Category — Magic

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

I love brugmansias and daturas, but they’ve been a disappointment to me. Especially the brugmansias.

Brugmansias (they used to be called tree daturas) just barely make it in my climate (USDA zone 8). My common experience with them is, just about the time they form a bud, frost hits. And that’s the end of the brugmansia for that year. Next year it will rise again, but not until later than you think possible: usually in the middle to end of May, when things start really warming up. Brugmansias (and their herby sisters daturas) love heat, and shrink away from the cold.

So that’s why I was shocked to come home from a holiday trip to find that my little struggling brugmansia, all of fourteen inches high (about 36 cm), had spouted a bloom.

In order to have a hope of seeing flowers before frost next year, this fall I laboriously made it a place  indoors - a place where I didn’t think it would thrive, but trusted it would at least not die to the ground (making more work for itself to get to blooming point next season). I had no anticipation that it would bloom, especially not when I went away, leaving the house cold.

What made this happen? Well, I did treat all my houseplants with an organic fertilizer called Voodoo Brew. Voodoo Brew inoculates the soil with some of the microorganisms that make soil nutrients more available to plants. You’re not supposed to use it on houseplants, but it makes my outdoor plants so happy, and my houseplants were looking crummy, and I’m not much of one for rules until I’ve tried them myself. And you’re supposed to use it in the growing season, not the dormant one, but (see above).

Another contributor to this miracle may have been the variety of brugmansia, ‘Cypress Gardens’.  This plant was bred (or selected, I’m not sure which) for containers, and it’s also meant to flower younger than other brugmansias.

Whatever the cause, I’ve got one, just one, beautiful flower trumpet breathing fragrance into the room of a night,

and showing off that particular sheen I’ve only found on the somewhat-stiff brugmansia trumpets.

An anthropology professor of mine once told me that brugmansias made her think of love; she and her husband had met in South America, and slept under the downbreathing trumpets of a brugmansia.

Actually, she said datura, because at that time the genus hadn’t been broken in two. Now it’s generally accepted that the shrubby plants with downward hanging flowers are in the genus Brugmansia, while the herbaceous (non-woody) plants with upward facing trumpets are in the Datura genus (these are the ones that are called Angel’s Trumpets in many catalogues).

The reason my professor and I were discussing daturas is that I was doing a paper on them; even then I loved them. The chemical constituents of  the different types of daturas and brugmansias are very closely related, although there are individual variations; in that paper I wrote I reported on a custom of some Amazonian shamans, of having several datura trees in their yards. Each variety had a special trait; each variety was used for a different type of divination. Finding a lost item might mean using one tree; helping an adolescent through the spiritual transformation into adulthood meant using another. The shaman knew which to use, how much to use, and how to guide someone through the experience safely.

No such shamans exist in my own culture (although many believe that European witches used daturas as their “flying” ointment, and had some skill in judging the dose and using the experience for spiritual gain). The datura/brugmansia reputation as a hallucinogen naturally attracted me as a teenager, although fortunately I didn’t find any to experiment with at that reckless age. Later, I did try smoking the leaves, since they were long listed in the U.S. pharmacopoeia as a remedy for respiratory problems, to arrest coughing.

They did arrest my cough somewhat, but by that time I knew that too much datura could also arrest breathing, so I was pretty cautious in my experiment (it tasted very bitter, even in smoke, which made me inclined to limit the experience even further). I have seen at least one young woman permanently altered for the worse from eating datura; I would never ingest it.

But I can admire its power through my nose and my eyes and those other senses all of us plant lovers use when we commune with green friends.  I can feel brugmansia’s power of death and resurrection spreading invisible fragrance through my house. That means a lot, this time of year.

It’s time to plant seeds. For those of us in mild-winter climates fall is the best time to plant cool-weather annuals. For those of us in any climate, it can also be an ideal time to plant perennial seeds (they often have cooling or cooling/warming requirements which are naturally met by  overwinter germination. Why not have nature do the work instead of fiddling with stratification and the rest?). And it’s a good time to plant wildflower seeds (after all, when does nature do it?).

So I was already tuned into seed when I got my fall letter from the miso company I patronize*, and found an article by Christian Elwell about planting seeds in a way that’s designed to strengthen plant/human communion.

The article describes a Siberian healer (real or imagined), Anastasia, who says that one of the big problems in plant/human communication is that plants no longer know whom they are serving.

Think about it: we grow huge monocrops of plants, plants which are often untouched by human hands, and which get attention only from machines. Our culture thinks of plants sheerly in terms of production.

But every gardener knows that there is far more to plants than that. We know that plants satisfy our souls in some way we may not be able to describe but would be devastated without. Gardeners also tend to be more aware than other human beings that we need plants: for the air we breathe, for the food we eat, the places we live in, the clothes we wear, the medicines we take, and for that valuable soul-sustenance.

What we might not quite be aware of is that plants may also need us. And not just for our CO2.

Humans and plants have been working together for thousands of years. But in the last several decades, humans have been separating themselves from plants more and more. According to Anastasia, plants need the feedback of our being. They need their souls fed by us. When we withdraw our personalities and attention, plants suffer.

One way to heal this lack is to plant seeds imbued with our consciousness. Anastasia recommends a three-part method for doing this. The first step is putting the seeds to be planted under the tongue for nine minutes, to infuse them with the invisible but tangible messages of our bodies.

The second step is to put the seeds in our palms, and breathe on them. Breath has holy meaning in many cultures; in ours, the word “inspire” means to take in breath or spirit. And by the way, seeds breathe, too. Just very very slowly. But that’s how they manage to keep viable for years (sometimes centuries, or even millenia).

