THE FIBER NETTLE
The nettle contains long, pliable fibers that can be spun and woven to make smooth, supple nettle cloth, or cooked and processed as paper. The leaves are used to make a green dye; a yellow dye is made from the roots.
Read more about this valuable herb:
Healing Wise, by Susun S. Weed
Nettles, by Janice Schofield
Cows fed on nettle give much milk and yellow butter. Makes horses smart and frisky. Stimulates fowls to lay many eggs . . .
—CONSTANTINE RAFINESQUE (1830)
MARCH 4
I turned to Ruby. “I’ve got a couple of salmon steaks I was planning to bed down in lemon butter and dill. Want to stay for dinner?”
“Offer I can’t refuse,” Ruby said promptly.
—THYME OF DEATH: A CHINA BAYLES MYSTERY
Better Butters
China Bayles uses herbed butters to replace regular butter in soups and sauces, on vegetables, rice and pasta, and broiled fish and poultry. Herbed butters can be stored in the refrigerator for 2-3 weeks, or frozen. Use unsalted butter to permit the fullest herb flavor, adding salt and pepper later.
CHINA’S LEMON DILL BUTTER
1 cup unsalted butter
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
grated zest of 1 lemon
Melt butter in a small saucepan over low heat, without stirring. Skim off any foam. Pour clarified butter into a medium bowl, leaving sediment in the bottom of the pan. Stir in dill and lemon zest. Keep warm until ready to serve. Wonderful on fish.
MARGE’S PARSLEY BUTTER
Indiana herbalist Marge Clark liked this butter because, she said, you can find fresh parsley in the supermarket, even in the dead of winter.
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup fresh parsley, minced
freshly grated black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
Combine all thoroughly. Cover tightly and refrigerate up to 2 weeks. Good on any meat, fish, chicken, bread, or vegetable.
DRIED IS FINE HERB BUTTER
It’s March, and all you have are dried herbs. Don’t fret—this blend is almost as tasty as if you’d used garden-fresh herbs.
½ teaspoon lemon powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder (not salt)
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried basil
1 tablespoon dried tarragon
1 tablespoon dried rosemary
1 tablespoon dried chives
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Mix thoroughly, grind fine using a mortar and pestle or a spice grinder, and store tightly lidded, away from the light. To make butter, add 2 ½ teaspoons to 1 cup of softened butter.
Read more of Marge Clark’s herbal recipes:
The Best of Thymes, by Marge Clark
MARCH 5
Today is the Egyptian festival honoring Isis, the Lady of Ten Thousand Names.
Isis of the winged arms was first daughter of Nut, the overarching sky, and the little earth-god Geb . . . From the beginning, Isis turned a kind eye on the people of earth, teaching women to grind corn, spin flax, weave cloth, and tame men sufficiently to live with them.
—PATRICIA MONAGHAN, THE BOOK OF
GODDESSES & HEROINES
Flax
Flax, like nettle, is an ancient fiber herb, its cultivation and use dating back to the beginnings of civilization. From flax (Linum usitatissimum) is spun linen, which is frequently mentioned in the Bible. In Egypt, coarse linen was the common domestic cloth, while “fine” linen was reserved for the wealthy. Mummies were wrapped in linen shrouds. Many tomb paintings of people cultivating and dressing flax and spinning and weaving linen thread have been found.
FROM FLAX TO FIBER
Preparing flax for spinning was a laborious process, and most of the work was done by women. The 2-3 foot stalks of this annual plant were cut green and soaked for several days to remove the outer casing, laid out on the flat roofs of houses to “ret” (rot), and then beaten to soften the long fibers and separate them from the pith. The fibers were combed, spun on hand spindles (the spinning wheel didn’t come along until the thirteenth century), and woven into cloth.
FLAXSEED FOR HEART HEALTH
Flaxseed (or linseed, as it is also called) has been used in medicine since ancient times. It was valued as a poultice for pleurisy, skin eruptions, tumors, and burns, and was used in cough medicines. Flaxseed itself (ground or whole) contains the antioxidant lignan, which may help protect against certain cancers. Flaxseed oil, containing alpha-linolenic acid, is highly unsaturated and heart-healthy. (Do not ingest industrial linseed oil!)
The seeds themselves have a nutty taste and are highly nutritious. Grinding them just before using preserves flavor and nutrition, but preground seeds are more convenient. Keep them refrigerated. Combine flaxseed flour with wheat flour for breads, quick breads, and pancakes, and sprinkle the ground seeds on cereals for additional crunch. Isis would be pleased.
Read more about flax:
Flax Your Way to Better Health, by Jane Reinhardt-Martin
Get thy distaff and spindle ready and God will send the flax.
—TRADITIONAL SAYING
MARCH 6
There is a legend that bad fairies gave the blossoms of foxgloves to the fox that he might put them on his toes to soften his tread when he prowled among the roosts.
