Category — Flowering plants (that aren't bulbs)

In the Celtic tradition, St. Brigid’s day - the second of February - marks the beginning of spring.

My own climate must be similar, because this is the time of year when we start hearing the peeper frogs, and, despite the rain, see some of the signs of spring. Like this planting of violets and valerian, for instance.

Lightly mulched by the black oak leaves that are so common around here, they are beginning to show signs of life. I love how the valerian (Valeriana officinalis) takes on a bronze tinge with its early foliage.

Besides being among the first plants to show signs of life, valerian and violets have something else in common: they’re both medicinal.  Actually, a lot of ornamental plants started out as medicinal, a sort of hangover from the time when a garden was a pharmacy, larder, and household supply source.

It’s pretty obvious that valerian is medicinal; the “officinalis” in its Latin name means a plant that was sold in European apothecary shops, a plant that has medicinal value. Some of valerian’s medicinal qualities are pretty commonly known. Valerian root (that’s the medicinal part) is a muscle relaxant that can help reduce aches and pains and ease the way  to sleep. It can also  just calm you down when you’re too nervy.  Maybe that calming effect is also why valerian has been touted as an aphrodisiac. In some parts of England, these powers of valerian were recognized in another way: valerian was hung in the house to invite peace and harmony, and to prevent bickering between marriage partners. Valerian has also been used for palpitations of the heart and epilepsy.

Valerian root is indeed useful stuff, but just a caution to those who have not tried it: any preparations involving roots must be simmered, and simmering valerian smells a little bit like dirty socks or a very hairy dog coming in after rolling in something dead. Fortunately, it doesn’t taste the way it smells, but preparing it can stink up a house. A lot of people prefer capsules. If you buy valerian root this way, be sure you get a good brand; bad processing and storage mean very low quality, which means few effects for you.

Valerian’s also a great garden plant, especially for those of us who have a lot of shade. It grows well with foxglove, which shares its taste for shade, rich soil, and water. The pink-tinged flower heads smell like vanilla heaven, which endears it to me.

Violets (Viola odorata), while well-known as a garden plant, are not well-known as medicinal these days. Yet they have not lost the properties that made them valuable to Europeans in ancient times. I could write pages and pages on their magical and medicinal uses. (For those of you who think the two are at odds with each other, I’ll point out that magic and medicine come from the same root. I’ll further point out that people still put a lot of magical faith in the medicine of our times; our touching belief that doctors know everything, and our fascination with medical TV shows, are only two example of this.)

In ancient Greece, violets were used to embellish homes and temples, since they were believed to calm anger. This belief may be related to violet’s connection to the moon goddess. Perhaps it was that same connection that made the ancient Romans decorate their parties with violets to prevent drunkenness (maybe it was just quarrelsome drunkenness they were trying to alleviate?)

In more modern times, Euell Gibbons had violet leaves analyzed for their vitamin content. They are very high in vitamin C, and also in vitamin A (could repairing vitamin deficiency have something to do with their anger- and drunkenness-averting qualities?). Gibbons used to cook them up as spring greens; I tend to use them as a staple of what I call “garden tea”, tea made out of whatever plants are showing enough leaf for me to take some.

The leaves have also been used in ointments for swellings and inflammations, and the flowers used to be made into violet syrup, which was said to cure ague, epilepsy, pleurisy, quinsy, jaundice, consumption, insomnia, and inflammation of the eyes.

It might or might not do any of those things. But when I see the first violets bloom, it certainly does my eyes good.

Resources:

Donald Law, Concise Encyclopedia of Herbs, St. Martin, 1976

Richard Alan Miller, The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfumes, Destiny Books, 1990

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, David McKay Co. Inc., 1966

It’s rose hip season.

In fact, it will be rose hip season well into winter for all but the coldest climates. Rose hips only get better with frost: their red color deepens, their flavor sweetens, the texture of the flesh gets softer.

The rose hips in the picure are from Rosa californica, our native wild rose. They have prickles coming out of their skins, a fact that was really brought home to me the first time I tried to collect them. Those prickles lodge nastily and persistently in the pads of your thumb and fingers.

For a while, I tried using Blue Mule gloves for picking rose hips, but it was just too awkward. I finally evolved a system of holding my bucket under the rose hips and snipping off the cluster with scissors.

