Guide to Everlasting Herbs

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Everlastings are plants that dry easily, retain their shape and color, and can be incorporated into long-lasting wreaths and arrangements. Many people know the showy dried flowers such as strawflower and statice; fewer realize that many herbs are equally attractive when dried. Their flowers, pods, bracts, and buds add ­visual appeal, and they have an historical resonance unmatched by the more familiar everlastings.

When I pick a safflower, for example, I see it as not just a green and yellow thistlelike flower, but the same flower that was woven into the garlands of Egyptian mummies, used for dyeing Egyptian cloth, grown for thousands of years, picked by ­millions of hands, and passed down by countless generations of gardeners. The notion that plants can be used symbolically in ­ceremonies and in expressing emotions is an ancient one, but herbs can reveal even more, since they also represent a living chronicle of human usage.

On the following pages are some of my favorite herbs to grow as everlastings.

Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

"Having been regarded, almost since the discovery of this country, as subtonic, diaphoretic, alterative, expectorant, diuretic, laxative, ­escha­rotic, carminative, anti-spasmodic, anti-pleuritic, stomachic, ­astringent, anti-rheumatic, anti-syphilitic, and what not?"
—Charles Millspaugh, Medicinal Plants, 1892

Actually, Native Americans considered butterfly weed a valuable medicinal herb even before Europeans ­arrived here. Unlike most other members of the milkweed genus, butterfly weed does not exhibit the characteristic milky white sap. Like them, however, it plays host to the caterpillars of the monarch butterfly. Its umbels of brilliant orange flowers are choice nectar sources for bees and butterflies. Covered with beating wings, it is one of the showiest of herbs.

The flowers are followed by long, pointed seedpods called follicles. Pick these after they have begun to split open on the plant. They will mature to a tan color.

Propagation is by seeds.

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius)

"Old dry safflower, cadmiun, grind it together. Sprinkle it on the wound. Fasten a bandage to it and tie it. It will heal."
—Coptic medical text, 9th century a.d.

Safflower is an Old World plant that has been in cultivation since ancient times. An important source of dye since the time of the ancient Egyptians, it is increasingly grown today as an oilseed crop.

This hardy annual looks like a thistle with smooth, thick stems and painfully spiny leaves. Spineless varieties have been developed and are far easier to harvest. Each plant is well branched and will produce several flower heads. Each flower head consists of many green leafy bracts which constrict around a tuft of yellow or orange florets.

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