I find there are two types of people; those who can’t stand the smell of Valerian and those who find them intoxicating. I place myself firmly in the category of the latter. Fresh valerian flowers in the garden carry a floral muskiness that I’ve often tried to bottle and can never seem to capture quite right.

Yarrow, ancient one. Mother of boundaries, healer of wounds. She clears the blood and clears the mind, cradling all in her white cloak.

Fireweed, the Clearcut Queen, majestic magenta prisms of hope and life. Fireweed grows and thrives in the ashes of destruction, after forest fires or logging have claimed the soil. Fireweed readily colonizes and heals the land, rarely growing alone, instead spreading rhizomatically and forming vast kindred colonies of towering pink blossoms.

Wild oats are abundant. Grown commercially as a crop, they gleefully escape cultivation, thriving across Turtle Island in fields, along roadsides or disturbed soil. Both feral and cultivated oats are one of the best nerve tonics we have to work with. Folks are often shocked when I recommend oats as a solution to their problems. Perhaps they thought something more exotic or trendy would do the job better, or bowls of porridge come to mind. Either way, I adore oats’ playful ubiquity and easy abundance. Healing can often be simple and oats provide us with modest yet powerful medicine.

Blessed are the bogs, fecund and wet.

There are few things that fill me with greater joy than a basket full of fresh spring nettles. I am giddy upon leaving the nettle patch, all sting kissed fingers and flushed cheeks. There is something about nettle that makes me feel like I’ve grasped hold of a thread that goes back back back into time.