Things do not have to be beautiful to be useful. Nor do things have to be of use to be good.
Nor does a thing have to be good, though I am familiar with the impulse.
While walking through Prospect Park the other day, I stopped to identify a plant with white flowers, one I noticed when it was in bloom last summer. I’d pinched off a sprig to put in a bud vase, but discarded it when it dried and turned brown. At first I had thought the plant was a relative of Queen Anne’s lace, the tall, waving wild carrot flowers that I grew up seeing, sprouting from cracks in the sidewalk. The identification my app provided said something else: Achillea millefolium, also known as the common yarrow.
The first part of its name, Achillea, comes from Achilles, who carried it to treat war-wounds; millefolium describes its feathery, fern-like leaves. Yarrow grows tall and brushy; its stems, dark green, sometimes grayish, can reach three feet tall. Atop each plant is a branched cluster of creamy white flowers, each disc-shaped head itself a collection of tiny white florescences. There’s a prairie feeling to yarrow, the way it leans and takes up space; it looks properly wild, a weed, an honest herb, covered in tiny native pollinators. I saw it growing in a scrubby patch near the roller rink, the clusters of flowers forcing their way past the corded wire fencing. It didn’t seem to care where it was planted; it was not ornamental. Yarrow is an old herb. It has had many uses: analgesic, wound-healer, fever-breaker. Dried yarrow stems are used in I Ching divination. In British folklore, a yarrow leaf could be used to determine if one’s romantic feelings were requited. The leaf was placed in the nose and a verse recited: Green ’arrow, green ’arrow, you bears a white blow, / If my love love me, my nose will bleed now.
I was surprised to find out this ordinary plant was yarrow; surprised again to realize that that was what yarrow looked like—I had only ever seen it named in writing; pictured something more like a long, fibrous root—and surprised a third time to realize that learning its uses, its history, made me feel differently about it. Yarrow was useful. It was medicinal. Suddenly the white flowers, on their brushy, hairy stems, had a new value to me.
I became interested in foraging edible and medicinal plants a year or two ago, while reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Around the same time, which was perhaps not actually the same time but that era of the pandemic which stretched on without end, I started following the work of Alexis Nikole Nelson, also known as @blackforager. Nelson’s enthusiasm for her subject is contagious, and I was intrigued by the bounty foraging offered, the reintroduction to plants that were familiar to me but which I’d never considered edible or useful before. Wood sorrel, stinging nettle, lilac blossoms to flavor sugar. Had all of this been ripe for the tasting, hidden in plain sight? I felt awakened with a secret knowledge. On my walks I noted plants with new significance: ground plantain; pineapple weed; shepherd’s purse with its heart-shaped seed-pods, which in a salad are said to taste peppery, like watercress.
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