Why was I going through all this trouble? Well, rose  hips are one of the better sources of vitamin C (and its bioflavinoids) around,  and the tea they make is pretty and tasty as well as healthful. When you make it with fresh hips, rose hip tea comes up a pretty orange-rose, and tastes a bit like weak Red Zinger. With dried hips, the brew is a little browner, but still gives you a lot of the benefits.

In World War II, Britain’s children gathered rose hips to use as a supplement when oranges and other sources of vitamin C were no longer available. In Sweden, rose hip soup  is a traditional dish which probably helped stave off scurvy in long winters. (It may still do that, but Swedes have more resources to choose from, now.)

If you pick prickly-hipped roses (not all of them are), eventually you have to deal with the prickles. If you’re just making rose hip tea, you can pretty much just drop them in simmering water (and once the hips dry, the prickles seem to retract into the wrinkles).  Rose hips need simmering (not boiling, but simmering) for about ten minutes, covered, to make a decent tea. Then you can strain the hips out. If you have prickly roses, I recommend using an old net curtain, cheesecloth, or a coffee filter, so you won’t get any surprises while you’re drinking.

There are many roses whose hips aren’t protected by prickles – a lot of the hybrid tea roses most people plant nowadays are like this. But the real queens of big smooth hips  are rugosa roses, the once-blooming roses with deeply-etched leaves.

While rugosa roses are imports from Asia, they’ve naturalized on some coasts in the NE U.S., and elsewhere: they are very hardy to wind and weather, and not fussy about soil. Old-fashioned rose fanciers like them in gardens.  If you’re lucky enough to live near where someone grows them, or in an area where they grow wild, these would be the optimum rose hips. Wherever you gather them, you will want to make sure they haven’t been sprayed with something deadly earlier in the season. (One of the big advantages to rugosa roses is that they are a hardy breed: they don’t require the sprays and coddling that a lot of modern roses do.)

I once painstakingly (I was using the wild rose hips, so the word is apt) made applesauce flavored with cooked rose hips. I had intended to make rose hip jam,  but  I decided I needed to dilute the rose hips with something easier to work with. I got the prickles out of the hips by pressing the cooked mash of them against a large strainer lined with an old net curtain and squeezing out about a tablespoon at a time of smooth bright orange-red paste. The applesauce/rose hip combination was a beautiful pale-peachy-rose color, tasted divine, and in my opinion, worked fine as (rather runny) jam.

There’s something magical and satisfying about going into the garden or the woods or the spare lot and gathering exotic food. Roses have all kinds of beauty to nourish us with; try taking advantage of this one.

In my climate, it’s time to plant poppies.

Anything that likes cool weather (and poppies do) is better fall-planted in places where cloudy-cool spring rapidly sizzles into dry and hot.

Earlier, I wrote a post about ‘Falling in Love’ Shirley poppies. But while Shirley poppies are by a small margin my favorite, I love other poppies.  ‘Lauren’s Grape’ is one of them.

Even before the crumpled-shiny-wrapping-paper buds shed their green skins, the magic show starts. Poppies move: they open in day and close at night.

 Their stems snake around in unexpected dimensions.

 And they move around the world, not only because of their beauty, but because of their power. Lauren’s Grape is an opium poppy. (Somniferum means “sleep-producing”. Like Somnolent. And Sominex.) Opium, like all of life, has its bad and good sides. One of the good sides must be the incredible beauty of opium poppy foliage (I like it even better than Shirley poppy foliage; its smooth texture, its soft sea green).

A friend of mine gave me seed to a dark purple poppy much like Lauren’s Grape. (Due to disruptions of life, I don’t have pictures of that one.) His grandmother brought it over from Eastern Europe when she came to the United States.

 In those days - and when you were that poor - emigrating to the United States meant going off the edge of the known world, never to return. The things you took were your only link with home: forever. The seeds you carried were the ones you held most dear, the ones you couldn’t imagine life without. The ones that meant home.

Here’s another report from the high Sierras – plus an entry in a photo contest at   Gardening Gone Wild. Their theme this month is “get down on your knees”. I was either on my knees or my belly for this one; I’m often in undignified positions with plants. And since it’s a Wild Gardening photo contest, I figured a garden of mule’s ear would be particularly apt.

It’s a wild plant that grows in its own nature-designed garden, and I think it’s worth it to take a look at how that happens. So many good garden designs appear in nature (and most of my favorite garden designers notice that).