The final step to conscious seed-planting is to  stand barefoot on the ground where we will be planting the seeds, and hold them  to the sky.

If we are planting a large crop (Elwell plants rice), we can just do this with a few of the seeds; they will communicate the messages we’ve given them to the other seeds.

Sound whacky? Maybe. But to me, it sounds like some of the less formal rituals I like to do when I plant, and it sounds worth trying.

Gardening and wandering in the woods has led me to a clear understanding: plants are sentient beings. In fact, I’ll come out of the closet and admit that for me, everything is sentient: I’m an animist. Working on that assumption can completely change your life. In fact, working on that assumption might be just the change our fast-moving produce-produce-produce culture needs so badly.

So, even if you think treating seeds this way is crazy, why not try an experiment, if only to prove that it doesn’t work?  Plant some seeds without this attention and some with it. See if you notice a difference in the growing plants, the flowering, and the harvest.  Or yourself.

* If you haven’t tried it, South River miso is an entirely different experience than other misos.They make the miso in wooden tubs over wood fires, doing everything the traditional way. At first I wondered why their miso was so much more expensive than others. Then I tried it, and all was revealed: it was the difference between a bottle of table red and a bottle of fine vintage wine. (And no, they aren’t paying me to say this: it’s unsolicited enthusiasm.)

You probably think I’m going to talk about your stress. Nope. I’m going to talk about plant stress. But you can extrapolate if you want: humans need a bit of stress, too, or we wouldn’t stand upright.

What seems to be important, in humans and in plants, is the right kind of stress. I’ve talked about bad kinds of stress, like what happens to plants that get watered, then  suffer from drought.

How do we create good plant stress?

Squeeze your grapes. Wine grapes, that is. But you’ve got to do it right. Mark and Rie Ishii Matthews, at the University of California, did a study on wine grapes that were stinted on water, making smaller, dryer grapes. These grapes made wine which was more aromatic and flavorful, and had a better appearance. The wine was worth more, too, which made the growers happy.

Whack off your vines.  Most vines put on a much better display if they’re severely pinched out or pruned early in life. Grapes would be only one example; most perennial flowering vines also benefit from being whacked. Instead of putting their energy into one long trailer, suddenly they have several branches, all potential rivers of flowers and fruit. Don’t forget that many tomatoes are vines, too. And some non-vine plants – such as chrysanthemums – also do well under this treatment.

Beat and shoot your trees. In the southeast U.S., farmers flail their pecan trees to make a better yield. This echos an old English custom, wassailing. On about the 17th of January (Twelfth Night on the old calendar, one of those post-winter-solstice holidays) farmers gather in the apple orchard with shotguns and other noisemakers. They pour libations of cider on the roots, and put cider-soaked pieces of toast in the branches. Sometimes a child is put in the branches of the chosen tree and fed some of the cider toast. Then guns are discharged through the branches, tin cans and trays are beaten, and a song is sung to the apple tree, encouraging it to bear.

There are records of similar rituals for other fruit-bearing trees, but for most of history, apple trees were the main source of alcohol, making them vitally important, and their rituals seem to have been more recorded. Some of the wassailing traditions include beating the trees, just like the southeastern pecan farmers.

Robert Stone’s 1989  book,  The Secret Life of Your Cells, got me thinking about this. Stone says that, in the grapes experiment, the researchers intended good when they turned off the water, and the plants sensed that. Having known scientific researchers, I think they were just as likely to be thinking about what they were having for lunch or if they could fit a trip to the gas station in before they got home, but OK. Let’s ride with this theory.

Certainly the farmers who beat their apple trees are looking to encourage, and not harm. Yet how many stories have we heard of plants who were threatened with death if they didn’t shape up – and they shaped up? How many of us have experienced plants thriving where they have no business to? A miniature citrus that thrives in a shady spot, but dies when moved to a sunny one; Ruth Stout’s gardenia, which flourished where it wasn’t supposed to.

Are these plants stressed, and liking it? Or are they just perverse? Is it the same thing?

I’ve studied a lot of herbs and plants that are used for healing.

But I’ve always secretly known that all plants heal, that it restores my energy and turns my life around just to be with them, especially in the woods.

Turns out that my feeling that all plants heal is now a scientific fact. Or at least on its way to being one.

Besides generously providing us with that stuff of human life, oxygen, being surrounded by plants – any plants – seems to help people heal faster. A study at Kansas State University put plants in the recovery rooms of half their appendectomy patients. The patients in the rooms with plants healed faster.

In three days, “plant” patients had kicked their pain meds, while “sterile” patients were still on moderate doses. The plant-surrounded patients also had less fatigue and anxiety, lower heart rates and blood pressure.

For some of us, this one’s a no-brainer: I’ve always felt the sterile, all-artificial-materials environment of hospitals was a very hard place to heal. And any gardener or nature-lover has felt the healing powers of plants: it’s why we hang out with them, after all.

Older traditions of healing work on the assumption that plants have spirits and personalities; we can communicate with them for healing. I’m convinced that this, and not lucky guesswork, is the way human beings found the plants to stock our larders and medicine cabinets. But while I’m sure you get more benefits from a skilled understanding of how to communicate with plants, it seems that even total novices and unconscious people can take in their healing personalities.

I’m glad science is catching up with folk tradition.

Next post: Revelations from down under: Catmint grows native Californian sticky monkeyflower in Australia. Don’t miss this transhemispheric post.