I took a bit of a hiatus from blogging. It’s a mental health issue: I struggle with anxiety, sensitivity, and depression. Sometimes, no matter how wonderful life is, I get sidelined psychologically. Emotionally. Whatever – I simply get sidelined.
I have stayed busy, and I have not forgotten that I was going to write about my adventures in herbs next. I do think I will bounce back and forth between herbs and other things gardening, because I am just (re)learning about herbs and I have several other projects going on in the yard as well (hint: water features!).
To write about herbs, I need to revisit the past. I started out gardening with the intention of becoming an herbalist way back in the 1980’s. I’d just landscaped my first yard, a project that was more about digging out unwanted periwinkle overgrowth and discovering what was underneath that mat of ground cover than it was about actually designing a garden of flower beds. I was also a young mother, unemployed, and a volunteer at a local birth center. We were poor and heading deeply into debt, living on the edge of losing the first house we attempted to buy. Life comes at you hard.
We started attending a small Pentecostal church. The pastors and most of the congregation were our generation, so lots of little kids, nursery duty, and spiritual changes all happened at the same time. For the record, I hate nursery duty: I loved my kids but am not so fond of other people’s tots. You know how it goes: “from a distance and only when I can give them back to their rightful owner”. I never minded teaching Sunday School or Vacation Bible School with older children, but those little wobbly-legged creatures – and especially those that cannot walk yet – are cute from a distance but not when you have to care for them in a group.
The ”Church” frowned on a lot of things. The pastors were just coming out of legalism, but the tentacles of bad teaching were wrapped around a lot of hearts and minds. Herbalism equals witchcraft and witchcraft is bad. Witchcraft is Satanism. Heck, midwifery is bordering on witchcraft. I gave up volunteering at the birth center and I gave away my books on herbalism. I embraced the theology of the day. Eventually we split away from the whole movement and that’s a story in itself and one I am not going to tell, at least not now and not in this forum. I still have a lot of friends from those days and they weren’t all bad and cultish.
I – We – have been “unchurched” now for nearly fifteen years. My husband slipped out the door long before I did and I left reluctantly. There was no place for me without my husband. We were paying off the last of our bad debts, we’d moved into the house we live in currently, I was working full time, and our children were moving into adulthood. During that time period I landscaped my second yard. It was a full-on landscaping job but a very small trailer park yard.
I started working on this yard with all the energy of a much younger woman (twenty plus years can age a body). The last couple years, I have begun to look into growing herbs and becoming an herbalist after all. A dream deferred and now there’s time to work on it. I have the space, the time, and no critics to listen to. I’m in a different place spiritually although I would argue I am just as strong a Believer as I was then – I merely choose to follow a different path, a path I believe is one that God set before me. The garden path.
I never fully gave up on growing herbs. I’ve always had a few in the yard and I’ve frequently dried flowers and herbs somewhere in the house by hanging them from the ceiling in bunches. I’ve planted oregano, borage, lavender, rosemary, parsley, chervil, sage – all the culinary herbs. Now I am branching out into some of the medicinal herbs and the foraged herbs. I will attempt, over the next few posts, to elaborate on what herbs I am growing, some uses, and how I have used them (or intend to use them). Some are surprising to me, some I have always known, some are new, some are old, and some I have had to eradicate from my garden (comfrey comes to mind).
So – here’s a patch of oregano to spice your appetite and I promise to write again soon.
Oregano is basically a weed, IMO. A tasty bee-friendly weed, but a prolific and self-seeding one all the same.
Jaci Dawn 