The Heirloom Gardener

Angelica

A Majestic Herb is Angelica archangelica, cultivated through the ages for its flavor, fragrance, and stately beauty. Seeds for this bodacious biennial were first brought to America in the 17th century, but they had a long history of use in Asia and Europe for medicinal preparations, teas, candies, and, famously, cordials: the emerging shoots epitomize the color chartreuse—so much so that they are the principle ingredient in the herbal liqueur of the same name.

In the garden, the hollow and resinous stems of this regal herb, covered in broad leaves, can easily tower three to five feet, and the enormous flower umbels rise up to seven feet toward the heavens—perhaps one of the reasons that the plant was dedicated to the archangels in Medieval times. Early each spring in centuries past, Europeans and Colonial Americans would harvest the tender stalks and simmer them in a simple syrup; eventually the stalks would become the translucent light green of sea glass, and the syrup would take on the color and herbaceous balsam flavor so unique to angelica. As lovers of spring have done long since, I repeat the process and candy the stalks until they become tender; I then either slice the stems lengthwise, into short segments, or braid the long strands together before rolling them in finely ground sugar to keep them from sticking to each other. They are excellent served like membrillo or marmalade with cheese and dessert platters, and I end up using the shorter candied strips like citron in baking. Like an herbal equivalent to candied ginger, candied angelica was often served as a digestive at the end of feasts.

Throughout the growing season, but especially in spring and summer, I enjoy serving gin and tonics and other cocktails with straws made from thinner angelica stems. I also save the syrup that results from the candying process; it’s an amazing herbal elixir to add into cocktails or serve atop vanilla ice cream.

To use angelica as a culinary herb, mince the tender leaves and add them to salads, cold fruit soups, and tabbouleh. As a tea herb, use whichever part of the plant is thriving: emerging leaves and stems in spring, flowers or tender seeds in summer, roots in fall and winter. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the root of Angelica sinensis (dong quai), which has the same properties early American colonists ascribed to its cousin, is most commonly used for asthma and pneumonia. Both A. archangelica and A. sinensis form a great chartreuse backdrop for a perennial border or herb garden. Angelica atropurpurea and A. gigas offer the same but with purple-tinged aerial parts and deep purple umbels that are continuously abuzz with bees, butterflies, and birds. Like many of our lost or disappearing foods, angelica reminds us that many of the best plants for home gardeners may never make it to market in fresh form, so “grow it to preserve it” and enjoy!

Apple Cart

Through the centuries, orchards and apple carts were symbols of the early American landscape, our agricultural marketplace, and sweet prosperity. Apples arrived in North America in the 17th century, brought as slips and seeds by the first immigrants. The first American apple was the Roxbury Russet, named in honor of the Massachusetts town where it grew.

Like many caught up in the same wave of immigration, my grandparents’ arrival in the early 20th century came at a time when new industries were consolidating resources that could undercut and drive out centuries of local production. But knowing the ups and downs of the markets (and having seen many an apple cart topple), my grandfather bought a humble triple-decker in Roxbury as soon as he could. Like so many before them, my grandparents knew that the surest way to have food that was lovingly raised and affordable was to grow your own, and their courtyard garden became an Eden in the middle of a decaying city; several of their fruit trees stood on the same ground where a 17th-century governor kept his orchard.

At the same time, in the early 1900s, the temperance movement harnessed a religious fervor for sobriety that ushered in Prohibition. Not so ironically, Prohibition strategically killed local brewing and distillation, and powerful robber barons (who were the only ones able to work around the laws) stepped in to fill the void. These wily investors had bootleggers smuggle in liquor for their own speakeasies and private parties—where they no doubt sat back and made plans for the consolidated breweries and distilleries that would take over nationally once Prohibition ended. Meanwhile (file under “collateral damage”), our hard cider–drinking nation cut down huge swaths of ancient orchards in the name of Prohibition (followed by housing developments with names like Orchard Circle and McIntosh Lane). All lessons that we can learn from—or be doomed to repeat.

