The Growing Challenge

In which I am mostly waiting and dreaming

My kiwi vines are ready to be planted. I can't oblige them yet. Like all plant geeks I find the minute details of growing plants as enchanting as watching babies take their first tentative steps. This fuzzy kiwi has the prettiest pink down and I almost can't believe that nature makes such delicate beauty in food plants. You couldn't make a maiden blush like that.

We are in a holding pattern. I have just finished a job and for the first time in weeks can look around me and see what's going on under my nose.* Well, for one thing, as I mentioned already my spring plant purchases are all wearing the impatient look of beings who have been waiting in line in the social security office for too long. They aren't looking at me with a great deal of charity when I say "Oh little kiwi, I will plant you soon! I promise!"

For another, there are stacks of dishes and crap strewn all over the place. Laundry is the same as always at least. Which is to say that I'm behind on it, Philip barely has enough underwear and socks, and the clean stuff is busy getting dirty in piles where the black dog sleeps.

Still, I am with the growing challenge in spirit and an enormous part of me is focused on medicinal herbs and which ones I want to grow this year. These thoughts took an interesting (to me) turn after the lecture on weeds in my Master Gardening class. I ended up buying a very expensive field guide full of glossy pictures called "Weeds Of The West" on a hunch that it would also make a great field guide to spotting medicinal herbs in the garden and in the wild. I was not wrong at all.

During the same week I bought that weed book I bought a book I have coveted for months called "Culpepper's Color Herbal". Culpepper was a medical doctor from the sixteen hundreds who cataloged all of the herbs and plants used medicinally in his time. Nicholas (as I like to call him in my familiar American style) had one of the earlier mullets seen in fashion. In most cases I find it impossible to look beyond a mullet for the gem of a person beyond the hair because I think there are few hairdos more distracting. However, in Nicholas's case I feel I must look beyond his unfortunate personal style. He is a person after my own heart.

He studied to be a traditional medic but became disillusioned with the elitist nature of his medical peers and was apparently disgusted with their habit of treating people for things they didn't have and charging them for remedies they couldn't afford. So he dropped out to become an herbalist to the common people. Although he came from pretty well off people, he set himself down amongst the people who needed him most. He made it a practice to use only the common names of herbs so as to not alienate his patients and only prescribed what he thought they actually needed and when possible, told his patients where they could find the herbs they needed for themselves in the wild and what to do with them.

The man was amazing!

To be honest, I don't think I'd care to have him treat me medically though. I mean, I'd be concerned a little because of his happy use of certain poisonous plants like Lily Of The Valley. Here's what he says about this plant:

"The spirit of the flowers distilled in wine, restores speech."

But here's what's fascinating me: my weeds book is absolutely filled with traditional medicinal herbs. Which means that out there in your garden you are most likely able to find quite a few natural remedies if only you knew how to use them! One of the ones that surprises me the most is the weed called "Cleavers", though you are more likely to know it as "Catchweed" or "Bedstraw". I used to pull this sticky stuff up with loud curses because it clings to absolutely everything with the vigor of a two year old in a violent tantrum whose arms seem to be everywhere at once.

Yet this very obnoxious garden weed is apparently the path to my body resculpting plan. This is what Culpepper has to say about it:

"It is familiarly taken in broth, to keep them lean and lank that are apt to grow fat."

The real question is- will this work on them that has already become fat?

Happily, my Culpepper book, though full of his original descriptions of the plants and their uses and his opinions, is also edited to include the modern herbal uses of the plants and as it turns out, Catchweed is an important remedy in modern practice as a soothing, relaxing diuretic as well as being used to treat skin diseases internally such as psoriasis and eczema.

Which? I have.

The irony here is that since moving to Oregon I haven't been accosted by this weed at all.

I feel I should say here that I pull anything out of my garden that I don't want in it. Even if it has great medicinal purposes. I only have a small plot of my own earth to work with and I'll be damned if I let things grow in it just because they have some value to the bugs and possibly me unless I really want them there. However, if I know that dandelions can be made into an excellent** wine, I just might uproot them and make them into wine instead of adding them to the compost heap. Or if I'm digging up some Catchweed, knowing it could be valuable medicinally, I just might learn to make a tincture of it to add to my medicine stores.

What amazes me most about my weeds book is how many of the plants listed there are ones I have planted on purpose in my own yard or am planning on planting: sunflowers, cornflower, wormwood (my mom doesn't think this is a great one to plant, but doesn't it sound medieval?), burdock, yarrow, poison hemlock (oh, don't pee your pants, I'm just kidding!), foxglove, mullein, toadflax, and violet.

That is only a sampling.

I could get all riled up and incensed that sunflowers are included in a book of weeds. I like to take the alternative route, however. Often we speak of weeds as a negative thing in the landscape and calling something a weed is meant to cast it into the undesirable class of plant. Really, though, it is just as easy to change how we see weeds. Weeds seem to simply be plants who have the superior ability to thrive and flourish in a multitude of conditions, making it hardy and reliable. Generally weeds also have superior (and sometimes completely surprising) methods of reproduction so that they multiply rapidly. These are traits they share with humans, incidentally. In humans we admire vigor. We admire vigor in plants we think of as ornamental but not so much in the plants we have no room for in our gardens.

I'm not going to get mad that foxglove is considered a weed. (I know I sounded like I was going to in a previous post, but I've now given this much greater consideration.) I am going to think of weeds as a generally wonderful and useful group of vigorous plants that may fill up my medicine cabinet on occasion and may possibly land in some broth as well. I will happily uproot them from my garden when they annoy me as they most certainly will.

This week I am going nettle hunting with a friend.
Soon I will have growing challenge posts that actually include some growing action.


As a totally random unrelated note: last night I had a dream that was filled with chickens, night walks with Philip, Ewan McGregor, his wife, and their grown up daughter (they have small daughters only), and Max learning to cook in school. Plus some disgusting bugs about to hatch. Isn't the subconscious a wild place? I think Ewan's wife would enjoy knowing that for once a woman dreamt about her husband without ravishing him.*** In fact, Ewan and his wife did an annoying amount of kissing in front of me in my own dream which I think was slightly disrespectful. But we were all great friends so I put up with their shameless PDAs. No swinging occurred. You must know how I feel about that already.

*This job didn't actually take up a lot of time so much as having a deadline hanging over my head made every minute I wasn't working on it feel like stolen time and I don't have a head that weathers that sort of thing well. You know, because I'm such a delicate flower.

**Has anyone out there had dandelion wine? Because I really want to know how it's possible to make an enjoyable beverage from them. If you have some, can we do a trade of some kind so I can taste this mythical drink? I have deep doubts about it but endless curiosity.

***Jesus! What the hell is wrong with me?!!