For lovers of Herbal Lore

“Faerie-Folks , Are in old oaks .”

I am teaching an Herbal Lore Workshop, actually, several this year. The first is with Savvy Authors from Mar 11, 2013 – Apr 7, 2013.

For more information and to register for the workshop with Savvy click the following link:  

Herbal Lore and the Historic Medicinal Uses of Herbs

“St. John’s wort and cyclamen in your bed-chambers keep , From evil spells and witcheries , To guard you in your sleep .”

“I borage , give courage .”

“Good morrow, good Yarrow, good morrow to thee. Send me this night my true love to see, The clothes that he’ll wear, the colour of his hair. And if he’ll wed me…”  ~Danaher, 1756.

“When daisies pied and violets blue, and lady-smocks all silver white. And Cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, do paint the meadows with delight.” ~William Shakespeare, 1595.

“Rowan tree and red-thread

Put the witches to their speed.”

“Much Virtue in Herbs, little in Men.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Poor Richard’s Almanac

“Where the yarrow grows , there is one who knows.”

“If ye would herbal magic make

Be sure the spell in rhyme be spake.”

“Faerie-Folks , Are in old oaks." ~Herbal Lore

“The intense perfumes of the wild herbs as we trod them underfoot made us feel almost drunk.”  ~Jacqueline du Pre

“More in the garden grows , than the witch knows.”

“Sell your coat and buy betony.”

“No ear hath heard no tongue can tell, The virtue of the pimpernel”

“Treoil , vervain , st. John’s wort dill

Hinder Witches of all their will.”

“The air was fragrant with a thousand trodden aromatic herbs, with fields of lavender, and with the brightest roses blushing in tufts all over the meadows…” ~William Cullen Bryant

“Here’s flowers for you; Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun, And with him rises weeping…”~William Shakespeare, 1611.

“Sow fennel , Sow sorrow .”

“And because the Breath of Flowers is farre Sweeter in the Aire (where it comes and Gose, like the Warbling of Musick) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for delight, than to know what be the Flowers and the Plants that doe best perfume the Aire.” ~ Francis Bacon, 1625.

“Plant your sage and rue together,

The sage will grow in any weather .”

“Snakes will not go  Where geraniums grow.”

“My gardens sweet, enclosed with walles strong, embarked with benches to sytt and take my rest. The Knotts so enknotted, it cannot be exprest. With arbours and alys so pleasant and so dulce, the pestylant ayers with flavours to repulse.” ~Thomas Cavendish, 1532.

“Where the yarrow grows , there is one who knows.”

“If ye would herbal magic make

Be sure the spell in rhyme be spake.”

“Woe to the lad  without a rowan tree-god.”

“The fair maid who , the first of May

Goes to the fields at break of day

And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree ,

Will ever after handsome be.”

“St. John’s wort and cyclamen in your bed-chambers keep , From evil spells and witcheries , To guard you in your sleep .”

“I borage , give courage .”

“Good morrow, good Yarrow, good morrow to thee. Send me this night my true love to see, The clothes that he’ll wear, the colour of his hair. And if he’ll wed me…”  ~Danaher, 1756.

“When daisies pied and violets blue, and lady-smocks all silver white. And Cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, do paint the meadows with delight.” ~William Shakespeare, 1595.

“Rowan tree and red-thread

Put the witches to their speed.”

“Much Virtue in Herbs, little in Men.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Poor Richard’s Almanac

“Faerie-Folks , Are in old oaks .”

***I’m teaching an Herbal Lore Workshop, actually, several this year. The first is with Savvy Authors from Mar 11, 2013 – Apr 7, 2013. For more information and to register for the workshop click:  Herbal Lore and the Historic Medicinal Uses of Herbs

"Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile." ~Fall Quotes and Images

Fall blew into theShenandoah Valley last night with a big temperature drop and welcome relief from the heat. For most of the summer the wind is silent, but it’s really talking now, whistling around the old red barn and rattling the house. The swifts still swoop over our pond in vigorous pursuit of insects and we’ll have many summery days yet before autumn settles in for good, but the season is a changing which inspires me to post some lovely autumnal pics with some of my favorite quotes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
~John Donne
Elegy IX–The Autumnal.

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
~William Cullen Bryant

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”
~John Keats Ode to Autumn.

(***Pic of the Alleghenies taken by my mother)

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
~Stanley Horowitz

Autumn’s the mellow time.
~William Allingham

Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.~Albert Camus

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
~Faith Baldwin

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.
~Emily Dickinson
Nature XXVII, Autumn.

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
~Emily Bronte

And from one of my favorite authors:

“It was one of those autumn days, crisp and clear, when the sky has a pellucid quality which is rarely seen in other seasons.  The hedge maple had turned a brilliant yellow and the beech trees above the hedges were a deeper gold. A few hardy summer wild flowers such as knapweed, yarrow, and cranesbill still starred the verges and banks, brave survivors of summer heat and the ferocity of the recent storms.”  ~Miss Read,Changes at Fairacre

A mix of royalty free images and some taken by my talented family.

