Saturday, October 19, 2013

In Fall, Singing Two Heroic Herbs of Summer

In September it was time to start a move, and when apartment-cleaning, daily work, a commissioned art work and then the move itself began to overwhelm me I began acknowledging the warning tickles of  a cold. In my midlife I've grown susceptible to bronchial congestion that would bloom into pneumonia if left untreated. Prescription antibiotics in the years I'd been insured would squelch those symptoms within hours, but the leftover cough and residue linger way deep. All in all I find I'm vulnerable to bronchitis after more and more of the colds I catch, though I've never smoked. In fall 2013, doing without health insurance and facing the move and my usual Canadian travels in the month to come, I felt the clampdown of familiar challenge in sore throat and fatigue. My house-mates (not the first but the second set of friends to make the same claim) urged that raw garlic would kill the infection and sent me away to Duluth with two whole bulbs of garlic, suggesting I eat it like pills.

So I gulped the cloves one at a time or broke them over the midday meal, while the infection developed because I couldn't afford to spend days lying down to sleep it off. I must have breathed garlic scent on my nearest co-workers, since whenever I burped I burnt the end of my nose with garlic gas. But the usual congestion never caught hold inside me. This cold instead remained the gentle kind I remember having as a schoolkid, a day or more of sneezes, then a three-days' cough toward the end. I ate up one whole bulb of garlic, then let up when the cough had run its course, and skipped that build-up of bronchial residue that reinforces warnings not to rely on antibiotic pills whenever infection strikes. Now I'm a convert to garlic in no matter what formulas it might be prescribed by practiced healers. What seems true is that the benefit may all be in the timing of when you load your system with it.

A friend and peer in Indiana years ago gave me The Herb Book by John Lust, Benedict Lust Publications ©1974. In this book garlic is ascribed a range of healing properties with beautifully arcane names: anthelmintic (a worm-purge,) carminative (a fart-starter to relieve belly gas,) cholagogue (a bile promoter,) antispasmodic (a spasm and cramp-dampener,) and expectorant (hastening the expulsion of mucous from the breathing passages.)

Part of the mystique that this past summer held for me included my first-ever acquaintance with another much scarcer herb, in some locales considered threatened unless propagated, the native North American queen of the prairie or Filipendula rubra. Nothing I've read so far connects it with any medicinal or salad-making properties, though  it's hard to believe that for all the eons of human foot-travel our ancestral gatherers never collected queen of the prairie or tried it out for whatever health-boosting it might be worth.


https://www.etsy.com/listing/165825104/pink-meadow-wildflower-queen-of-the?

I wanted the painting to honor not just the plant in its wind-swayed weirdness--a rose with a foam-like or plume-like floral structure, its leaves subdividing like the fingers of a spread-open hand but saw-toothed along all edges--but also the day on which I sat before it, with the wind ushering a complex of clouds from west to east into ever new sprawls and pile-ups. Wisps of rain cloud would complement plumes of pink flower. The day was of a distinct cool summer type, and the mixture of plants deepened and wove itself into green and greenish black fibrous shadow. The mixture forced me into abstraction. The queen's precisely developed leaves might only bare glimpses of themselves through ever-differing green-shadow, losing itself into scratchy black-green.

A great share of my joy on that scene came of knowing I would soon be living just down this road from this plant colony of chilly-water fens, within a mile of the middle reaches of the St. Louis River. I would come home there as I did today into the impending autumn, which would yield to the first spurts of winter, the vanguard of cold weather with its walls of drear against the horizons. In these ramparts of dark cloud overhead just now I sensed no menace, but a wink of old tomorrows and yesterdays, gold-trim along edges revealing jolly blue. High, low, openings here, there, and beyond them streaks of rain, smears of snow held way aloft. There was nowhere else I would prefer to be. 

The queen of the prairie painting on the featured card is about earth's profusion of waters, sky-borne and ground-channeled, engendering a profusion of plants and moving lives. Along these very roadsides  caraway, a member of the parsley family escaping into the wild from long-forgotten herb gardens, can also be untangled. Though in a separate family, as a garden escape it seems akin to the garlic, wild or domestic. Every plant I remember finding along this roadside with the queen of the prairie figures in, from the standpoint of art, to the living thatch-work of green through the power of visual suggestion.