Wasiwaska in Brazil is Dr Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve

Gardening just got even more quietly inspirational.

Among Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s itemised tips for for the Western psychedelic therapy sector presented in his Vital lecture is: ‘Experience the medicines among beautiful, dedicated surroundings.’

Another recommendation is to grow the plants and fungi locally, plus grant patients access, “So they can spend time in the forest feeling the presence of non-human persons. There is healing from contact with the forest itself.” Specimens should be kept around at least, so “People have direct perception of them.”

Wasiwaska is Dr Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve, retreat and research centre on a far corner of Santa Caterina island, Brazil’s answer to Ibiza. Artist Alex Gray, Cosmic Serpent author Jeremy Narby, writers Graham Hancock and Sue Blackmore, plus DMT pioneer Dr Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman are among the luminaries on Wasiwaska’s advisory board.

Dr Luna, who was born on Santa Caterina is not the only local ecologist; an initiative to reintroduce oysters to the ecosystem has proved stunningly successful. 

This El Jardin de la Ciencia (scientific garden) was founded in 1996 while Dr Luna was teaching at nearby San Catarina University. It boasts extensive ethnobotanical gardens, a psychedelic library, and study facilities plus guest rooms. It is the culmination of several other attempts that Dr Luna didn’t let phase him.

Dr Luna showcased the garden in a speech titled The Wasiwaska Ethnobotanical Garden in Southern Brazil: A Chronicle at Exeter University (where he is an associate research fellow) for its Transdisciplinary Research Colloquium on Psychedelics in July.

The enclave is home to miles of ayahuasca vines, fifty-plus chacruna plants, capi, yagé, plus even more exotic DMT-containing plants like the distinctive brugmansia aurea, which flowers near constantly and produces “an intoxicating scent, that at night is overpowering. Its leaves vary in length like a key. A spider living inside the flowers changes colour accordingly; the bees are interacting with the spiders, getting some sort of effect. Perhaps it’s possible to make psychotropic honey.” 

Dr Luna and Anna tap sap from the psychoactive vines and drink it as a syrup. DMT-containing Cohaba trees, which Christopher Columbus turned down and took tobacco home instead, are also in situ. Non-native plants like Polynesian kava-kava, Tabernaemontana catharinensis a South American plant with similar effects to iboga, and peyote – which has been grafted on to San Pedro so it grows much quicker – have been cautiously introduced. 

Permaculture innovations like clitora plants, which sport vibrant flowers and invigorate clay soil, support the ecosystem. Living alongside are the hummingbirds, bees and spiders one would expect in the wild. The garden is mostly curated by Dr Luna’s wife Anna, who recently introduced marmoset monkeys. These headed straight for the Cohoba trees that were part of their ecosystem, taking resin in morning and evening. The monkeys climbed other DMT-rich plants that weren’t part of their natural environment and did the same.

“My first teacher, Don Emilio,” about whom Dr Luna made probably the first ayahuasca documentary Don Emilio and his Little Doctors in 1984, “told me everything is full of life, of spirit,” he reminds us.

See what’s on at Wasiwaska via wasiwaska.org