Elderflower cordial
(dancing on the edges of things) I remember the day I first fell in love with the elderflower: it was a hot Glaswegian summer day. I was sitting on my favourite grassy knoll, in the shade of a big craggy old hawthorn bush, with a bounty. All of my adventures involved a bounty of some kind, be it wood sorrel (no plant was safe), wild blackberries, or, in this case, chocolate chip... Read More
Holy smoke
Lately, I’ve been too restless to get anything useful done. In my mind there are these lists of things to do. Newsletters and website updates and blog posts and dealing with traffic tickets (*cough*) and parking tickets (*cough*) and returning phonecalls. I think it’s the coming spring; I want to be outside so much that all this other stuff makes my brain short-circuit.... Read More
A New Day’s resolution, and abhyanga.
As I said, these last couple of posts went up the wrong way around. Nonetheless, Happy New Year, lovely readers. Here are some photos from our Christmas week out in the desert. I’m not really one for New Years resolutions- for the past year or so I’ve been practicing something I’ve come to dub ‘New Day’s resolutions’. As in, why the hell wait... Read More
Rosemary- lavender- black pepper polenta cookies
(the magic of rosemary) My friend Leandra had a cookie party on Sunday night. She wore Christmas bauble earrings and fluff-topped elf socks (and looked rather like an elf herself), and told all of us to bring a big batch of cookies because there’s going to be a contest. After four batches of macaron failures, I was out of almond flour and powdered sugar and decided that it’s... Read More
Kitchen herbalism
(a little bit of magic goes a long way) Waking up before dawn makes me happy. Lately, I’ll put some fuzzy socks on because it’s cold, and will pad downstairs quietly, while the cat weaves her way around my feet. I’ll brew a cup of California Mountain Tea (a blend of rose petals, white sage, black sage and wild mint), add some cream and honey, and then wrap myself... Read More
Herbs for athletes. Part 2.
Following up from last week, where I wrote about herbs for athletic performance, this week I want to talk about injuries. Because they happen to the best of us. I’ve seen some seriously gnarly injuries over the years, from my own torn LCL, to a separated AC joint with an inch separating the acromion and the clavicle (I almost threw up when I stuck my finger in there) to a... Read More
Herbs for athletes. Part 1.
I’ve been practicing ashtanga yoga for 5 years now. Which isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things, but as far as a daily practice goes, it feels like forever. Or almost forever. There’s a running (not very funny) joke in the ashtanga community: daily classes are called ‘Mysore style’ based on the part of India from which ashtanga originates. So... Read More
About astringents
Our Wild Thing for the month of October is sumac. I know, I know. It’s more than two weeks into October, and I’m sorry for the delay. Truth be told, this is a tough one for me. Most of the herbs we use for Wild Things are things that I use a lot, so it’s easy for me to document their uses. Sumac, on the other hand, I have only used a few times, and it’s... Read More
Traditions
When I started to write this post, I was sitting in Butter’s kitchen, with the smell of wild plums and sugar infusing the air. I was visiting her as part of a road trip that led me through New Mexico, to the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, then up to Northern Colorado for some mountain and foraging time, then back across the mountains and the desert to Los Angeles.... Read More
Transitions. (and a giveaway)
(Autumn) I’d like to say that Autumn happens just like that. That one day it’s summer and then one day it’s not. But it doesn’t work like that in Southern California, I don’t think. Three days ago I had to put the heating on for ten minutes when I woke up because my fingers wouldn’t work properly because it was so cold. Yesterday it was 95 degrees... Read More
