Veronica

Veronica plant from New Zealand:  the bamboozle plant

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10608278

I find this article interesting.  It reminds me of the Wollemi Pine...  I'm not going to write much now.  But mayb I can add some material in a few days.  I was looking for Veronica teucrium but Wikipedia did not have anything.  One day, I'd love to be able to contribute to Wikipedia...

Anyway, I found Veronica teucrium in Wikipedia under another name:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_austriaca

I noticed some peculiar things about this plant.  Maybe it's just my imagination, but I wondered if this plant was special to women before Christianity.  Before the inquisition...  Somebody should write a novel about life in 5000 BCE...  That's where I keep going in my imagination, but I don't have much yet.  Not enough material for a story yet.

So, large Veronica was called Herb Marion... Why?

*** This is probably not related but I wondered if Veronica had some pagan traditional uses, kind of like Elecampagne.  So, I found pictures of Saint Margaret right next to the herb (could be totally random coincidence). When I looked up St. Margaret, I found lots of pagan roots.  Margaret seems to be linked to the Three Fates.  Here is the page that places Margaret as one of the Fates:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Holy_Helpers

Ok, now I am copying the key part of the Wikipedia page about the 14 Holy Helpers:

"At the heart of the fourteen were three virgin martyrs:

Sankt Margaretha mit dem Wurm, Sankt Barbara mit dem Turm, Sankt Catharina mit dem Radl, das sind die heiligen drei Madl.[2]

Saint Margaret with the dragon Saint Barbara with the tower Saint Catherine with the wheel those are the three holy maids."

Pagan roots of Arbor Day (?)

Just a link about Arbor Day.  I think Arbor Day is related to (but not the same as) Oak Apple Day.  And Oak Apple Day seems to have a pagan history.

All I know is that I saw it on Wikipedia.  I don't have strong evidence, yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Apple_Day

The Wikipedia page about Arbor Day also hints at a history of pagan and Christian blended spring festivities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day

What I would like to find is something about actual arbors, festive arches, shelters decorated with flowers.  Imagine if the ancient world had other festivals similar to the Jewish festival of booths?  Springtime booths?


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Yogurt for long life

I was a child when Americans started eating yogurt.  People used to get their yogurt at the health food store, I think.  I remember an advertisement on TV sometime around 1979 -1981, an ad about yogurt and how the oldest people in the world eat yogurt.  So, yogurt gives long life.  I want a long life; I'll eat a lot of yogurt.  One day recently, I was daydreaming and I had this idea, What If It Wasn't Just the Yogurt?

What if their longevity had to do with living at high elevation?  Less oxygen, less decay, unchanging...  So how tall are those mountains where the oldest people live?  Soviet Georgia in 1980 - maybe it was a very quiet place?  I don't know what held that country together, nor why they had a war recently.  I am thinking about medical mysteries a lot these days.  I am sure the yogurt helped with longevity, anyway.

Maybe the yogurt helped them keep a healthy appendix.  I read a new theory that the appendix  has an important job.  Everybody used to think that the appendix was an unnecessary body part.  Now, the new idea is that the appendix stores healthy gut flora, and helps the good flora repopulate whenever you lose them to illness (right, I did not want to say, lose them to diarrhea.). It is so cool to learn new things about anatomy.  I thought there wasn't anything new to learn about the human body.

I thought that subject was pretty much entirely known.  But this summer there was news of the discovery of lymph nodes/ lymph somethings in the brain.  Ok, I don't know anything about it.  But when I read about the discovery, I went straight away to Wikipedia.  I checked, there was a picture of the lymph system, and it only went up to the neck, not the brain.  All the anatomy textbooks must be revised, how often does that happen?

So, I spent months thinking about lymph nodes (lymph passages?) in the brain.  We know the human brain needs a lot of food, lots of glucose.  But, there has to be waste products from all that food.  How does the waste get cleaned out?  Wish that I knew this subject better.  Anyway, I started checking regularly for news relating to the brain.  Because I Want To Be Okay.  I want to be healthy not crazy.  I can accept that I may have to take antidepressant medication for the rest of my life.  But, I still feel crazed often.  And, I am worried about the children, how to prevent craziness in the next generation?

Elecampane

Inula helenium, Elecampane just may have a really amazing history.  I am not going to write it all now, after midnight.

But here are a few thoughts:  it was named elf wort or elf weed for a good reason.  I suspect it is something to do with absinthe.