“The start is what stops most people.” Inspiring Quotes and Images

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. W.B. Yeats

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
Harriet Tubman

Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
Pamela Vaull Starr

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
Patrick Henry

Hope is the dream of the waking man. ~French Proverb

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores. ~William Shakespeare

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. ~Lanston Hughes

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David Thoreau

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” - E. E. Cummings

“Great minds have great purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.”
- Washington Irving

“The start is what stops most people.” - Don Shula

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” - Bill Cosby

“To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” - Elbert Hubbard

“It is during our failures that we discover our true desire for success.” ~ Kevin Ngo

“Don’t wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater.” - Mary Manin Morrissey

*Royalty free images

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days. ~John Burroughs

Fall blew into the Shenandoah Valley last night with a big temperature drop and some much-needed rain. For most of the summer the wind is silent, but it’s really talking now, whistling around the old red barn and rattling the house.  The swifts still swoop over our pond in vigorous pursuit of insects and we’ll have many summery days yet before autumn settles in for good, but the season is a changing which inspires me to post some lovely autumnal pics with some of my favorite quotes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
~John Donne
Elegy IX–The Autumnal.

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
~William Cullen Bryant

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”
~John Keats Ode to Autumn.

(***Pic of the Alleghenies taken by my mother)

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
~Stanley Horowitz

Autumn’s the mellow time.
~William Allingham

Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.~Albert Camus

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
~Faith Baldwin

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.
~Emily Dickinson
Nature XXVII, Autumn.

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
~Emily Bronte

And from one of my favorite authors:

“It was one of those autumn days, crisp and clear, when the sky has a pellucid quality which is rarely seen in other seasons.  The hedge maple had turned a brilliant yellow and the beech trees above the hedges were a deeper gold. A few hardy summer wild flowers such as knapweed, yarrow, and cranesbill still starred the verges and banks, brave survivors of summer heat and the ferocity of the recent storms.”  ~Miss Read,Changes at Fairacre

For The Love Of A Pond

Henry Thoreau said of Walden Pond,”A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

Thoreau lived in a small cabin at Walden Pond for two years where he did some of his best writing and learned the essentials of life.

From http://thoreau.eserver.org/answer.html

“Henry wanted to write, and needed a quieter place than the Thoreau household to do this. And he did write both A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and an early draft of Walden in his two years at the pond. But in Walden’s ”Where I Lived, & What I Lived for,” he describes an additional motive. '

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

In conclusion, Thoreau said, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

*Image of Walden Pond and a replica of Thoreau’s cabin

Thoreau isn’t the only one who loved a pond.  I’m deeply fond of ours. Although Walden Pond is rather larger than our farm pond, more of a lake really, and heavily wooded.  Grassy meadows and corn fields surround our pond, but wooded hills rise above the fields, and beyond these, on a clear day, you can see the Alleghenies.

I could not write all that I have without this marvelous  ever-changing scene around me.   And the pond plays host to many birds and waterfowl.  Overhead, swifts, swallows, and purple martins skim and dive in pursuit of the insects we are very glad for them to devour.  The swifts gathered in mass and departed early in the fall two years ago when we had a bad winter.  Which I predicted from this event.

But back to the water, most interesting to me is that you never know what waterfowl might be swimming on it.  Migrating ducks of all sorts have stopped by, and I do love ducks.  The most common, of course, are the mallards.  Wood ducks nest in the tangle of trees growing along the edge of the meadow in a dry creek bed that runs with water when the heavy rains come.  Each spring finds the wood duck mammas on the pond with their babies darting over the water like little bumblebees.

Our barn yard geese make daily treks down to the water.  And flocks of Canadian geese are not uncommon.  The great blue heron can be seen in the early morning mist fishing along the banks.  Sandy brown killdeer dart around the edges of the pond on their long legs, sounding that wild funny cry peculiar to them.   On one snowy day a flock of swans took respite from their journey.   Snow geese wintered with us one year.  Our most unusual visitor was a pink flamingo, though his rosy color had faded from lack of the shell fish that generally make up a flamingo’s diet and gives them that brilliant hue.  I suppose if you fed them lots of carrots they’d turn orange.

An excerpt from my nonfiction book, Shenandoah Watercolors:

Dozens of swallows skim over the pond as the sun sinks below the Alleghenies. If I were standing on a distant ridge, would it sink behind me, or the ridge beyond that one?

The water is calm now but was awash with waves during the storm that hit a short time ago. The grassy hill and maple tree are reflected on the surface, silvery and streaked with rose from the western sky. All is peaceful as a soft twilight settles over the valley. Utterly idyllic, until I pause to consider what all of those swallows are after. There must be clouds of mosquitoes.

Here’s another thought, where do all the birds spend the night? Are the woods up on the hill lined with birds perched wing to wing jostling for space on the branches? I’ll bet they make room for the big red-tailed hawk. He gets the whole tree––as many as he wants. It’s good to be king.~

*Images of our pond by my mom and daughter Elise