Round Robin: Experiment with a Medicinal Herb Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Experiment with new plants for your medicinal herb garden.

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

WOLFTOWN, Virginia—At the local nursery each spring, I see friends picking up their usual half-dozen flats of geraniums, petunias and red salvia. Their gardens look the same year after year. I’d rather experiment with plants, especially medicinal ones. I want to know how they grow and what conditions make them happy. I want to see if they reseed themselves. If they do, do they stay close to mama, or do the babies pop up at unexplainable distances? Are they bothered by insects? How do they react to the seasons, temperature extremes, moisture levels, shade or sun? If they have medicinal properties, what part is used, when is it gathered, how is it used?

A year ago, I brought back from New Zealand seeds of marsh mallow (Althaea officinalis), a perennial herb that has fascinated me ever since I read about an archaeological dig for 60,000-year-old Neanderthal bones in a cave in Kurdish Iraq. One set of bones lay atop decomposed plant material as though the body had been given a ritual burial. When analyzed, this material yielded up pollen from the flowers of seven flowering plants, all still used medicinally by the Kurds today. One was marsh mallow, the original source of the puffy confections that are now achieved synthetically. The plant, especially the roots, is rich in mucilage and can be made into a soothing concoction for irritated membranes such as sore throats. The botanical name Althaea is derived from the Greek word meaning “to heal”. My plants grew well, though they like more moisture than they received this year.

I’ve also added the small, drought-tolerant chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus) to my garden. The chaste tree was supposedly used to cool the ardor of Crusaders’s wives whose husbands had gone off to their holy wars. Another common name, monk’s pepper, refers to the alleged use by monks of the ground seeds as pepper to ensure their chastity. Medicinal or not, the tree’s fragrant spires of pale lilac flowers are lovely in dried arrangements.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print