made it store opening soon!

Ive decided to start up a store on 'made it' the australian version of etsy. Therell be ocean stone amulets, handdrawn graphics and herbal salves popping up. Wanted to give my makings a focus place to gather. Ive been collecting beads, making comfrey salve and doodling away, so hopefully we'll be open soon!

hanging gardens....

 In my shady garden Ive been brewing up ideas to maximise green exposure to light.After waiting impatiently for my pocket type shoe storage system to arrive from China via 2 weeks at Balmain post office, they arrived! How bloody cool are they with seedlings popped in em?! Mums up and she brought lettuces, parsley, coriander and spinach. Ive hung them on my sunshiney wall to maximise growth and plant happiness. The water drains from the top ones down via the ones below and into the ground where more seedlings await a drink, its bloody great. Let you know how the experiment progresses. Theres hope for shady gardens yet...

whats growing in the garden....medicines?

My wee seedlings that have been still for so long have grown in the last four days! Spring is beginning to seep into the days. As I watered my gardens a term came into my mind 'physick garden'. So in my developing researching before doubting mode, i found that these were gardens in Europe created by apothecaries to teach their apprentices plant identification and give them a connection to the plants. Learning gardens.Theres a garden like this that was established in Chelsea in 1673 thats still growing! How cool is that. Mind you indigenous folks earth gardens have been going way longer. But when these gardens were all the rage hospitals had them, damn sensible, as did private estates, damn sensible. Heres to physic gardens in every home and place of healing!


While Im on this era, about 50 years prior actually, Ill quote from Nicholas Culpeper.He was the first apothecary to translate the pharmacoepia (list of herbs in use) from the Latin into english so your everyday folk could access the information. Along the way came some scathing words for the medical establishment.
"It seems the College hold a strange opinion that it would do an English man mischief to know what the herbs in his garden are good for."
At the time the Colleges descriptions of English herbs listed neither their common names or virtues.
"I would consider what number of poor creatures perish daily who else might happily be preserved if they knew what the Herbs in their own Gardens were good for." He was an eat your weeds kinda bloke, whereas the establishment of the time liked to use complex mixtures of exotic and expensive ingredients...

Nicholas is also known for his combining of astrology with herbs. He ascribed symptoms, body parts and herbs to astrological houses and then used either herbs from an opposite house, or sympatheticly ones from the same house to treat disease.
"He that would know the reason of the operation of the Herbs, must look up as high as the stars."
Love how he capitalises Herbs...he was trying to construct a system of understanding health that could be accessible to many rather than the few. His English Physician containinng "a Compleat Method of Practice of Physic, whereby a Man may preserve his Body in Health, or cure himself when sick, with such things one-ly as grown in England, they being most fit for english Bodies." Local plants, used one at a time as simples.

Resources:
Planetary planting: A Guide to Organic Growing by the Signs of the Zodiac by Louise Riotte
Green Pharmacy : The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine by Barbara Grigg

Cernunnos...

see ya L plates...

Yep black betty nand I passed the test for Ps over the weekend! Yah! Just 2 weeks before my L plates ran out. Riding back through the hills I was struck, as one is in moments of awareness, at the geographical beauty Im surrounded by up here. Such variety too. So now im not studying for Ps homework I can relax into riding a bit more and explore the area. GPS aint much use on a bike, but theres a north coast street directory that advertises as 'going everywhere you GPS cant'. Sounds good to me! Betty goes off the bituman. Cant see that itll be a problem for her with her jacked up exhaust pipe and fat tyres, infact Ive tested over some potholes and shes pretty damn stable.

Its my first experience of chuck out piling round these parts at the moment. At first I was disappointed but then came the cane sofa for out in the garage space, then clean foam to make cushions for it, the cow hide rug, the round table that folds away (minus the knights of), a journal of handcrafted paper, those new ug boots, some pots for green folks, so Im feeling a bit more in my scavenging element.

Bloody bush turkeys got into my garden last night and uprooted my small but cherished seedlings that Ive been nurturing since I got here, grown from seed. Not impressed, theyd better watch out if i catch em at it again. Always did think they looked like good eating....

Woman o the Woods...

'A moss-woman!' the haymakers cry,

And over the fields in terror they fly.

She is loosely clad from neck to foot

In a mantle of Moss from the Maples root,

And like Lichen grey on its stem that grows

Is the hair that over her mantle flows.
Her skin, like the Maple-rind, is hard,
Brown and ridgey, and furrowed and scarred;

And each feature flat, like the bark we see,

Where a bough has been lopped from the bole of a tree,

When the newer bark has crept healingly round,

And laps o'er the edge of the open wound;

Her knotty, root like feet are bare,

And her height is an ell from heel to hair,"

from The Fairy Family as quoted in The Lore of the Forest by George Allen, 1928.

hong kong dragon for jo....