Green Tribe of Belonging

It's probably no surprise to you that healing plants are a favorite hobby of mine. For the past 50 years, starting when my children were babies, I began learning about how different herbs can improve our health and cure some maladies. When I lived at our family farm, I had a huge medicinal herb garden and gave workshops in how to grow, harvest, prepare and use different ones. Now that I live at Prairie Hill, I'm fortunate enough to have a large "adopted plot" right at our entrance, and it's full of perennial medicinals. Now it's the time of year to harvest, especially the ones whose roots have the best healing properties. It's been a couple years since I've given a workshop in these life-benefiting plants, so it seems time to do it again. The next free Saturday here at Prairie Hill is two weeks from today, Nov. 2nd. I've reserved the common house living room for 1:00 then, and we'll gather there for a show and tell. I'll have examples of va

 After a couple days of being under the weather, I decided to catch up on what is going on in the world. Now that I was feeling better, it was time to engage more broadly than the surroundings of my own cozy little home. But oh my, it was such a downer! The world news flattened my spirit. Then I got a call from my daughter April. She and her family survived the terrible devastation of Asheville recently. She called from an emergency shelter where she and her son Gus were volunteering to distribute food and water and other necessities to the surrounding population there. And she told me how the wonderful FEMA volunteers helping out after that severe crisis were getting attacked by right wing fanatics, forcing them to leave the area. There were hateful, ugly, scurrilous things being said about people just trying to do the best thing they knew.  And listening to the wider news, I was yet again saddened and angered by the lies, lack of morality, the heedless disregard for one's fellow

 Green Homecoming I’m sitting in the warm companionship of my newly migrated houseplants, just moved in from the front porch,  out of danger of cold and frost, into the protection of my home, For the first time in five months, I feel softly surrounded by intimate friends  as I watch baseball reruns on my TV,  leafy living green on either side of me. After spending the day heaving and lifting, trimming and watering, moving furniture here and there, finally a place was found for all these members of my family. Maybe I don’t need a kitty after all. Most of these plants have been with me for years, and yet again I realize they are like my beloved pets. I wonder if they can feel that love. Whether in my imagination or not, I sense a gratitude on both sides.

 I'm off to Maine to visit my daughter and her husband early tomorrow, so I'm getting off another post about beneficial weeds before I leave. We are in quite a drought here in eastern Iowa. I went out this morning to take pictures of Plantain and Burdock, and you can tell by the results that these plants would love some rain! However, even in their slightly wilted state they'll be recognizable to many of you. The first one below, Plantain, is one of my favorite plants. This is not the banana-like plantain that you may be familiar with, but a low-growing small plant that loves compacted soil. If you want to find some, just go to a path or trail where lots of animals or people walk. That's where they are happiest. Long ago I was taught that their leaves are a miracle skin-healer, and I've used them as the main ingredient in the healing salves I've made since then. I had thought they were just good for external use, but now I find that actually they are taken inter

 I remember when I bought my current i-phone a couple months ago, I was ready and excited to take clear and beautiful pictures of weeds and post them on this blog. But this phone has proven to be a total challenge. I feel like flinging it against the wall multiple times a day. I've always had an android, and the transition to the completely different i-phone has been so much more difficult than I could have imagined. I am very, very slowly adapting to this new-age phone, and I finally have learned to take relatively good pictures with it. At last I can get back into the flow of blog posts and catch up by presenting two more weeds we have in plentiful quantities at Prairie Hill. They are both plants that we pull up from our native lawns. But as usual, they are also admirable in many ways if you look at them by themselves. And I even have pictures of both of them. First, there's Black Medic. Here's a picture of it growing out of the crack on one of our sidewalks: I had never

 As humans, we naturally view the world through the eyes of our own species, and of our culture. As our species has developed, we've become more distanced from the other living things around us so that sometimes our worldview is totally focused on the doings of other people, the natural world viewed a bit like furniture, something in the background but not very important. I imagine this is a tendency with other animals too. Wolves may not think much about the interrelationships among their neighbors in the forest. Chipmunks' lives are probably focused mostly on their secure homes and navigating the dangers outside as they look for food. But it can be mind-blowing to let yourself imagine being some other species, even plants. As I was sitting quietly in Friends Meeting the other day, a little restless and unfocused, I began to look out the window at a tree limb blowing in the wind. Just a limb, covered in leaves, attached to a tall trunk out of my view. And I began to imagine th