The wild mountain thyme

AlasNotMeBlog links to posts from a blog about the LOTR... about the healing of Faramir, Eowyn, and Merry. (the book not the movie, which edited out mos of this).

the plant in the film, by the way, looks like the common chickweed, which is used for wounds, can be used to feed pigs (again, in the film), but doesn't have a nice smell.

Others have thought it was a basil or a mint plant, or maybe yarrow or a similar herb.

When I walked the fields in Appalachia, we would find various mints and herbs that grew wild, often because the farmers who had left 100 years earlier had grown them in their gardens.

Yet thyme also comes to mind, since this grows wild in southern climes and is useful for headaches, as is kingsfoil. Since Aragorn had to look hard for it when Frodo was injured, presumably also growing in a lost farm's garden, or in a certain type of habitat, one suspects this might fit the bill easier. In the films, it is a northern weed, but in the book, it is only considered a weed in Gondor.

yet wild thyme is a weed in the British Isles

longer discussion here.

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O the summer time has come
And the trees are sweetly blooming
And wild mountain thyme
Grows around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?

Chorus
And we'll all go together,
To pull wild mountain thyme,
All around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?

I will build my love a tower,
By yon clear crystal fountain,
And on it I will pile,
All the flowers of the mountain.
Will you go, lassie, go?

Chorus

I will range through the wilds
And the deep land so dreary
And return with the spoils
To the bower o' my dearie.
Will ye go lassie go ?

Chorus

Factoid of the day

The newest bimbo scare is that an actress sent ricin the president, and then called the FBI saying her husband did it.

Well, that's one way to get revenge.


As a doc, I was aware of the danger of these seeds, which can be poisonous if you have jewelry made from it...

It is surprising how little many parents know about the danger of castor beans and others such as jequirity beans and fava beans. You can go to many markets and buy cheap necklaces with these beans (rosary beads, etc). Of course, they are not harmful unless consumed. However, one such be aware, since children can easily pull beans off and ingest them. Adults should also be careful, as sometimes we unknowingly put objects in our mouths as well. I've seen a few people unawaringly "sucking" on their castor bean necklaces. The problem here is if any of the seed coatings on the beans are damaged.

But the plant has a long history of being used for oil and food: 
castor oil has been used as a lubricant and medicine since the days of ancient Egypt, and after pressing out the oil, the seed left behind can be used as fodder for animals.

So why isn't the oil poisonous (but the dried seed used for jewelry can be poisonous?)

Heating during the oil extraction process denatures and inactivates the protein. However, harvesting castor beans may not be without risk.^[7]

So where do you get castor bean seeds? From Amazon. And why would you want to grow it?

The Castor Bean plant is a natural mole repellant.

and their oil can be used as a petroleum substitute for nylon...

 The oil extracted from the castor bean already has a growing international market, assured by more than 700 uses, ranging from medicines and cosmetics to replacing petroleum in plastics and lubricants.

Nylon 11, which is produced from castor beans, is produced from a sustainable resource, similar to PLA resin and the cellulosic materials, but it is not biodegradable. Furthermore, nylon 11 is significantly more durable and less hydrophilic than the standard synthetic nylons. The most common nylon, nylon 6 has six carbons in the basic building block unit, and at the end of each carbon chain, there is a water-loving end group. These water-loving end groups result in poor hydraulic properties, but nylon 11 has 11 carbons in its basic building block and thus about half as many water-loving end groups providing a product with better hydraulic properties. In fact, nylon 11 has long been used in underwater cable insulation applications.

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and no, the castor bean was not the "poisonous berries" of the Hunger Games (it takes a day or two to kill someone). That poison berry was the more common deadly night shade (which takes a few hours to kill, but hey it's a movie.)

more about that deadly herb, from which we get the drug atropine, here.

Holy Basil and the cross

Those who follow Brother Cadfel are aware of his herb garden, and indeed medieval herb gardens were used not only for medicine but to flavor food and to repel pests.

Dave'sGarden has an article by Gwen Bruno on these herb gardens.

The earliest known garden blueprints are found in a monastery plan intended as a guide for Benedictine abbeys (this document survives today in a Swiss abbey). The plan featured several gardens, including a kitchen garden for vegetables and herbs and an infirmary garden for plants used in medicine. A typical medieval garden, as represented in medieval manuscript paintings, was enclosed by a wall, fence, trellis or hedge, and generally subdivided into neat geometric units with straight paths in between.