—MRS. M. GRIEVE, A MODERN HERBAL
The Mystery of Foxglove: A Love Story
It all started in the spring of 1768, in the English county of Shropshire, when Dr. William Withering rode out to make a house call on Miss Helena Cooke. Her illness confined the young lady to her home and required the good doctor to visit frequently. The two young people fell in love. He proposed marriage and she accepted.
Miss Cooke’s favorite occupation was painting watercolors of plants and flowers. As a medical student, Dr. Withering had found botany exceedingly dull and disagreeable, but his fiancée’s fascination with plants quite naturally charmed him. By the time they were married in 1774, Dr. Withering was as passionate about plants as was his new wife.
One subject of the doctor’s passion was the poisonous foxglove, known by its Latin binomial as Digitalis purpurea. The year after his marriage, the doctor acquired an herbal recipe from Mrs. Sutton, a Shropshire herbalist. She had been using the recipe, which contained foxglove and other herbs, to treat dropsy—the disease we now know as congestive heart failure. Although none of the authoritative herbals recommended the use of foxglove, Dr. Withering began to experiment with this powerful herb, administering it in different forms and dosages and carefully observing its effect on his patients. He learned that the plant increased the strength and efficiency of the heart muscle without requiring more oxygen. He also learned that the most reliable effects were obtained from the leaves of a two-year-old plant, gathered just before it bloomed.
By 1780, the success of Dr. Withering’s clinical trials encouraged him to recommend foxglove to his fellow practitioners. Five years later, he published his now-classical study, Account of the Foxglove. Eventually, the plant’s compound was synthesized, and digitalis—as it was now called—came into common use.
If you use digitalis, you can thank Mrs. Sutton for making the recipe available to Dr. Withering. You can thank the good doctor for his careful trials, and his patients for their courage. And you can thank Mrs. Withering for inspiring the doctor’s interest in plants. Yes, sometimes it does take a village.
Read more about plant-based medicine:
Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine, by Barbara Griggs
The fascinating question thus presents itself: how many other country remedies—like the foxglove, unrecorded in the herbals—have never met their Withering, and have been lost for ever to orthodox medicine?
—BARBARA GRIGGS, GREEN PHARMACY
MARCH 7
A Jesuit prie
st living among the Onondaga of New York—and probably taught by them—wrote the following about sassafras’s healing powers: “But the most common and wonderful plant . . . is that which we call the ‘Universal Plant,’ because its leaves when powdered heal wounds of all kinds in a short time.”
—ALICE THOMS VITALE, LEAVES: IN MYTH, MAGIC & MEDICINE
Sassafras, the “Universal Plant”
Tea made from sassafras twigs and leaves was my Missouri grandmother’s favorite spring tonic, which she prescribed liberally for internal spring cleaning and as a cold and flu fighter. As a child growing up in Illinois, my favorite treat was a frosty mug of root beer—originally a product of the sassafras tree. When I lived in Louisiana, I learned that Creole filé gumbo just wasn’t the same without filé powder, made from sassafras. And recently, I’ve seen fabric dyed a deep, pretty yellow from sassafras bark. No wonder it’s been called the “universal plant”!
The sassafras tree (Sassafras albidum) is common throughout the eastern United States. It was the New World’s first cash crop, and made quite a sensation in the early 1600s in Europe, where its health-giving roots and wood were more prized than chocolate and tobacco, two other wildly popular New World herbs. Its popularity declined sharply, however, when word got around that it was being used to treat syphilis. Its main constituent, safrole, is now considered carcinogenic.
Because of this concern for toxicity, root beer is now made from artificial flavors, and people have been warned to reduce their consumption of sassafras tea. (My grandmother would undoubtedly have gone right on drinking it.) Used in small quantities as a flavoring, the leaves are safe and are available, in the form of filé powder, from many supermarkets. If you want to make your own filé, dry the young sassafras leaves until they’re crisp, then powder them. To flavor and thicken gumbo, add the powder at the very end of the cooking period, after you have taken the pot from the heat, and add it only to the portion you plan to serve. (Filé powder becomes stringy when it’s heated or reheated.)
Read more about sassafras:
Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation, by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Wild Roots: A Forager’s Guide, by Doug Elliott
Fill me with sassafras, nurse
And juniper juice!
And see if I’m still any use!
For I want to be young again and to sing again,
Sing again, sing again.
—DON MARQUIS, “SPRING ODE”
MARCH 8
In the early church, rue was dipped in holy water and shaken in front of the doors and in the aisles to repel demons and evil. By the sixteenth century, the plant had come to be associated with the idea of ruefulness and repentance, with sorrow for one’s wrongdoing. Perhaps that was why the poison pen writer had put it into the envelopes. Rue, regret, repentance, grace. It was a powerful symbol.
