Round Robin: Herbal Gift Exchange

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ORANGEDALE, Nova Scotia—The first time I exchanged herb plants was in 1972 when the late garden writer Adele Dawson, author of Health, Happiness and the Pursuit of Herbs (1980), stopped by our place in northern Vermont to beg a piece of my husband’s elecampane, and in return she gave me comfrey, lamb’s-ears and English daisies. I had no idea then of the consequences of this simple transaction, nor did I realize that I was participating in a long-established custom. Thus, Robert Child writes from Gravesend in 1644 to thank John Winthrop, Jr., for the seeds from America which he had delivered to “the Gardiner of Yorke garden and to Mr. Tredescham, who are very thankefull to you for them and have returned diverse sorts which you shall receive by the hands of Mr. Willoughby.” Etiquette among plant fanciers demands an exchange of material.

I did not become a full-fledged member of the group, though, until I had established my own garden, shortly after we moved to Cape Breton Island. Here, the long maritime winters are characterized by driving gale-force winds and precipitation in every form, with alternate freezing and thawing. Spring is nonexistent, and the soil is poorly drained heavy clay, leached of nutrients from glacial activity—altogether tough growing conditions. Nevertheless, the plants I have received and those I’ve given are surprisingly numerous and varied.

I made my first garden on the site of an old rock and wood pile. Here, as opposed to the hardpan elsewhere on the farm, the soil was friable, moist, rich, and deep from decades of decomposing organic matter, and it provided a good home for my recent acquisitions. These included not only Mrs. Dawson’s gifts, but my husband’s herbs, for which he now had little time. Super-hardy Old World perennials on the wild side, tenacious in their hold on life, they were the very best types to begin with because they not only survived my ignorance and occasional neglect, but they thrived and soon had to be divided. Now, with an excess of plant material, I could give as well as receive. Visitors to my garden henceforth were gratified by my clumps of comfrey, for in early summer there is no more pleasing sight than a single bush, resplendent in powder blue trumpets from head to toe.

I soon acquired and gave away roots and divisions from chives, sedum, mints of various types, violets, bugle, mallow, lady’s-mantle, Jacob’s-ladder and bleeding-heart, among others. Some of my favorites of these hardy types are the heirlooms, whose roots (literally) can be traced back many generations.

I inherited lungwort with the farm. It had been planted from a neighbor’s stock more than 70 years ago to form a ring around a now-thickened bunch of orange daylilies on a knoll in front of the farmhouse. How many times in early spring have I appreciated the artistry of the gardener’s untrained eye (she, I learned, was an aunt of the former owner) and expressed gratitude for her gift, which I have faithfully tended. In the spring, the lungwort carpets the ground between two treelike lilacs, the clusters of nodding little bells—bright pink, lavender, sky blue, and white—enticing hummingbirds and honeybees in search of early nectar. My visitors admire these pretty flowers, and over the course of the past 20 years I must have given away enough of them to cover a football field. Not for nothing are they also called “hundreds and thousands” after their creeping, rhizomatous roots.

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