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Posts Tagged ‘garden’

#AGiftFromGaia

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Prussian Asparagus

Lizard tongue orchid

Poppy

Selfheal

Star of Persia

These are all plants which I’ve discovered in my garden this month. I didn’t plant any of them. They just appeared, clearly their seeds having been borne here by birds, wind, or other creatures. Every single one of them is a delight. Every one of them stimulates my favourite “emerveillement du quotidien” (my everyday wonder). Every single one of them has stopped me in my tracks, to gaze, admire and contemplate not just their beauty, but the incredible, unpredictable nature of Nature.

And in every case, there are several of them. There are a number of these plants, either close together, or in quite different parts of the garden.

I first saw “Selfheal” when it appeared by the forest and spread across the grass as I was recovering from an operation the year before last. I didn’t know what it was, but it gave me a real boost to discover its name and its ancient uses (I didn’t actually swallow any of it, however!).

The poppy is also a medicinal plant, and the ones which have appeared “from nowhere” this year are the tallest poppies I’ve ever seen. (I haven’t swallowed any of that either!)

Apparently the “Prussian asparagus” is edible, but there are only about six of them, so I’m letting them be, in the hope that they will seed and spread further.

Several of the “Lizard tongue orchid” plants have appeared together in a clump at the edge of the forest, and I found a “Bee orchid” in the front plot. Every orchid I’ve ever encountered strikes me as a wondrous plant. They all appear to me as astonishingly beautiful.

So, with the beauty, the wonder, the science and the symbolism of these plants, I really feel blessed. I’m going to share the photos on social media using a hashtag of #AGiftFromGaia – maybe you’d like to do the same.

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Discovery and exploration

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

What I love about discovery and exploration is that you can do it right on your own doorstep. Our garden here in the Charente Maritime was largely abandoned for a few years before we bought the house. We’ve been working on a bit at a time over the last three years. There’s an area where we had giant brambles, overgrown nettles and fallen trees cleared away and seeded grass where it had until then been impenetrable but we left all the healthy trees which surrounded that area. I made a few paths amongst the trees and it feels like a little forest walk.

One of the things I love about this garden is that so many plants grow here after having found their own way here. I think there’s very little which has been deliberately planted (until we arrived!). So, the other day, the sun lit these lovely yellow flowers and I thought, what on earth are these? These days it’s dead easy to find out. I took a photo with my phone, pressed the “info” button and it told me this is Calendula arvensis. I only knew Calendula officinalis, so I then searched online and found a research article on PubMed Central about traditional uses of this particular plant. Wow, was I amazed! The researchers say it has “anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antimutagenic, antimicrobial, insecticidal, antioxidant, and immunomodulatory activities” – well, that sounds a lot! They list about 45 different areas of the world where there are recorded traditional uses of this plant, describing in each instance what parts of the plant are used and what they are used for.

I find all that absolutely fascinating, and it reminds me how much we limit our knowledge and therapeutic skills when we ignore how populations around the world have used particular plants over millennia. Surely we shouldn’t dismiss all this information just because we haven’t studied them the same we study our manufactured, artificial drugs?

While I was admiring this little flower I was aware of how much bird song I could hear, so I fired up another app on my phone, “Merlin”, which is a kind of Shazam for birdsong, and it found and identified seven different species of birds all singing like mad. I don’t think I’ve ever lived somewhere where there were so many birds around every single day.

I like how modern technology helps be to recognise plants and birds and how easy it is now to discover so much about them. It makes me aware of how little I know and how I’ll never stop discovering and exploring.

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Ethnobotany

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

This is Echinacea….maybe one of the best known medicinal plants, with a reputation for helping to boost the immune system. If I ever get a cold or flu, I take Echinacea daily until it’s gone. I don’t remember where I read it, but back when I was a GP I remember reading a few studies which seemed to show that taking Echinacea during viral illnesses could be associated with less severe symptoms and a shorter duration of illness. I’ve adopted the practice ever since.

I have quite a fascination for medicinal plants. There’s something extra special about finding or growing a plant with reputed healing powers. I was pretty excited last year to discover “self heal” suddenly growing all over the garden, and I do like to see plants like Echinacea, Chamomile, and Pulsatilla growing nearby. I even like the poisonous ones with potential powerful pharmacological effects (even though I don’t actually swallow any of them!) – Foxglove (Digitalis), Aconite, Belladonna, and Trumpet flowers (Brugmansia) – although the only ones I’ve managed to grow so far are the foxgloves.

I can’t remember when I first encountered the term, ethnobotany, the study of the place of plants in human lives, but I’ve often thought that, in another life, I’d probably have enjoyed studying ethnobotany at university. One of my favourite books on my bookshelves is “Plants of the Gods”, subtitled “Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers” by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann.

When I learned homeopathy as a young GP it fired up my interest in the potential healing powers of plants many fold, and I still think that’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed learning homeopathy so much. To be able to enjoy the beauty of a plant, to be fascinated with its growth, but in addition to know stories about human beings have interacted with it over the centuries seems, to me, to deepen and expand my enjoyment.

Many years ago I went to an ethnobotany exhibition at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. In the middle of each room were plant filled stalls laid out like a street market, with explanations about each plant. I remember thinking, how on earth did nomadic tribes discover that one particular plant was good for treating diarrhoea, whilst a different one was great for dyeing your clothes purple? I mean, was it decades of trial and error? How many purple people died from diarrhoea?

That still absolutely fascinates me. How did the tribes in South America discover that a particular tree was good for treating fevers, only for us to discover decades later that it contains quinine, a great malaria treatment? And how interesting that when Samuel Hahnemann read about that in Cullen’s Pharmacopeia, he decided to take some of the tree bark himself, leading him to come up with the idea of “like treats like”, and, hence, the whole therapeutic method of homeopathy?

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Beauty in form, spirals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »

One of the commonest forms you’ll see in the plant world is the spiral. Pretty much any plant which sends out creepers to latch onto something so the plant can grow higher towards the sunlight, uses this form. It doesn’t go for a straight line….what we were taught is the shortest distance between two parts. Why not? There just aren’t that many really straight lines in Nature. It seems there’s a great preference for meandering, changing direction, spiralling around…..not what a machine would do.

Machines, and the industrialised types of management which dominate our lives now, are said to be best when they are most “efficient”. But Nature has a different idea. “Efficiency” seems, these days, to be about expending the least possible amount of effort and money to achieve a standardised outcome. It’s not natural, and it squeezing out beauty and life.

Complex, natural, living forms are not like machines. A plant doesn’t produce the least number of seeds required to produce a second plant. It produces thousands and thousands of them, using a huge number of different methods to have those seeds carried far and wide, relying on the weather and other creatures to do the scattering. Have you ever watched a bee or a butterfly collect pollen? They don’t start top left and work their way “methodically” flower by flower until they’ve harvested the most possible. There’s an inherent, apparent randomness to their flight. You just can’t predict which flower they are going to explore next.

The spiral is a favourite form of exploration in many plants. It’s a way of discovering.

It’s also extremely beautiful. One that artists replicate again and again. Here’s an example from the sculpture park near where I live……

Beautiful, dynamic, attractive, pleasing, and even in a stone carving, bursting with “life”.

I reckon we’ve taken a life destroying path through industrialisation, and I’d love to see us grow whatever we find life enhancing instead. We can do that by paying attention to, and learning from, plants and other creatures. We can privilege beauty, joy and Life instead of consumption, “efficiency” and “profit”. That would lead us to a very different kind of “growth”, and a very different society.

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