Porteranthus trifoliatus (bowman’s root) section A, has been used as an emetic, among other things, by Native Americans.
The spring rush is finally beginning to ease a bit. Spring at the Medicinal Herb Garden can be a blur. It’s busy and exhilarating but a little nerve-racking at the same time. In a public garden that is on view every day of the year, there is the constant need for improvisation. A hard winter kills plants unexpectedly, leaving big gaps in the beds or borders; seeds that came up easily last year, mysteriously don’t come up or take much longer to germinate; winter hangs on into June, making it difficult to move tender plants into the garden, or seedlings get hit by damping-off disease in the greenhouse. It’s always something. This year I started a whole flat (36 rose pots) of Porteranthus trifoliatus (bowman’s root) and watched half of them wilt and flop over from damping-off. A quick treatment with cinnamon, which is a pretty effective fungicide, seemed to work though it’s hard to say for sure whether or not the seedlings left standing are the tough ones that would have survived anyway. But cinnamon is cheap, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Sophora flavescens (ku shen) section A. It’s used to treat skin conditions in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
And what about Sophora flavescens (ku shen)? No sign of life yet, though it was thriving last summer. We had a cold winter, but it is supposedly hardy to zone 6. Unfortunately, it has a big root crown that sits right at the soil surface, making it susceptible to hard freezes when there is no protective blanket of snow, and that is exactly what we got last winter. Sophora and the Astragalus membranaceus (huang qi) in the same bed are always a bit slow to emerge, so there’s still hope. The Astragalus is just waking up.
Astragalus membranaceus (huang qi) section A. Huang qi is a tonic herb used in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
For years I’ve wondered why there aren’t seedlings of Eupatorium aromaticum (boneset) or Inula helenium (elecampane, xuan fu hua) surrounding their garden beds.
Eupatorium aromaticum (boneset) seedlings in section B. Boneset has been used in Native American herbalism and homeopathy.
Inula helenium (elecampane, xuan fu hua) in section B pathway with a Eupatorium aromaticum seedling, is used to treat lung conditions.
They both produce a lot of seeds but they are both clumpers, meaning the plants slowly spread outward from the roots over time. There’s only so much room in a bed and I have to thin them at the edges every few years. It’s possible that there’s not a group of individual plants anymore, just one big clonal mass. Could it be that neither species can make viable seeds because of self-incompatibility? Apparently not because this year, out of the blue, seedlings of both have appeared in profusion. What triggered this sudden emergence? I don’t know. Seed banks resting in the soil and gravel pathways of the garden have a way of germinating unexpectedly on their own mysterious schedule, so it helps to expect the unexpected.
Withania somnifera (ashwaganda) section A. This tonic herb from India is easy to grow from seeds, as you would tomatoes.
Stevia rebaudiana (stevia) section A. A natural, sugar-free sweetener that is easy to grow and to root from cuttings. You can keep it inside by a window for winter.
There’s nothing like abrupt changes in the garden to inspire the inquisitive among us to get down and inspect closely, looking for effects and their causes . This spring, many of us are seeing the effects of last winter’s extreme cold in our gardens, but in the first few years of the 21st century, we had some winters in Seattle that barely went below freezing. Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana) made it through the winter outside, a feat unheard of in recent years, but unfortunately, so did greenhouse thrips (Heliothrips haemorrhoidalis). They had their way with many species in the Ericaceae family and nearly decimated the salal (Gaultheria shalon) in the Medicinal Herb Garden. A solemn meeting was convened with the concerned parties on campus and all sorts of solutions were suggested. But some very cold winters did the work for us and put the thrips to rout.
Gaultheria shalon (salal) Cascara Circle. Salal fruit are sweet and tasty, raw or cooked
Who knows for sure how future weather patterns will play out? The overwhelming scientific consensus is that we are heading into a period of increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather events. That’s reason enough to get out into the garden (yours, a friend’s, a public garden, p-patch etc.) and experience it through all of the seasons, from starting seeds to collecting seeds. Working the whole year in the garden seems like the best way to get the fullest picture and the most useful knowledge. To learn a lot in a short period, if you’re new to gardening, you might try keeping notes on planting and harvest dates, weather data, insect infestations, heavy and light fruit tree harvest years, and on and on. If you keep accurate and consistent notes and have friends and neighbors who will do the same, your contributions can add to your community’s sense of food security, resilience and interdependence. Plus, it’s enjoyable to sit around on dark winter days, comparing notes and trading seeds and bits of wisdom over food and drink.
That few children are being taught good gardening skills (including composting, basic taxonomy, natural history of plants, animals, soils, watersheds etc.) in the public schools, from preschool onward, says much about our collective priorities. There are two long-out-of-print books (and probably many more…try Dover Publications; they specialize in publishing out-of-print, public domain books) called Among School Gardens (1911) by Louise M. Greene, and Children’s Gardens for School and Home: A Manual of Cooperative Gardening (1904) by Louise Klein Miller. Well, lucky us, they’ve been recently reprinted and you can get the former for about $15 and the latter for about $10. They are both classics and an inspiration and will hopefully be a call to action for anyone who reads them, especially teachers. But teachers are in a tough place, trying to do more with leaner resources in our oddly depleted 21st century in which the rich keep getting richer while our basic social service institutions suffer slow death by a thousand cuts. May the gardens return soon to all schools everywhere.
weather permitting
our age of agriculture
this place we call home
See you in the garden.