Ode to the common plant, part 2

in the garden daze of chamomile

This year I finally have a good bed of chamomile blooming in the garden. I’ve been trying every year since I started a garden here to get one going, but one year there was not enough sun in the spot I chose, one year it succumbed to the weeds, another year it rained all summer and the chamomile plants molded (how is this even possible?!), and this year, finally, it took off. Gardening is truly a life-long journey and I believe the joy and fulfillment, for me, comes in the many challenges of learning and unlearning after each season and the unexpected curveballs each new one manages to throw. I’ve lived on this land 4 years now, 4 years of attempting Chamomile growing here and this is the first year I’ve bewildered myself with some great success. But more on my many thoughts about gardening later…

Because of my amazing Chamomile achievement, I’ve been interacting with this plant on the daily this spring, gathering its small white and yellow blossoms each day as they bloom. It’s all a practice in persistence with this plant—the one bed I am growing does not produce enough flowers for me and all my Chamomile needs (which are plentiful) in one harvest. Rather I must return daily for each new wave of flowers—the plants produce more and more the more that you take—building my stock over many weeks to dry for tea and make all my medicine. Because of this, each of my days has been sweetened by this gathering practice, among the wild bees and butterflies, drinking in the fruity fragrance, pondering the power of this delicate but voracious common plant. The thing about growing Chamomile too is that it’s an avid self-seeder—so once you’ve gotten it going in your garden, it will often return and return with little effort by you! What a relief after so much trying, hopefully it’s here to stay. So here are some of my thoughts that I’ve gathered during my garden harvests too:

Chamomile is one of our best known and often most under-appreciated plant medicines, I think likely because it is so familiar. But its power truly resides in its commonness. Almost every pantry holds a box of dried chamomile; almost everyone, even those completely detached from and uninterested in herbs, knows and has drunk chamomile tea, had it handed to them by a Granny or elder in a moment of need, and has some semblance of its use and purpose. This ubiquity, I think, allows us to toss it off but should really speak to its incredible power—something so beloved, useful, and essential that it was brought across continents in the pockets of immigrants seeking new life, that of all the herbs out there it has by far the most resisted society’s pull to modernize, industrialize, medicalize, and capitalism’s efforts to eradicate herbal medicine. And so it remains! On our tea shelves, in our gardens, at the backs of our minds, no matter how disconnected from natural healing we have become.

Chamomile is one of those herbs with so many actions, so many benefits that, in a pinch, it can be used for all of our most common ailments and complaints—colds and flus, menstrual pain, headaches, allergies, sleep. Its uses have evolved over its many years as medicine, but in my apothecary it shines as a nervous system & skeletal muscle relaxant, an uplifting anti-depressant, and an anti-inflammatory with multiple applications but especially shining in the realm of digestion and the GI tract. In my apothecary Chamomile serves as an important component in both our Deep Sleep formula and in our Rest & Digest, a warming digestive blend to help with any and all GI discomfort—bloating, gas, cramping, heartburn, slow digestion, poor nutrient absorption, and so on. Personally I drink it before bed to calm my body and mind, whenever I have digestive upset of any kind, and soak my weary body in a strong tea that I pour in the bath when I’m sick or worn down. Chamomile is also just amazing water medicine—though I do tincture it, the tea is perfect for pretty much all of its virtues, and it’s delicious, which makes it accessible to pretty much everyone.

The name Chamomile comes from Greek, “chaos,” which means ground or earth, and “melos,” which means apple. Native to Greece and Egypt and other more eastern areas on the edge of Europe and Asia and North Africa, one of my favourite facts about Chamomile is that in all of these quite different and disparate cultures, Chamomile was not only used frequently for medicine but also revered, so much so that to come across Chamomile in the wild was seen as sacred. People would bow down to this plant in acknowledgment of its power and strength and in thanks for its offering of such useful, necessary, and multifarious medicine.

I’ve been listening a lot to The Ground Shots Podcast lately, run by my dear friend Kelly Moody and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways our relationships with plants have shifted so much over really not such a long period of time. We all come from these people—sewing seeds into their clothing or weaving them into their hair as they travelled or were taken away from their homes, bending knee to wild and cultivated plants that feed and heal them—people who viewed these plants and their gardens as extensions of themselves, so integral to their way of life. The act of taking and exploiting plants has evolved so much from those days of bowing down in gratitude—we take with so much less thought, so much less consideration, so much more focus on the self than what’s left behind when we walk away. Where we see plants as beings only when we feel like it (to blame and vilify them) while most often pretending like they aren’t even there.

And so in my Chamomile garden harvesting daze I’ve just been generating so much gratitude and reverence for this wily wonderful herb who despite so much set against it in this world has persisted and persisted and continues to offer such a varied array of healing gifts in one small but powerful little flower. There are so many lessons I’ve been unpacking here—the patience and persistence of gardening, the deep remembering of who and where we came from and how we got so far along (because of plants, duh), but mostly the acknowledging of where true power, true sacredness lies and how to we relearn that sense of centre. I’m hoping it’s not all lost.

May Chamomile forever haunt the back of all our pantries, waiting to show us the way back to the plants, may we find it re-seeding and re-seeding in our gardens forever, and may we become the grannies who pull it out when the moment is right to pass on its power for many generations to come.