The leaves have started falling from my oak tree and the helicopter seeds are flying off the sycamore. They're ending up in the house, either blown in by the gales or transported on the hairy coat of my dog. It's autumn.
I feel bad about owning a sycamore tree. It's considered a weed in New Zealand. If I was any kind of environmentalist I'd chop it down, but I can't. It's over eighty years old and covered in moss. It's a romantic looking tree with or without its leaves. Thomas D. Church would tell me to keep it, saying it brings a sense of scale and permanence to the garden. The sycamore doesn't block out sun or views or pose any garden design problems. It must've been planted, with the oak, when our house was built in the nineteen-twenties. Oaks and sycamores were fashionable trees back then. New Zealanders looked to England for gardening inspiration. Gardeners planted exotics. Maybe scientists will discover that sycamore leaves cure a rare kind of cancer and that will make them alright again. But at the moment they're reviled, put in the same category as rats and gorse and agapanthus. Environmental terrorists.
I've been doing a lot of weeding and mulching and it came to me that pulling weeds is a bit like fly fishing or meditating or doing jigsaw puzzles or any of those pastimes that are more about the journey then the destination. Weeding always starts out as a chore but ends up being a great time to think about plants and gardening. As all gardeners know, the best time to weed is a day or so after a good rainfall. The weeds slide out of the soil in such a satisfying way. I don't own a hoe so I get down on my hands and knees and use my little niwashi to lever out dandelion roots and oxalis bulbs. If I was a better sort of gardener I'd leave the annual weeds as a mulch in the garden and recycle the pesky perennials in a 'weed tea', but I don't.
I am changing the way I think about weeds, sure they're a nuisance and some grow like a cancer, but they deserve to be appreciated. I'm serious. Weeds are plants too, only they're in the wrong place. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'What is a weed?...A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.'
Chickweed Stellaria media. Illustration from the book The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices.
Most weeds have interesting personalities and talents once you get to know them. There's a lot of science going on at the moment, looking at the beneficial properties of plants. Take chickweed Stellaria media and dandelion Taraxacum officinale for example. Their young leaves can be used as salad greens or cooked like spinach. Both plants have proven health giving properties if eaten or taken as a drink. Chickweed can be made into a poultice and put onto ulcers, skin irritations and chilblains. These plants grow for free.
And how do you make a poultice? You might well ask. There are two simple steps. First you gather a bunch of fresh herb leaves and chop them up with a knife or mash them with a pestle and mortar until they turn into mush. Then you apply the mush to the affected area on your body and secure it with muslin, gauze or a big bandaid. Only make a poultice from edible non-poisonous herbs. A poultice will take longer to work than a cream but it will work (so my herb books say). You can make a warm or cold poultice depending on the nature of your problem.
Yarrow Achillea millefolium. Illustration from the book The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices.
Take Yarrow for example. I talked about this plant in my 'Meadows' blog. It's growing wild in my lawn. I think its very pretty, though most people only see a weed. It contains lots of compounds that make it excellent for wound treatment: achilletin and achilleine help the blood coagulate, a whole lot of other compounds have anti-inflammatory and pain relieving actions, and a few other compounds are antiseptic. It can be used for digestive upsets because it smooths and relaxes the muscles in the digestive tract. Make a poultice from the leaves for cuts.
Many plants that we think of as weeds are categorised as herbs. So what kind of group allows weeds to join it? A group of plants that do things of course. Herbs are plants whose leaves, seeds, or roots are used for food, scent, medicine or flavour.
Here are three weeds that grow in my garden: prickly lettuce Lactuca serriola, plantain Plantago psyllium and milk thistle Silybum marianum, and they are all really useful plants. Prickly lettuce, whose flowers look like yellow dandelions, is used as a herbal sedative and cough medicine. Plantain is used to treat constipation, diarrhoea and high cholesterol. Milk thistle, which has a small purple flower like a thistle, is a liver protector and extracts of it are used in German drugs that treat liver conditions.
Prickly lettuce Lactuca serriola. Illustration from 'Herbal' by Deni Brown, 2001.
Plantain Plantago psyllium. Illustration from 'The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices' by Claire Loewenfeld and Philippa Back, 1978.
Milk thistle Silybum marianum. Illustration from 'The New Healing Herbs' by Michael Castleman, 2009.
The Complete Book of Herbs & Spices, by Claire Loewenfeld and Philippa Back, 1978.
Way back in the mid-seventies my parents were given an earlier, and larger, edition of The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices as a present. I loved that book. I loved the names of plants, such as: wormwood, star-anise, samphire, Angelica, fat hen, foxglove, tansy and rue. And I loved the botanical illustrations, which looked like illustrations in a fairytale. At this time in my life I was reading stories about magic trees, a wardrobe that opened to a strange land and a giant peach inhabited by giant bugs. My dad was thrashing the folk songs of Steeleye Span on the record player and I was singing Puff the Magic Dragon at school. The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices may as well have been a book of witch's spells because that's the kind of power it had over me back then. Even now, when I flick through the pages, I'm hearing Maddy Prior singing - 'One misty moisty morning when cloudy was the weather
I met with an old man a-clothed all in leather.'
Growing herbs makes me feel like a medieval apothecary.
Soapwort Saponaria officinalis. An illustration from The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices.
I'm trying to turn a corner of my garden into a herb garden. It's been a problem area for years and It looks like this.
My back yard showing the fenced off herb garden and the trunk of the sycamore tree, March 2018.
My herb garden started out as a vegetable patch, only I was useless at growing veggies. I ended up with green tomatoes and undersized potatoes. It wasn't worth the effort. Also, I have a big dog who lives in the back garden during the day. She likes to run up and down the fence line barking at passers by. This is not good for the plants and many of them end up squashed or with broken branches. My dog likes to dig and that's not good for the plants either. Because of my dog's habits I had to fence off the herb garden. From a design point of view I don't want a fenced off garden. It looks ugly and it's hard to access. I want a wild, everything running into each other sort of garden.
My herb garden after the fence came down on Sunday.
On Sunday I started sorting out the herb garden. I took down the fence. I moved 3 Griselinia lucidas that I'd planted last year to provide privacy from people walking up and down the right-of-way. Griselinia lucida's grow into big bushes, really big bushes. If I'd left them where they were there wouldn't be a herb garden in 3 years time. I weeded some of the herb garden and this gave me a chance to think about how I was going to stop my dog from trampling on the herbs. I decided I needed a couple of clear paths leading to the fence and lots of obstacles to stop her from trashing the plants. Time will tell if it works. I'm working on the premise that big dogs are like fourteen year old boys - they love short-cuts.
Removing the fence improved the look of the back garden. Instantly it appears larger, albeit rustic looking with the wooden sleepers on the side of the raised bed. I plan to plant some herbs that will spill over and hide the sleepers.
Inner Form, by Henry Moore (1898-1986), Wellington Botanic Garden, March 2018.
Here are a couple of photos of Henry Moore's sculpture in the Wellington Botanic Garden, taken from opposite hills on Saturday. As I was searching for the plaque that accompanied the sculpture I was joined by a man and his dog. The man pointed out the plaque, hidden in the grass, and then proceeded to photograph the sculpture, telling me that he did this everyday. Henry Moore, in my opinion, is one of the best artists ever. His Inner Form sculpture is perfectly placed. It can be seen from multiple angles and changes according to the angle of view and the weather. See the way the blue of the sky is reflected in the bronze.
View of Henry Moore's sculpture from the Herb Garden, Wellington Botanic Garden, March 2018. The big yellow flowers are golden rod Solidago canadensis, the leaves are used for sore throats.