Jardin Sachamama

For several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, BD received herbarium specimens and letters describing ethnomedical uses for the plants, from knowledgeable indigenous and mestizo Peruvians. In 1991, Kathleen Harrison set up a project to fund an indigenous ethnobotanical garden near Iquitos, Peru, and she went to work there in 1992. Over several years’ time, this became the Sachamama Garden, directed by Francisco Montes Shuña. This garden served, and still does, as a place to educate Peruvian students and foreign eco-tourists who have an interest in the many uses of hundreds of forest plant species. Ethnobotanist Susan Leopold, with help from BD, later lived there and composed their guidebook in Spanish and English.