Winter Recap

The Ides of March are almost upon us, and I am just now finding time to update this blog with the activities of the winter....well, of the fall and winter actually. So this will be a sort of highlights reel, a quick tour with images of some of the highlights of the seasons past.

I am not one of those people who likes to rush through winter, joining the headlong surge towards spring. The quiet and enforced interior life of the cold months, the luxurious length of the nights, the fires, the cozy post-holiday hybernation: I love all these.  Not that there was much Winter to speak of this year, here in Philadelphia, where an unexpected Halloween snow was just about the only wintery bit we got.

In day-to-day practice, this experience, another "warmest winter" on record, is quite lovely, but one cannot help but wonder, and perhaps even to feel that something is slipping, askew.

a field of valerian, escaped from some early garden

On a boat ride to this island, off the coast of Maine, we hike to the seaward side in search of sweet fat mussels for dinner.  The remnant fields are filled with St Johnswort, heavy with a late bloom of yellow flowers, and i am glad I've tucked a small gathering bag in my pack.

Here I have the luxury of just stripping the blooms themselves (I take only about 1/3 from any individual plant, and, again, only harvest from 1/3 of the population.I steep half in alcohol (100 proof Vodka) and the other half in olive oil.

After just a few hours, the characteristic red color is already intense!

The hardy proliferation of these two European plants throughout these cold northern islands seems like a special gift, attuned to the needs of the 'settlers'

It provides an aid to the depression and light- deprivation of these long dark months, in the case of St Johnswort, and a sovereign pain medicine, in the case of Valerian.  How necessary and fortuitously hardy they must have seemed to these early herbalists!


Modern herbalism tends to pigeonhole plants into a fame based on one use (depression in the case of St Johnswort) whereas a reading of the early texts reveal that this is good, as well, for burns and for the deep nerve damage that accompany 2nd and 3rd burns ---

This deep red colored oil is strained and compounded into a deep healing salve, with the addition of beeswax and 12,000 units of Vitamin E  (d-alpha tocopherol: natural)

The finished products

In the stillroom...