The earliest firsthand gardening account comes to us from a 9th-century monk named Walafrid Strabo. His Hortulus or “Little Garden” was a poem dedicated to his garden in which he describes his pleasure at working with the soil and tending plants.

More HERE.

Walahfried Strabo’s poem Hortulus, dating from the first half of the 9th century, is probably the   first  comprehensive   statement   in   Western

Christian civilization concerning garden design....

The medieval herb gardens can be proved to derive from medical pamphlets of late antiquity. Strabo studied the writings of the statesman and scholar Cassiodor (487-583), who had founded a monastery at Scyllaceum near the Messina Straits. There he had also set up a vivarium (fish-breeding pond), an animal enclosure, and a herb garden. In his main work, the Institutiones, he refers to both Roman and Greek culture. His pharmacological studies were based on the herbal of Dioscurides Pedanios, a lst-century Greek doctor. This herbal was re-issued at the beginning of the 6th century, and  provided  with  illustrations  in  a  Byzantian

workshop in Constantinople. Today, the codex is kept in Vienna and is therefore known as the "Vienna Dioscorides." It contains a herbarium with illustrations of 435 plants.

ASpoonfulOfThyme has photos of a medieval herb garden HERE.
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related item: Father Z notes that the herb basil was traditionally associated with the Holy Cross (feastday Sept 14).

According to a pious legend, the Empress Saint Helena found the location of the True Cross by digging for it under a colony of basil. Basil plants were reputed to have sprung up at the foot of the Cross where fell the Precious Blood of Christ and the tears of the Mother of Sorrows.
A sprig of basil was said to have been found growing from the wood of the True Cross.

On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross it is customary in the East to rest the Holy Cross on a bed of basil before presenting it to the veneration of the faithful.

and Father adds this traditional prayer:

Almighty and merciful God,
deign, we beseech You, to bless
Your creature, this aromatic basil leaf.
Even as it delights our senses,
may it recall for us the triumph of Christ, our Crucified King
and the power of His Precious Blood
to purify and preserve us from evil
so that, planted beneath His Cross,
we may flourish to Your glory
and spread abroad the fragrance of His sacrifice.
Who is Lord forever and ever.

Father Z also has a post with this photo sent to him by an Orthodox priest of using the Basil with the cross for the feast day.


The feast day is pretty well ignored in the western church nowadays, but it is still celebrated by the orthodox churches:

This is a holy day of fasting and repentance. On this day the faithful make dedication to the crucified Lord and pledge their faithfulness to him by making prostrations at the Lords feet on the life creating Cross. For the feast, the Cross is placed on a tray surrounded by flowers or branches of basil, and placed in the center of the Church for veneration. 

 more HERE.

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Basil has many uses as an herb, not just in Europe but in India

  where it is called "holy Basil"...

Factoid: Growing it in a garden is supposed to discourage mosquitoes.

there are all sorts of basil, of course...when I moved here, the only herb that grew well in our garden from the seeds I brought was lemon Basil.
Alas, no one used pesto, so I stopped growing it.

here is an article on the various forms of Basil used in Thailand. 
including holy Basil and Lemon basil.

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In the Philippines, however, the "Santa Cruz" festival is held at the end of May..
In recent years, it has degenerated to a celebration of beautiful girls and lost it's religious character, although villages and barangays named Santa Cruz still have the traditional fiesta with mass and the parades of the saints and statues.
 \
I'm not sure why they changed the day, but since we are in the midst of a busy rice harvest, the move to May (right before the monsoon season and rice planting time) is more convenient.

Factoid of the day

I always figured the holly species was poisonous, but apparantly the American Indians made a ceremonial tea from one type of holly, the Ilex vomitoria aka Yaupon Holly.

photosource JSPIPPEN

the holly contains caffiene, and is similar to yerba mate used by some South American Indians.

and archeologists found a shell with residuals of the tea in the Craig mound at Spiro Mounds in Okalahoma, the only public mound site in the state.

Celtic beer recipe

Sciencenews has the recipe:

"...At the Celtic site, barley was soaked in the specially constructed ditches until it sprouted, Stika proposes. Grains were then dried by lighting fires at the ends of the ditches, giving the malt a smoky taste and a darkened color. Lactic acid bacteria stimulated by slow drying of soaked grains, a well-known phenomenon, added sourness to the brew.