Mule’s ear colonizes on Sierra slopes, making a repeating pattern with its leaves and, in season, flowers. Here you can see that it’s pointed up by Indian paintbrush (Castilleja); there’s also some of the miniature mountain lupine which blooms through fall, when it is also punctuated by occasional asters. An occasional low shrub leaves the sense of a meadow but gives some variation.

Mule’s ear is a good example of how a repeated plant, with a bit of variation, can be a very satisfying sight. It’s not a sight I see in my own garden much, as I tend to the botanical-garden order of gardening, but I notice I actually have been slipping a little into repeating plantings (I planted Papaver rhoeas “Falling in Love” in several containers, and really enjoyed the results), because there is a certain satisfaction to it. Maybe we’re just dialed in to like having certain plants surround us; maybe it’s an ancient survival instinct or maybe it’s an ancient magical one.

Mule’s ear is in the sunflower family, obvious when you look at its blooms:

While most dry-environment plants have small leaves (often hard and shiny) to keep in vital moisture, mule’s ear uses another tactic: soft hair all over the leaves (mollis means “soft”). And in order to avoid too much evaporation, mule’s ear leaves are oriented vertically, to get as little sun as possible.

That’s another clue we might use for our gardens: how suited is this plant for my environment? If I want to plant a lot of something, that’s a really important question, because a lot of work, water, and whining will go into it if I pick something that just isn’t suited to my climate.

In any case, I always look for colonies of mule’s ear (I admit, to myself I call this mule ears and am having a hard time getting it right for this post). I’ve been watching this particular field for years.

Even though it isn’t as spectacular in the fall, I may like mule ears best when it’s on its way out*. Half the foliage dries by early fall, and when the mountain wind blows, it makes a pleasant rustling.

Not all the ears dry at once, as you can see, so there is a depth of color and texture  as well as sound to fall mule’s ear as they slowly dry in the Sierra wind.

*For those who are unsure of the use of “it’s” and “its”, this sentence proves a guide. If a sentence doesn’t work reading the contraction as “it is” “it was” or “it has” then the word you want is “its”. And I know: many editors don’t even get this these days. That’s their shame, but it doesn’t need to be yours.

In the evening, as it opens, it’s one of the sweetest and most gentle scents, a combination of jasmine and orange blossom and gardenia, blended gently with its own mellowing agent. In the morning, it smells faintly of rubber balloon.

I’m a little bit of a sucker for the nicotiana genus, and I also have a weakness for fragrant plants. Add to that that I like carrying on heirloom plants, and you’ll have the sum of why I chose to order ‘Cranberry Isle’, an heirloom flowering tobacco from Select Seeds. I received on of their typically bouncingly healthful plants which has since boomed several sizes larger.

Marilyn Barlow, founder of Select Seeds, was kind enough to answer my email asking for more on the origins of this “new” heirloom introduction (actually, re-introduction). But this plant may be a mystery wrapped inside an enigma surrounded by a riddle, because the only information Ms. Barlow has is that Cranberry Isle came from an old garden in Maine, and was rumored to have come from an actual, land-and-sea Cranberry Isle.

Cranberry Isle is a hybrid of Nicotiana. sanderae and Nicotiana. forgetiana. When I saw this info on a garden list, I wondered at first if N. forgetiana was a joke; background information is often lost and forgotten, especially with heirlooms. So far I haven’t been able to find out how old it is (I haven’t been able to find out where its parents come from, either. Very worrying.).

Until I looked it up, I thought one of the parents might be Nicotiana alata, as the flowers look so much like jasmine tobacco. To my nose’s memory (sounds like a beginner piano piece), the smell of Nicotiana alata is different; more straight-ahead, piercingly sweet, not the gently rounded bouquet Cranberry Isle has.

The backs of my Cranberry Isle’s flowers are rose, while the insides open white (with perhaps the slightest pink tinge; it’s hard to see in the dusk), but by morning have turned pale blush pink. I haven’t gotten the multicolor effect promised in the seed catalogue, but perhaps that’s something that comes with time. Or varies from plant to plant.

While ravaged by earwigs (one of the few bugs that isn’t put off by tobacco’s insecticidal powers), this flowering tobacco gamely kept growing. It started blooming about a month after I’d received it in its tiny mailer pot, and I can expect it to go awhile.  I don’t know how long, because I can’t find that information anywhere. I’ll just have to research the old-fashioned way: wait and see for myself. Or get info from other gardeners who have grown it - maybe that’s you?