Garden Medicinals

Summer brings such beautiful boughs of bountiful leaves to the garden.

It's quintessential nature tamed, yet untamed. I've lost a few arrows from playing archery with Hero. Even in the dead of winter their whereabouts remain unseen. It's become somewhat of a sacrificial portal of foliage.

This weed turned out to be borage, luckily I am always reticent to remove weeds until I can identify them. Borage flowers are delicious on salads. The essential fatty acids contained within them are good for skin. Historically, the flowers have been candied, used in restorative summer libations and given to make folks merry and joyous. For pensiveness, melancholy and forgetfulness.

In only one year, my mullein given to me by a client went from the size of a dime to two feet tall with flowers. So hearty, it made it through the winter, while my my kale and rosemary perished. Look, at how splendid the flower grows.

Mugwort grows wild all over Cape Cod. It is helpful in painful, delayed, scanty and excessive periods. In this way it is an adaptogenic herb, meaning it helps balance you where you need it. It is also helpful in contact dermatitis such as with poison ivy, oak and sumac, although jewelweed is said to be superior. Also, Chumash people rank it above white sage in clearing away negative energy. My late teacher Cecilia Garcia instructed me to boil four handfuls of mugwort in a large pot with a large quantity of water for four hours. The vapors permeate the air and help clear away the energetic residue of former tenants. A cloth can be drenched in this fomentation to clean mirrors and metals such as faucets and doorknobs. I have found it to be helpful in the case of the periodic ghostly visitor.

Motherwort, is very helpful in combination with hawthorn berries to strengthen the heart. It is good for all sorts of heart troubles, palpitations, angina, leaky valve, and even a broken heart. Helpful in neuralgia, sciatic, hysteria, fainting, and nervous debility. It is a antispasmodic, tonic, nervine, emmenagogue. It relaxes muscles, tonifies the female reproductive system, relaxes nerves and helps to bring on menses.