Re-posted via Laura Bruno's Blog

Growing Medicinal Plants or Good Enough Gardening

Reflections by Ann Armbrecht

The one passage that has stayed with me from Stephen Buhner's new edition of Herbal Antibiotics is this:"The first thing to understand is that there are no mistakes. You are learning a new skill and everyone learns what works by learning what doesn't."

Simple advice. Yet I'd ignored it every time I'd picked up the book, trying to remember instead how Gram-negative Bacteria was different from Gram-positive bacteria or what exactly happened in a cytokine cascade. This time though I was six months into trying to deal with a really nasty case of cat Good enough gardening scratch disease, caused by the Bartonella bacteria, a bacteria that Buhner has now dedicated almost half of his equally excellent book on Lyme Co-infections. Who knew those sweet kittens nestled against our eight-year-old son would cause him so much trouble?

In early November, a week after we got the kittens, the lymph node behind his ear swelled to the size of a golf ball. I thought it was an ear infection at first, and gave him all of those good herbal ear ache remedies. It only got worse, especially the pain. Eventually we found ourselves in the ER on a Friday evening, because his doctor couldn't tell the difference between a swollen lymph node and mastoiditis, which is a really bad thing to have. Finally, we were told it was likely cat scratch, a self limiting disease that was said to resolve itself in a few weeks with no intervention.

It didn't get better, or it would, and then it would get worse. I consulted with every herbalist I knew. We found another doctor, who told us there was nothing to do but wait it out. I tried every plant I knew and many I'd never even heard of before. Each time a new remedy seemed to help, I got down on myself for not having tried it sooner, for not having known at the beginning what I knew now, two months or four months or now six months into treating something we were told should have gotten better a long time ago.

And then I read this passage about there being no mistakes. And I realized that maybe it wasn't that I was doing it wrong. That, as Buhner said, in choosing things that didn't seem to work, I was getting clearer about what might. And in the process I was learning about plants I hadn't known before. And uses of those plants I'd never tried. And also about a bacterial infection that, it seems, mainstream medicine doesn't know very much about.

I deal with long, challenging experiences – and to me there is almost nothing more challenging than having my child endure any form of suffering – by trying to find the wisdom to apply, in this case, to other instances where I beat myself up for not being an expert already, like, say, gardening.

Hence a post on good enough gardening written for anyone else who struggles with perfectionism in the garden!

We live on 1 ½ very steep acres in downtown Montpelier, most of which is a gully. The soil is largely fill, nasty stuff I don't trust for growing food or medicine, and what we do grow, we grow in soil we hauled in by truck. We are surrounded by trees, beautiful tall trees that block out the post office parking lot beneath us and, it turns out, that also block out the sun. As these trees have grown, the garden now gets only about 4-5 hours of sun a day and so vegetables growing in that nice, expensive soil don't do very well. I got a garden plot in a community garden two miles away which meant that tending the garden now also meant cajoling two small children that they really did like digging around in the dirt, having their own little garden, etc. Other kids seemed to like this; my kids, I'm afraid, did not.

So my gardens never looked too good. Each spring I would resolve to do better: I would enter each garden with re-newed vision and energy and lots of seedlings I couldn't resist at the farmer's market. And each year, by mid-July or so, I gave up. The weeds were too overwhelming, the mints too out of control, everything growing way too tall and falling over onto everything else. I would turn my back and spend the rest of the summer swimming with my children. Not really. But whatever I would do, I didn't go into my gardens.

This year I decided two things: first, I finally acknowledged that gardens need more than bi-monthly visits and abandoned the community plot and we built raised beds in the one section of our yard with closer to six hours of sun.

Second, I let myself consider, as Buhner suggests about using plants as medicine, that growing the plants is part of the process, not how good it all looks from afar; that, as all those wise interviewees in Numen say,the most potent and powerful medicine plants have to offer is their presence.

This year I'm growing calendula in the raised beds, tulsi and gotu kola and hyssop in pots with soil I trust right outside our door. The calendula is doing really well, the tulsi isn't so happy. I don't know what a happy gotu kola looks like, but I am growing it so my son can eat a leaf or two daily in hopes it helps heal the still not fully healed tissue behind his ear and there is enough for that.

I divided the nettles I had planted several years ago because Cascade Anderson Geller oncer told me, in an interview, that that is what her grandmother told her to do, that it was part of what Cascade calls feminine gardening. Cascade had recently died and I divided my nettles in honor of her words and her life. And it seems to have been good advice, because my nettles are more bountiful then ever.

Several years ago a friend passed on what I called purple bee balm, but what Matthew Wood calls sweet leaf (Monarda fisulosa). It is lovely, which is lucky, because it is taking over my garden. Wood suggests it for deep nerve issues and so I've tinctured it to try it this year. I added some to nettle tea, which my son, who loves nettle tea, wouldn't drink because the sweet leaf made it too spicy.

I harvest the lemon balm that also threatens to take over and mint for tea, echinacea and motherwort to tincture. There is a huge elecampane – who knew it would ever get so big when I got that root clipping from a friend – and marshmallow, both tower over everything else. I keep trying to dig them out and they keep coming back.

Lots of things don't grow well on our scruffy plot of land or need more attention than I seem able to give them. The spilanthes seems to need more sun. The blue vervein came back this year but the leaves are brown and twisted and that lovely purple spear of flowers has never bloomed. I've planted many things that never return: teasel and rue, the kittens devoured the catnip so I've tried catmint instead. Things that grow in the clay fill of most of our lawn I don't trust, especially the burdock that grows with such abundance.

I grow black cohosh and blue cohosh and a not very happy goldenseal. Some solomon seal, lots of wild ginger. Butterfly weed. None to harvest as medicine, but because I love these plants and feel happy just knowing they are there.

I now realize I inadvertently did one more thing that has made even more difference in my relationship to my garden: I moved my office so my window now looks over my garden. When I look at herb books, I see all I don't know. When I look out my window, I realize I see something else. I am far enough away to not see the weeds and the work and instead see patterns of color: pale purple and yellow, pink and white and different shades of green. I see the echinacea I grew from seed, the sweet leaf I got from Annie, the baptista and apple mint from Amy, the nettles from Sage Mountain and the butterfly weed that was here when we moved in. I know something of how each one grows in part by learning how it doesn't grow. I know how they taste in tea and I know how they make me feel.