Why the name of the plant is associated with Helen of Troy...?  Could Helen of Troy have a connection to ancient religious ideas?  I noticed a story where they used elecampane to bring the Wild Man back to life in a mummer's Christmas play.  It is from the book, Santa Claus - Last of the Wild Men...

Dung

Humorous humus, funny shit:

If men were believers, learned, religious, then, rather than laughing at socialism, as they do, they would profess the doctrine of circulus with respect and veneration. Each would religiously collect his dung to give it to the state, that is, to the tax-collector, by way of an impost or personal contribution. Agricultural production would instantly be doubled, and poverty would vanish from the globe.

I copied this from Wikipedia:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulus_(theory)

I don't know what else to say about this.  It's funny what you can find out by reading about fertilizers...

Is Mullein poison or medicine?

Verbascom thapsus, called Mullein, is a beautiful weed with furry leaves.  I pulled out a truck load of weeds from a new garden.  The garden owner allowed me to save the mulleins.  I explained that this plant contains rotenone,  a natural insect repellant.

I have been doing some reading about mulleins.  I learned that rotenone use may be phased out due to concerns that the insecticide could be a cause of Parkingson's Disease (ok, I was surfing the web and fooling around on Wikipedia.). It seems to me that in future, people will say that there is no safe minimum dose of rotenone.  Very tiny amounts of the stuff may cause disease... Kind of like a biological plutonium.  I certainly don't want to go near the bag of rotenone for sale at the local Agway store.

On the other hand, there are records of mullein used as medicine for thousands of years.  It sounds like herbalists of the past valued this plant a great deal.  I am sure there is no danger in allowing mulleins to colonize my customer's garden.  If we get lucky, maybe the plant will repel mosquitoes, although no one has suggested that yet.  My client just wants to be free of mosquitoes but I can not promise that.

What worries me is my farm friends at DACRES.  They keep a jar of dried mullein in the kitchen for herbal tea.  I think it is not safe.  Never mind the thousand years of medicinal use, I say that tea is not safe.  Why ingest rotenone when you do not have to?  There are other herbs that you could use.  And my friends were using the mullein tea when they were not even sick!  I should go have a talk with them.

For me, the most interesting part of all this was finding 4 leaf clovers beside the mulleins.  There were a lot of 4 leaf clovers -and I was always finding them quite close to a mullein plant.  I suspect that the mullein has a chemical capable of driving away competing plants.  In fact, my guess is not just one chemical but a mixture of 3 or more chemicals.  I have forgotten the name for this effect, the ability to fight the neighboring plants with chemicals at the roots.  This is the same thing that the walnut trees do, causing bare spots in the lawn under walnut trees...

It was so fun for me to predict the location of the 4 leaf clovers.  I am usually not at all magical.  I had a magical moment with my daughter.  But sometime soon I will have to tell my garden client that the lovely mulleins probably do not repel mosquitoes.  I really hope they will allow the plants to stay. I need time to find out which insects the mullein can repel.

Bosworth's New Spinning Wheel

Jonathon Bosworth had a new type of spinning wheel on display last weekend (8 August 2015) at Fiber Revival.  Next to the spinning wheel was a big bright sign that said, "New design.  Please try it and let us know what you think."

I sat at this new wheel at the end of the day, just before they were going to pack it up.  I'm new to hand spinning so I asked, "What's different about this wheel?"  So while Mr. Bosworth was explaining the similarity between this mechanism and the movement of a steam locomotive...  Abby Frankmont came by, sat down and tried the wheel.  She declared it a success for three reasons -which I can't remember, but one was that it would relieve her tendonitis.  It was only when I noticed that she took off her shoes that I realized that she might be the famous author of the book, Respect The Spindle.

I failed to take off my shoes -really a faux pas, since it was a truly wonderful spinning wheel.  I am just not ready for an accelerator.  I asked the price of his book charka, but it was too much for me right now.  Maybe I am not ready to spin cotton anyway.  I asked if his spinning wheels could be set to spin very slowly, and I was disappointed to learn that a book chakra must spin fast & has an accelerator wheel.

I had a close encounter with a live cicada, my first ever.  I always wanted to see where the sound of summer comes from.  I made it home in two hours with lots of new ideas, mainly about growing flax. I hope to grow a linen shirt someday.

So it seems that I have met two of the three fates.  I met Habetrot, and saw Abby Frankmont... Who will be the third spinner?