Amagase H & Nance DM (2008) A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Clinical Study of the General Effects of a Standardized Lycium barbarum (Goji) Juice, GoChi™.The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine VOL. 14, NO. 4 https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2008.0004
Bean WJ (1974) Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, Eighth Edition Volume 2. John Murray, London
Coats AM (1963). Garden Shrubs and their Histories. Vista Books, London.
Mi J, Yan Y, Li Y. et al. (2020) The effects of ecological factors on the chemical compounds in Lycium barbarum L.. Acta Physiol Plant 42, 84 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11738-020-03069-1
Potterat O (2010) Goji (Lycium barbarum and L. chinense): Phytochemistry, Pharmacology and Safety in the Perspective of Traditional Uses and Recent Popularity Planta Med 2010; 76(1): 7-19 DOI: 10.1055/s-0029-1186218
Symes M, Hodges A and Harvey J (1986) The plantings at Whitton. Garden History 14, 138-172.
John Grace
Botany in Scotland 