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If there isnt an essential oil of this plant, there should be. The smell is of thick warm summer coming on, with sticky orange minty maple syrup fenugreek. When you see this plant I highly recommend stroking it and rubbing its perfume on your neck. It will be with you all day long. This is […]

Spring is green blooded time.  My eyes are inundated with verdant imprinting. My insides want to look and feel verdant too.  Verdant, verdant, verdant, I can’t stop saying that word! This spring greenness makes me feel joy, enlivening, and a quickening of my system.Cleavers, bedstraw, goosegrass, sticky willy, gripgrass, zhu yang yang is an herbaceous […]

Spring has sprung, and the weeds are bountiful! They are our first harvest! Weeds were my first herbal friends at the age of three, for they were in abundance and I would see them year after year in the same place.  I would squeeze, squish, smell, and taste many plants on my path, in that order. […]

Just less than two weeks ago, the sky was tinged with a yellow mist that rode upon the wind, and the leaves, cars, and roads were dusted yellow. Some of you could hardly revel in the beauty of spring through swollen eyes, nor smell the glorious singing fragrance bursting forth from locust blossoms, wild California […]

Below our home and out back behind the old barns, which are falling down plank by plank from the drilling of the wood bees, there is a pokeweed forest growing. An old cedar came down two winters ago, and it seems all these dormant poke seeds finally saw the light to germinate. Poke, Phytolacca americana, […]