After discovering The Secret Garden as a child something in my brain clicked. I don’t know if it was all the subtle folk magic that made so much sense to me or the fascinating cycle of death and rebirth of the garden in the story, but I started planning my own secret garden. It would be completely walled in so no one could see it or enter it. I even built rectangular models using cardboard and scotch tape (I was an industrious 9-year old) in my old backyard by the fish pond. I dreamed my garden would be full of beautiful and mysterious plants, but on the surface would look just like weeds to everyone else.
I stood outside on my giant rectangular terrace garden with its three walls and one half wall facing nothing but the two-storey-high tops of trees on the downslope of the mountain and I realized that I had created my secret garden. When I was away the mountain wept, the sun did not shine, and the garden did not grow. Now the sun has arrived and almost alchemical transformations happen every day.
Black Henbane unfurls its sleepy head of flowers, each one slowly waking up after the other until they are spread out in long line of purple-veined flowers and green seed pods. Henbane belongs to Old Man. It is beautiful and seemingly friendly from a distance, but up close it smells of onions and rotting meat and the hairy sticky leaves try to hold on to those who would dare caress it to pull them close, too close, and make them drink in its poison. It is like a tall stately man covered in leaves, vines, flowers, and snakes, but at second glance you see the man’s face is a rotting skull.
Bittersweet nightshade schemes to take over the garden and overrun the other plants by strangling them with purple vines. I untangle them from the Rowan tree and the Catnip and move them a safe distance away from the others with their very own wall to climb. They whisper to me to dig up the Solomon’s Seal for the roots so they can have the planter to themselves. I laugh and tell them they are the ones who will be cut back.
Black Nightshade is much healthier this year, still so slow compared to its cousin Bittersweet, but it may produce flowers and berries this year if I am lucky, if I give it many offerings of tobacco smoke. It quietly asks for more shade and more water and then responds with new healthy vines.
Belladonna has been waiting for the sun. New to the garden, she is very quiet. She wants to be wooed, not the other way around. Be careful when she does whisper, she makes promises of beauty that often lead to death (as vanity has a habit of doing).
Viper’s Bugloss, one of Odin’s nine sacred herbs, grows taller and taller producing more and more fuzzy prickly leaves and brilliant blue-pink flowers with stamens like insect antenna. Every time I visit and touch it Echium gives me its flowers. “Eat them”, it says. It is a creature of healing and of destruction and has no qualms – the mercenary of the medicine basket.
The Foxgloves finally grew from small seedlings into plants. They may not flower this year due to spending too much time on their roots. This is a good thing as I will need to thin them out before they get too big. Unlike the other poisons, I’ve found foxglove friendly without any sinister undertones. It is soft and welcoming with it’s rabbit-ear leaves, but never tries to convince me to eat it or use it for anything but charms. Foxgloves says “turn me into a black ink and use it to paint symbols of protection on your threshold”.
I find a mother spider protecting her eggs with layer upon layer of finest and strongest silk. My garden is already full of spiders and their webs. I have also seen honey bees, bumble bees, wasps, dragonflies, butterflies, moths, lady bugs, and more beetles. Once upon a time there were no insects in my garden. Their presence is an indicator of good health and biodiversity. They will attract bats and birds and perhaps other beneficial friends.
The poisons and magicians grow side by side with the healing plants of alfalfa, bergamot, catnip, lemon balm, spearmint, peppermint, thyme, oregano, Solomon’s seal, lavender, rosemary, and clary sage. They all intermingle which keeps the poisons from plotting together and the healers from getting too gentle and intermarrying with their cousins (as mints have a habit of doing).
And at the front of the house, right by the front door only touched by the setting sun, is my Devil’s Club. Tyson saved it for me when cleaning up a trail at his cabin and I transplanted it this winter. To my delight, spikey shoots appeared in the spring and then later came the splays of bright green leaves covered in the finest nasty spines.
Maybe it will flower and fruit this year… I want to try crafting an extract with the berries to use in a dandruff shampoo or for a lice rinse. I have loved Devil’s Club since the first time I met it and smelled it’s enticing ginger-ginseng fragrance. It is friendly despite its thorns. It is a warrior of medicine and of magic and will fiercely protect and defend anyone who befriends it. I collect and cure the wood to make protective beads and charcoal. It is a blessing to have one so close, protecting my house, instead of having to travel deep into the mountains to find them.