Today I see the apple cart as emblematic of our new local market economy. The return of local breweries and distilleries, and the revitalization of a regional landscape, complete with orchards. Farmers markets brimming with heritage apples in wooden crates, hard cider, and cider doughnuts. A cart maneuvered by a farming family in order to create a seasonal income stream directly between grower and eater. An alternative to plastic crates filled with machine-harvested, unripe apples gassed to turn red when they arrive at the distribution warehouse thousands of miles away. An apple cart without a half-dozen middlemen and fifteen added chemicals. Food justice on wheels . . . and a chance to know the farmer and the stories of the produce behind the farm stand.

I have had the good fortune to partner with preservationists and foundations across the nation, working to save forgotten fruits (including regional apple varieties) that were disappearing at an alarming rate in a world of Red Delicious apples meant to endure shipping, look perfect, and remain shelf stable—at the cost of flavor and regional diversity. Historically every state or county had a favorite apple adapted to the conditions and needs of the place: summer apples, storage apples, pie apples, sauce apples, and cider apples for every home and orchard. In my region, it was easier to grow apples than barley and more cost-effective to drink hard cider than beer; so now, with a return to local hard cider production, the apple cart even has a place out in front of our liquor stores.

I am grateful to see a younger generation tipping the apple cart and creating alternative systems. Red Delicious—thunk. High-spray orchards—dropped. Cargo ships laden with Chinese apples—sunk. Industrial juice—drained. In their place, pick-your-own heritage apples and pears, hard cider, and open spaces. Ka-ching: rebuilt local agricultural economies far more joyful and meaningful than data entry can collect. Systems which respect our shared cultural inheritance and invest in human industry.

The idiom to “upset the apple cart” has been with us, in some form, at least since Jeremy Belknap’s The History of New-Hampshire (1784), which noted that John Adams nearly “overset the apple-cart” by slipping in his own amendment on the morning of the day the Constitution was to be ratified. Adams was a farmer-turned-politician and ultimately president at a pivotal time in our nation’s history. Today, we are at another pivotal time, a time for the tenacity that gardeners know so well. It is clear that many of our systems are broken, but like other farmer-statesmen and -women before us, we are agitating, planting seeds, and rebuilding systems.

For those of us who love the land, there is a sense of urgency. It’s time for us to get our hands back in the soil. Time for us to overturn politics as usual. We seem to be at a tipping point. Boom or bust. The bigger the mainstream gets, the more room there is for an undercurrent, and this generation of farmer-activists knows that some apple carts were meant to be overturned and filled anew—this time with local, organic, sustainably and justly raised heritage harvests, rich with flavor, history, and diversity.

Artisanal Skills

A New Land-Based Arts and crafts movement is emerging in America. For more than a decade, local farmers and gig workers have been quietly reshaping the face of industry, and farmers markets and Etsy sites have grown up around them to create new retail outlets. In turn, these direct-to-consumer sales are reinvigorating cottage industries that produce small-batch quality goods for the sustainably minded: handcrafted wooden bowls, garden chutney, artisanal cheese, forged cutlery, and Windsor chairs. Cottage industries that lead to the preservation of a local mill, farmland, and heirloom seeds.

Much of the world seems to be coming around to the value of a new preservation movement, a responsive experience economy with both long-lasting and ephemeral goods that stretch old market perspectives on consumer culture. At this critical juncture, skill-based economies of scale remind us of things we should never have forgotten, basic skills that help artisans rebuild fractured economies and the environment, even as they regain a sense of pride in their work.

Historically, the barons of industry centralize power and make the cheapest product with the greatest profit margin, regardless of environmental or human impacts. But even as industry threatens to drown out our democracy, these new small-scale industries are proving to be a mighty undercurrent, offering consumers local artisanal alternatives to unsustainable products sourced overseas to meet corporate bottom lines.

