cream. I love that the dogwood is such a democrat, growing anywhere and everywhere, in places where no other such beauty dare show herself.
A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up in the air.
—Henry Ward Beecher
How to Grow a Wildflower Meadow
I believe having a lawn is vastly overrated. It takes a tremendous amount of water and too much labor and causes vast quantities of chemicals to be dumped into our water supply. So I decided to dig mine up and plant a wildflower meadow instead. It took some work to get it going, but within four weeks, I had my first bloom. It was a glorious sight for six months and, unlike a lawn, is virtually maintenance-free. Plus I had an almost endless supply of cut flowers from late spring to late fall.
The tricks are to till the soil in the spring, select a pure wildflower mix (no grass or vermiculite filler) appropriate to your growing area, and blend the seed with four times its volume of fine sand, so it will disperse evenly. After you’ve spread it over the dirt, put down a layer of loose hay to keep the seeds from blowing away. Usually the mixes are a combination of annuals, biannuals, and perennials. To keep the annuals going, you have to rough up parts of the soil and reseed just those every year.
To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.
—Beverley Nichols
Sun-Infused Flower Essences
For centuries, flower essences have been used to heal many infirmities (see list below). While the health-food-store versions are handy, they are also very spendy. You can make your own flower essences at home. Start by making a mother tincture—the most concentrated form of the essence—which can then be used to make stock bottles. The stock bottles are used to make dosage bottles for the most diluted form of the essence, which is the one you actually take.
What you will need to make a sun-infused essence:
•Fresh pure water or distilled water, 3 quarts
•Clear glass 2 ½-quart mixing bowl
•A dark green, blue, or green glass 8-ounce sealable bottle
•Organic brandy or vodka
•Freshly picked flowers specific to the malady being treated
•Clean, dry cheesecloth for straining
Ideally, you begin early in the morning, with your chosen flowers picked by nine o’clock at the latest. This ensures three hours of sunlight before the noon hour, after which the sunlight is less effective and can even drain the energy.
Fill the bowl with the fresh water. To avoid touching them, gingerly place the flowers on the surface of the water, using tweezers or chopsticks very carefully, and add until the surface is covered. Let the bowl sit in the sun for three to four hours or until the flowers begin to fade.
Now, delicately remove the flowers, being careful not to touch the water. Half-fill your colored-glass bottle with the strained flower essence water and top the other half off with the organic brandy or vodka (40 percent/80 proof is advised to prolong the shelf life to three months if stored in a cool, dark cupboard). This is your mother tincture; label it with the date and the name of the flower, such as “Rose Water, July 14, 2018.” Use any remaining essence water, and murmur a prayer of gratitude for their beauty and healing power.
To make a stock bottle from your mother tincture, fill a 30-ml dropper bottle ¾ with brandy and ¼ with spring water, then add three drops of the mother tincture. This will last at least three months and enable you to make lots of dosage bottles, which contain the solutions you actually take.
To make the dosage bottle for any flower essence, just add two or three drops from the stock bottle to another 30-ml dropper bottle of ¼ brandy and ¾ distilled water. Any time you need some of this gentle medicine, place four drops of this solution under your tongue or sip it in a glass of water four times a day or as often as you feel the need. You can’t overdose on flower remedies, though more frequent, rather than larger, doses are much more effective.
Flower essences mixed with 30 milliliters distilled water can also be used as the following remedies:
•Addiction: skullcap, agrimony
•Anger: nettle, blue flag, chamomile
•Anxiety: garlic, rosemary, aspen, periwinkle, lemon balm, white chestnut, gentian
•Bereavement: honeysuckle
•Depression: borage, sunflower, larch, chamomile, geranium, yerba santa, black cohosh, lavender, mustard
•Exhaustion: aloe, yarrow, olive, sweet chestnut
•Fear: poppy, mallow, ginger, peony, water lily, basil, datura
•Heartbreak: heartsease, hawthorn, borage
•Lethargy: aloe, thyme, peppermint
•Stress: dill, echinacea, thyme, mistletoe, lemon balm
•Spiritual blocks: oak, ginseng, lady’s slipper
The Garden of Earthly Delights
I have always been extremely sensitive to smells. Blessed (or cursed) by a finely tuned sense of smell, I find I am often led around by my nose. I have fallen in love because of the way a man smelled; when I was a child and my parents were away on a trip, I used to steal into their bedroom and smell their robes hanging on the back of the door. One of my favorite books is Perfume, the story of a man so affected by scents he can smell them from hundreds of miles away.
Naturally enough, I am attracted to flowers primarily for their scent. All my roses are chosen for odor—spicy sweet, musky, peppery—if they don’t smell good, I don’t want them. My current favorite is a climber called Angel Face. I also love the heady smell of lavender, the spiciness of daffodils, the romance of lilacs and lilies of the valley, and the subtlety of certain bearded irises. I particularly love the elusiveness of fragrance. You catch a scent in the garden and follow your nose to…where? Now it’s here; then it’s gone. That’s why I love the sweet olive tree that blooms in Southern California in the early spring. The fragrance is strong in the early evening as you walk down the street, but press your nose against a blossom and the scent diminishes.
My husband, who knows of my fragrance passion, surprised me last spring by planting me a huge patch of multicolored sweet peas and an entire bed of rubrum and Casablanca lilies. Batches of sweet peas perfumed my office throughout the spring. Extremely long-lasting as cut flowers, the lilies bloomed for two solid months during the summer and, all that time, the house was full of their heady scent. I don’t think any gift has ever pleased me more.
And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter In the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore, nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
—Francis Bacon
Fragrant
