quote

"There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ..... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."
- Ruth Stout

quote

"If it's rare, we want it. If it's tiny and impossible to grow, we've got to have it. If it's brown, looks dead, and has black flowers, we'll kill for it."
- Ken Druse

quote

"A gardener's best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook."
- Andy Tomolonis

quote

"The strongest, most productive garden implement you can ever obtain probably won't be for sale in tool catalogs or implement stores; you won't find it listed in seed catalogs or stocked in your favorite garden center. Yet this tool is far mightier than the hoe; it will dig deeper than a tiller and will lay off rows better than any wheel planter. It's the most valuable implement a gardener can ever use: a pencil."
- Jim Long

quote

"There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter.
One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues."
- Hal Borland

quote

"As I write, snow is falling outside my Maine window, and indoors all around me half a hundred garden catalogs are in bloom."
- Katharine S. White

quote

"Turn down the noise. Reduce the speed. Be like the somnolent bears, or those other animals that slow down and almost die in the cold season. Let it be the way it is. The magic is there in its power."
- Henry Mitchell

quote

"A natural garden ... includes the wide, wild world as it is, warts and all."
- Jeff Cox

quote

All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.
- Helen Hayes

quote

"Anyone who thinks that gardening begins in the spring and ends in the fall is missing the best part of the whole year. For gardening begins in January with the dream."
- Josephine Nuese

quote

When the snow is still blowing against the window-pane in
January and February and the wild winds are howling without,
what pleasure it is to plan for summer that is to be.
- Celia Thaxter

quote

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
- John Berger

quote

Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things,
but just look what they can do when they stick together.
- Vesta M. Kelly

quote

"If there were no tribulation, there would be no rest; if there were no winter, there would be no summer."
- St. John Chrysostom

Hens and chicks are herbs

A friend, who has been project chairperson for the Master Gardener's demonstration Hardy Cactus and Succulent Garden (first a Michigan State University demonstration garden, now transplanted to the property at the Easter Seals office in Flint) for many years, used to tell me there was very little to do with succulents in a herbal, "useful", sense.

Of course we all know about the lightning folklore concerning Sempervivums, and that Aloe Vera was a proven soothing medicinal herb. And that Yucca roots are both detergent and food, And that Opuntia pads and fruit are desert food.
But Hens and Chicks? Sempervivums?

Hens and Chicks, a.k.a. . House leeks (Sempervivum tectorum), are hardy evergreen succulent herbs. They are exceedingly simple to grow, thriving in heat, cold, drought and poor soil; seemingly independent of human concern. That old saw, "thriving on neglect," fits them to a T.

I've read that they can be grown indoors in clay pots, like other cactus and succulents, but the only time I tried it, they stretched to the wan light of my midwinter window and lost their charm. If my son would take his tender succulent trees from out my limited grow light space (I'm succulent-sitting while he works on his basement renovation) then I might try again to raise indoor Hens and Chicks.

And only just because I have finally read a herbal use for them that I might actually try, aside from the French Emperor Charlemagne's decree, based I'm guessing, on earlier Anglo-Saxon, or earlier, lore, that his subjects should grow them on their roofs to ward away lightning strikes.

According to an old herbal calendar that I was cutting up to recycle the artwork into gift tags, Hens and Chicks leaves, crushed, serve as a facial, and are soothing to bumps and bruises. Use seems to be topical as in poultice, tincture wash, and salves. Like the Aloe Vera, the leaf can be cut vertically and the mucilage applied directly to the skin.

The calendar also provided a recipe:

House Leek Foot Bath

1 cup hot water

1/2 cup House leek leaves

1 gallon warm water

2 Tbsp. Epsom salts

Puree the leaves in a blender with the hot water. Pour into a foot bath, then add water and epsom salts. Soak the feet for 20 minutes.

Mrs. Grieve, in her A Modern Herbal, a classic English herbal encyclopedia edited by the many times neglected Mrs. C.F. Leyel, and published in 1931 (that you can now read online), describes many traditional western herbs, and I just looked up Hens and Chicks, a.k.a. House leeks. (Another Master Gardener, Judy, gave me her copy when she was cleaning out her bookshelves. I love its breadth of knowledge. And it makes a heck of a doorstop.)

Here are some factoids:

Leac is Anglo Saxon for 'plant'. The Latin Semper (forever) and vivum (I live) were easy, the interesting epithet however, tectorum refers to its location of choice - the roof.

Cool legend - it protects homes from sorcery as well as fires and lightning.

Linnaeus stated it preserves thatched roofs in Sweden.

Plenty of topical uses. Parkinson tells us the foot bath above might be just the thing for warts and corns, used nightly, with the inner leaf applied as a plaster.

The Mrses. Grieve and Leyel go on and on listing a plethora of historical useful uses for our cute little Hens and Chicks. You can look them up, but I'll stick with the foot bath use as my Hens and Chicks touchstone.

For Sedums, there is a whole another entry in The Modern Herbal. Who-da thunk it?

If you are one of those modern gardeners committing to permaculture in your yard, feel free to plant a hardy cactus and succulent garden - they're HERBS!

quote

No one can look at a pine tree
in winter without knowing that
spring will come again in due time.
-Frank Bolles

quote

"Of winter's lifeless world each tree
Now seems a perfect part;
Yet each one holds summer's secret
Deep down within its heart."
- Charles G. Stater

an advanced, civilized society

This was in the e-newsletter from The Old Farmer's Almanac today. (You'd think I'm working for The OFA, for the way I'm talking about it, but, NO. I'm the perennial volunteer. ) Something in this ancient pagan custom spoke to me when I read it. Something along the lines of "those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes" or "why don't we open "Temples of Peace" where progressive thinking could be safely contemplated?" What does it say about "civilation", the ancient world, and our own times?

"From the Ruler of new beginnings, and gates and doors, the Roman god Janus gave January its name. He was pictured as two-faced so that one face looked forward into the future while the other took a retrospective view. Janus presided over the temple of peace, where the doors were opened only during wartime. It was a place of safety, where new beginnings and new resolutions could be forged."

quote

"Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle ... a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dream."
- Barbara Winkler

quote

"In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature."
- Edna O'Brien