OTOH, some good plants are as traditional as you can get. When Marco Polo got to China, they had some plants & animals that had never been seen back in Europe.

OTOH, some good plants are as traditional as you can get. When Marco Polo got to China, they had some plants & animals that had never been seen back in Europe. When Western botanists followed over the next few centuries, they brought back specimens. Especially medicinal plants before there were drug companies anyway. It would seem there might be something worthwhile about a material which made it into a pharmacopiea over a period of millennia. Eventually people started trying to give every different thing a different latin name, and when Linneaus got around to Chinese ginseng he dubbed it Panax Ginseng, simply preceding the Chinese name with panacea-derived "Panax" to classify the genus itself as the most highly regarded in the Far East for treating the widest variety of conditions. This must have also been considered relative to all the other plants that were known to the West for millennia themselves. American ginseng, known to the natives for millennia on that continent, became Panax Quinquefolius. Literally _plant with five leaves that can cure many things_.