Nature is giving. ALANDA GREENE shares with us the giving nature of one plant in particular that has been used as a medicine, cosmetic and tea for thousands of years by human beings.
LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN
I want to be like a calendula plant. This plant with its luminous orange blossoms just seems to delight in giving, and, in the process, gives delight.
What a great solution to flourish! Make yourself so agreeable, so joyful, so beautiful, so easy to be with, so useful, that everyone just wants to have you around. That is calendula.
Right
now it’s autumn, and a lot of flowers have done their course of
blossoming, feeding bees, giving beauty and they have now gone to seed.
But the calendula is still blooming like in early summer. There are more
blossoms than ever, their color is deep and bright, and when I look from
my house down towards the garden, the garden bed is filled with
calendula like someone has turned on a bunch of orange lights. The days
lately are dark, with deep gray clouds blocking the bright autumn sun,
but this doesn’t seem to deter the calendula plants, or dampen their
spirit or brightness.
The herbalist, Matthew Wood, commented that he thought it impossible for someone to stay sad or depressed if they had the company of calendula. He called it the sunshine herb.
Dried calendula flowers make a soothing, pleasing tea that calms an irritated stomach or just brings a pleasing infusion to the taste buds and insides.
Tincture of calendula is the best remedy for wasp or bee stings I have found. It soothes the burning, eases the effect so the swelling calms and decreases, and settles the reaction.
Calendula oil soothes irritated skin, rashes, scrapes and skin eruptions.
I want to be like a calendula plant.
This plant with its luminous orange
blossoms just seems to delight in giving,
and, in the process, gives delight.
Chipmunks appreciate calendula as a food supply. As the seeds mature and curl in a circle of elegant spiral curves around the centre of the stalk, the chipmunks pull the stems downward or climb up the sturdier ones. They stuff the dark curled seeds into their cheek pouches until they look stricken with a bad case of mumps, then run off to stash their supply as a winter source of nourishment.
The days grow colder and shorter, everything else in the garden has been harvested, dug into the earth and covered with mulch. But I cannot bear to pull out the calendula or cover them. Even when frost lays a thin sheen over the straw packed around them and over the leaves, the flowers hold their luminous shine and bring a glow to the gray days before winter sets in.
I want to grow old like calendula: be of use by easing pain, bringing beauty and delight, just keep on going without needing much.
Article by ALANDA GREENE
Alanda Greene