—RUEFUL DEATH: A CHINA BAYLES MYSTERY
Rueful Death: About China’s Books
When I chose rue as the signature herb for the fifth of China’s herbal adventures, I didn’t have a very clear idea of how I was going to use it. Once I began to work with the herb, however, I quickly turned up two interesting things. The first had to do with rue’s symbolic association with ruefulness and repentance. The second was inspired by a remark in Steven Foster’s book, Herbal Renaissance: the frequently reported “burns” caused by rue sap are the result of “photosensitization resulting from a reaction of the furocoumarins in the fresh leaves to sunlight.” Putting these two things together, I came up with a plot in which a poison-pen writer includes a leaf of rue with her messages and is betrayed by the rue-burns—photodermatitis—on her arms.
I have to confess to being less interested in the mechanics of the plot, however, than in the herb itself, for rue’s rich symbolism brought a special depth of significance to what was a fairly simple mystery novel. The plant gave me a way of seeing and understanding the events of the story: a special dimension, symbolic, allegorical even. And although readers don’t have to perceive this dimension of the book in order to understand its plot, it can certainly enrich the reading experience.
When I was doing research for Rueful Death, I harvested many fascinating snippets about the plant. Here are some:
• Rue lends second sight. With it, you’ll be able to see a person’s heart and know whether she’s a witch. —Medieval folklore
• If gun-flints are wiped with rue and vervain, the shot must surely reach the intended victim, regardless of the shooter’s aim.—C. M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants
• Rue in Thyme should be a Maiden’s Posie.—Scottish proverb
• What savor is better, if physicke be true For places infected than Wormwood and Rue? —Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry , 1580
• And from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, famously and memorably: I wear my rue with a difference.
Read more about rue:
Rueful Death: A China Bayles Mystery, by Susan Wittig Albert
MARCH 9
I plant rosemary all over the garden, so pleasant is it to know that at every few steps one may draw the kindly branchlets through one’s hand, and have the enjoyment of their incomparable incense; and I grow it against walls, so that the sun may draw out its inexhaustible sweetness to greet me as I pass.
—GERTRUDE JEKYLL (1843-1932)
It’s Not Easy, But You Can Do It
Yes, you really can grow rosemary from seed. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) seeds have a fairly low germination rate (around 25 percent) and germination may take anywhere from a couple of weeks to two months. But if you plant 100, you’ll have 25. It’s certainly worth a try.
Sow the seeds on the surface of a small container of sterile potting medium (do not cover with soil). Moisten, and put the container into a plastic bag in a warm, light place—light helps them to germinate. As soon as you can handle the small green plants (some 10-12 weeks from now), transplant them to individual pots, using good soil, enriched with compost and
plenty of sand for drainage. Keep them on a bright, cool windowsill, then move them outdoors in stages: from the windowsill to a protected porch, bringing them in on cold nights; from the porch to an outdoor spot with morning sun and plenty of moving air; then (still in the pot) to the bed where they’re going to grow; and finally, into the ground.
Growing rosemary from seed is one of those things you just have to want to do. But think of your friends’ surprised shock when you say, with a casual wave of the hand, “Oh, those rosemarys? I grew them myself, from seed.”
Read more about growing from seed:
Growing Herbs from Seed, Cutting & Root: An Adventure in Small Miracles, by Thomas Debaggio
To make Conserve of Rosemary Flowers.—Take two Pound of Rosemary-flowers, the same weight of fine Sugar, pownd them well in a Stone-Mortar; then put the Conserve into wellglaz’d Gallipots. It will keep a Year or Two.
—SIR HUGH PLATT, DELIGHTS FOR LADIES, 1594
In the floral calendar, today’s flower: daffodil.
MARCH 10
Native Americans called the March Full Moon “The Sap Moon.”
Botanists say that trees need the powerful March winds to flex their trunks and main branches, so the sap is drawn up to nourish the budding leaves. Perhaps we need the gales of life in the same way, though we dislike enduring them.
—JANE TRUAX
Sap’s Rising!
Throughout the Northeast, March is the month to tap the trees, an activity that was an important ritual in Native American Indian cultures, where all six maple species (especially Acer saccharum, sugar maple) would be tapped, as well as birch, butternut, box elder, and hickory trees.
For the Mohawks and other tribes, tree-tapping was preceded by a major religious ceremony. Before the sap—the tree’s lifeblood—was collected, tobacco was thrown onto a fire of maple twigs in a ceremony of thanksgiving for what the tree was about to share. A community feast fo
llowed, and then bark sap baskets were attached to the trees to be tapped. The sap was boiled down into syrup and sugar. Maple bark was also used to prepare a blood purifier, eye medicine, and cough medicine.
MAPLE AND BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE
Try this sweet-sour dressing on a hearty spinach salad, with sliced red onions, crimini mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and feta cheese.
1 teaspoon chopped cilantro
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Mix together the first five ingredients. Whisk in oil. Salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate.
• Sap from a maple tree flows faster before a rain shower.
• You’ll get more sap if you hang the buckets on the south side of the tree.
China Bayles' Book of Days Page 10