It is so great to find wintergreen out in the wild, especially when it's got berries on. It's great to have wintergreen tea, around the campfire or on a break during a hike. In Wisconsin, you have the Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis) that has the same wintergreen oils in it. It's good for tea, too. The Sweet Birch (Betula lenta) is more in the northeast US, but it has an even stronger flavor -- it was the original source for commercial wintergreen oil. It's a lot easier to harvest twigs and branches than tiny little wintergreen leaves! Of course, now commercial wintergreen oil is just a laboratory chemistry concoction.

Here's some fun when you are in Wisconsin with folks that are hesitant to really breathe deep and smell things out in the woods. Find some wintergreen or yellow birch and have them smell that (scrape some bark off the birch twigs first). Then find some sassafras and have them smell the scraped twigs. By then, they have gotten over their hesitation. So then go to the skunk cabbage and give them a piece of leaf to smell. This works every time! It's good for laughs all around - but more importantly, it gets them over their fear of really smelling things in the outdoors.