Horto in Urbs in Horto

As I compose this first entry that sees me resume my role as blogger, I look over my humble garden. It is mid-August. Cabbage whites, monarchs, red admirals, and black swallowtails flit over the roses, the Turk’s cap lilies, the peonies, and what’s left of the daisies.

Some who live in this garden are perhaps a bit less predictable: post-bloom tapers of black cohosh sway alongside waist-high ferns over a carpet of velvety wild ginger. There’s also a stand of poke somewhere between bloom and berry, stretching across the bumble bee’d comfrey, and here and there the bright red-orange pop of three different kinds of pleurisy root where it’s naturalized in the sunny areas.

Borage, California poppy and chamomile volunteers break up the patchy green on the lawn whose homogeneity I care little for. The sparrows and yellow finches are having some sort of shindig in the towering cup plants, and the mugwort that’s gone to seed is threatening a thick brood of silver-leafed babies in the spring.

We have trees, too – seven of them, including a giant rangy peach whose harvest gave us butter, tarts and sticky elbows, and an Austrian pine declared by an arborist to be the oldest one she’s seen in the city. (She was a pretty young arborist, though.)

That city would be Chicago – the stinky, allium-laden, swampy outpost whose early 19th-century government dared to seize as its motto “Urbs in Horto” – Latin for “city in a garden.” Thanks to the likes of landscape artist Jens Jensen, park-planner Frederick Olmstead, and much more recently, Mayor Richard M. Daley, we seem to have made good on the city fathers’ vision, with the green spaces expanding alongside the skyscrapers and slaughterhouses.

Likewise, the birdsong, bee buzz and gurgling fountain of my little quarter-acre plot is punctuated by the dull roar of flight paths to O’Hare, the hourly clatter of the Union Pacific North Line, not infrequent sirens, and ranchero music.

It’s all about balance, right?

Áine samples some wild grapes growing over a Victorian mansion door repurposed as a property divider by the previous owners of our turn-of-the-last-century Chicago home.

This Botanical Life

I have spent the better part of my adult life training in the field of clinical and traditional herbalism. I’ve spent almost as much time editing books, articles, and educational curricula for some of the most prominent herbalists in the West.  But I won’t be writing (much) about herbal medicine and diagnostic theory here – there are many excellent resources from my colleagues on the Web for that information already.

Those years made me a better herbalist, a (somewhat) better gardener, and definitely a better editor. (I think they’ve made me a better person, too, but depending on whom you consult, that’s surely up for debate.) Still, the one gift I am sure to have taken from that period of my life is a more keen and joyful ability to appreciate the stunning diversity of plants – not only of their bewildering array of forms and species, but also of the ways in which they infuse our everyday lives.

This Botanical Life will be a wide-ranging celebration of our chlorophyllic friends who literally sustain life on Earth as food, shelter, clothing, oxygenators and carbon-dioxide eaters.  All manner of plants who play key roles in all our rites of passage, be they wedding bouquets or embalming herbs, as aphrodisiacs to attract our mates, or as smoke to drive away unwanted spirits. Plants as they appear in recipes, poetry, grimoires, news, pop music, fairy tales, wallpaper, toiletries, cartoons, thermal underwear – whatever unique and unusual botanical feature catches my eye.

So. From my garden, in a city, in a garden, I invite you to stop by often for a thoughtful exploration of plants. Think of it as your garden oasis offering weekly dispatches from a lover, seer, and discoverer of all things green and growing in our fragile, fascinating world.