Unlike modern beers that are flavored with flowers of the hop plant, the Eberdingen-Hochdorf brew probably contained spices such as mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane, in Stika’s opinion..."

Henbane is an herbal sedative/narcotic, related to scopalamine. Witches made a salve with it to fly in the good old days, and alas it is known for it's poisonous properties.

but up to the middle ages some added it to beer to make it more intoxicated:

In the Middle Ages, henbane was widely used in Germany to augment the inebriating qualities of beer. The names of many German towns originate from the word Bilsen–henbane. Later on, the word was transformed to Pilsen to name the famous Pilsen beer. It took many years to prohibit the use of henbane in brewing after numerous cases of poisonings.

headsup IO9

Bitter melon for diabetes?

Ampalaya here in the Philippines is believed to be a Diabetes preventative. It's not a melon but a vegetable/gourd. We often eat the early ones, about the size of a golf ball, but the photos show it can grow as large as a cucumber.

Science daily has an article explaining it counteracts insulin resistance, which is thought to be the cause of diabetes type II


People with Type 2 diabetes have an impaired ability to convert the sugar in their blood into energy in their muscles. This is partly because they don't produce enough insulin, and partly because their fat and muscle cells don't use insulin effectively, a phenomenon known as 'insulin resistance'....

The four compounds isolated in bitter melon perform a very similar action to that of exercise, in that they activate AMPK.

Garvan scientists involved in the project, Drs Jiming Ye and Nigel Turner, both stress that while there are well known diabetes drugs on the market that also activate AMPK, they can have side effects.

"The advantage of bitter melon is that there are no known side effects," said Dr Ye. "Practitioners of Chinese medicine have used it for hundreds of years to good effect."

We eat it with our veggies almost every day (usually mixed veggies: Okra, beans, ampalaya etc)

Butterbur!

Most of those living in Bree had plant names.
Ever wonder where Mr. Butterbur got his name? Above link is to Killerplants about the herb.
The leaves were large and flat and the name comes because they were used to wrap butter...
as an herb, it was used to lower fevers and treat cough/congestion. A BMJ article suggests that it has anti allergic properties.

When I lived in Appalachia, the locals used the tead of a related herb, the coltsfoot, to treat coughs. The tea was made of the small yellow flowers...which bloomed in the spring...the leaves appeared later.

12 plants that produce most of our food

The cereals:

1. corn (Zea mays)
2. rice (Oryza sativa)
3. wheat (Triticum aestivum)

The legumes:

4. common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris)
5. soybean (Glycine max)

The roots:

6. white potato (Solanum tuberosum)
7. sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas)
8. cassava (Manihot esculenta)

The sugar sources:

9. sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum)
10. sugar beet (Beta vulgaris)

Pan-tropical fruits:

11. coconut (Cocos nucifera)
12. banana (Musa spp.)

from Killerplants newsletter, which they will send you free...

Tumbleweeds

killerplants news has an article on the tumbleweed.
Did you know it came from Europe? and probably hit the west as a weed from Russian/German Mennonite farmers who settled on the plains?

more HERE...

Bananas!

Killerplants has an article on bananas...

Wild (species) bananas must be pollinated to have fruit, but the domesticated banana is a 'mule' (cannot reproduce). The plant is a triploid (having 3 sets of chromosomes) as the result of inheriting one set from the diploid, Musa acuminata (AA) and 2 sets from the tetraploid, Musa balbisiana (BB BB). The domesticated banana (ABB) has 33 chromosomes.

In most plants, if the ovules are not fertilized to form seeds, the fruit never develops. The female flowers of wild bananas develop relatively dry fruit with little or no pulp and large seeds. But the domesticated banana develops large, pulpy, nutritious fruit with no seeds. Because the chromosomes cannot divide equally, the domesticated plant cannot produce seeds. The nourishment that would normally go into the seeds goes instead to the fruit.

and did you know a banana is a berry?

Herb of the day

depressed? Try a banana...

stinking gladwyn?

Stinking gladwyn leaves remain green through the winter; a nice addition to a garden where winters are long and cold. Gerard mentioned, "Gladdon groweth in many gardens [and] I have seene it wilde...in woods and shadowie places neere the sea." Gerard, of course, stated the most famous characteristic of the iris's leaves, "...being rubbed, of a stinking smell very lothsome." (The Herbal, 1633 edition)
Your herb of the day from Killerplants