medicine garden dreamings....

calling in 2011

acknowledging and farewelling 2010

Listening to the plants...terms to translate...

As the last post was about urban wildcrafting and finding, I thought Id take it a step furthur to talk about working with plants, for food and health.
What beauty if in every home we had the wisdom to be our own herbalists? Theres a wave of it happening with food, a masterchef in every home and thats one of the easiest ways to get to know herbs!
But how do we know which ones to use and how much?
We have botanical names (and visual information, our own and such as in many guidebooks) to check out if the plant in our hand is the one we think it might be. A cumulative way to double check that intuition that said, I know that plant I can work with that one.
Hence the creation of broader terms like nourishing, tonifying, stimulating. These terms are designed to let us know how much to use (of which parts) and largely how much those whove gone before us used. But the original messages came from the plants themselves, so its like a translation.
Nourishing herbs are mild enough (yet potent enough to be medicine) to be eaten daily. In salads, like chickweed, dandelion leaf, sow thistle leaf, infact some herbs are best befriended in such ways. Simply steaming greens!
The tonifying herbs are a little stronger but still able to be used in infusions (a strong brew of tea, often overnight) like dandelion root, nettle, oatstraw, members of the mint family. Some oif these names sounding familiar to our front lawns?
Flavouring herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil are pretty self regulating, their flavour letting us know how much is enough already! Especially stimulating ones like chilli, cardomom, nutmeg. Go overboard and the sniffles set in as the ol mucous membranes wake up, its up to us howfar we go with them (as always).
And it works its way up to power plants like tobacco, hops, generally conciousness changing plants (although they all have that property!) that need to be treated with just that extra bit of respect.

These terms may seem dry and distant from the act of harvesting the plants with bare hands, but they can give us an idea of where in the circle of medicine, food and indeed worship, they sit, as we get more apptitude. Its like a secondary language to the botanical names we use globaly to share plant knowledge. Our ancestors, distant and closer, learned a few things from the plants and so we can learn from them. We are lucky to live in times when this herbal ancestry has been brought to the fore by the work and love of several generations of folks, so that we can double check references as we learn. Unfortuneately for u my reference books are packed in boxes right now so this tasters been improvised!

theres wildness everywhere....

Theres something magical in finding a discarded thing with appreciation for it. The ancient art of 'gleaning' has been with us, probably since agricultural beginnings, where we began to have enough produce to create a surplus. Be that food, or rusty ol chairs (probably post paleolithic). But its kind of a cool cycle where those with less can make use of the excesses of those with more. Thats why the trend to lock supermarket skip bins, or spray them with hydrogen peroxide ( so nothing can be used) sux bigtime. Wildcrafing herbs uses the same skills as chuck out pile collecting, the finding and seeing the value and bounty that others might miss. So even in urban environments our deeply ancestral hunting and gathering skills can come to the fore, and indeed be practiced and honed. Its a way of envisioning whats around us, keeping an eye out for changes and just, noticing. That chairs rusty but it could be comfy seat dreaming with some sanding and a coat of paint, that chickweeds lush (and not in a dog pee zone) think Ill invite her to lunch. This way of being taps into deep seated (excuse the pun) survival skills that are hardwired into our genetics, especially as women. So heres to chuckout pile wildcrafting an urban version of gathering the roots and berries!