I never wanted to be defined as a consumer. I am a gardener and an artisanal producer, and I take care with the funds I expend. I want my home and garden to reflect William Morris’s ethos: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Purchasing well-crafted household goods is part of a strategy to support alternatives to throwaway industrial manufactured goods. Instead of impusively buying into cheap particleboard that will end up in landfill, I wait until I can afford a locally crafted wooden table; meanwhile, I make more meals at home, supplemented with produce from my own garden and perhaps some fresh eggs from a friend. Being a producer in a gig household economy might mean managing a landscape to yield coppice for fencing, kindling, and charcoal, or making scratch bread or kimchi for home or for sale. Artisanal work in my community runs the gamut from compost contractor to local greengrocer; it’s the local distiller who turned around production to make hand sanitizer during the pandemic, and the farmer in the adjacent field who grows the grapes and grains that supplied him.

Fortunately, many former boomer-consumers and hippies, who saw an earlier back-to-the-land movement, are now in a position to support sustainable systems. In my region, that has meant community-minded entrepreneurs investing in outdoor infrastructure for year-round open markets, participating in the revitalization of local agriculture, and organizing regional distribution hubs that make it more lucrative for those willing to wholesale directly to alternative food chains. Alternative is frequently lambasted as elitist by the consumer culture that helped get us into this mess, but to me it means my middle-class grandmother’s thrift foods, made with whole ingredients from her own city backyard or sources she otherwise knew. It means that eggs with deep yellow yolks, crisp cucumbers, and fresh sausage fill our corner stores—local alternatives to soda and Ring Dings.

Technology. The word is derived from the Greek, techne (“skill,” “craft”) and logos (“word,” “thought”)—in essence, a personal expression of skill made manifest. I like to think that sustainable technologies are once again united with the crafts that gave birth to local industries. An alternative to life as a disconnected cog in a manufacturing wheel, or a market demographic attached to a blue screen. For many of us, our garden is both a personal artistic expression and an applied craft that keeps us grounded in meaningful work.

It’s been suggested that the difference between art and craft was that craft was women’s work or manual labor; or worse, that both art and craft are matters of novelty—this from the generation that reduced them to painted polyester aprons and crocheted Kleenex-box covers. But look back further, to trade unions or guilds: artisanal work was highly valued, as it came with an assurance of quality. Fortunately, many of the new generation of young farmers and artisans are women and men who blend the integrity of guilds with flavorful and useful products that inspire fair recompense.

Craft industries are akin to public utilities, which, by their nature, should do the important work of preserving our shared natural resources. Artisanal skills can help us rebuild our common wealth by producing sustainable, place-based ingredients, nontoxic waste, and regenerative agriculture. We can create compost instead of landfills, farm food over factory food. Fewer plastics, more parsnips.

“If the robot makes it, let the robot buy it” is a sentiment posted by the register at many of the finer establishments in my town. Our community works to buy products made by the people and industries in our shared landscape, and the quality of life here is better for it. In an age of robotics and artificial intelligence, artisanal skillsets provide meaningful alternatives to soulless mass production. Machines don’t know what to do with a ripe heirloom tomato or an oddly shaped potato. Machines don’t understand human dignity, pride, or individuality. Machines require standardization, which has cost the world precious variables, including biodiversity, sustainability, and humanity. You can’t stamp out craftsmanship on a production line. It’s one of the many reasons why so many of us bypass the robot: it doesn’t fit our values stream, and it seldom serves those living downstream.

Modern industry often disrespects human dignity and the planet; and without the union wages, insurance benefits, and pensions that built the Greatest Generation, new generations are opting out. They are adapting pre-industrial technologies and agricultural skills to foster new economies where we can buy from each other. Beer and butter, farm shares or a timber-frame shed. Veg for vegans. Maple syrup for tree work. Cottage industries bring us goats for chèvre, meat, and poison ivy control. They bring honey for mead and art for art’s sake. Apprenticeships and jobs linked to the land bring honor and meaning back to manual labor in our gig economy, and cash on the barrel head. No gym membership necessary.

When we produce, sell, and buy in our own communities, seventy percent of money spent remains in our local economy; the new baker in town is commissioning farm and garden production of grains, seeds, nuts, fruit, and botanicals, a graphic designer, a media sales rep, an electrician, a carpenter, a local mill, a community kitchen space, and perhaps even apprentices who help to bring goods to market or open up a bakery storefront café. We become conscious of our kith and kin—our friends, acquaintances, and relations, those we are glad to support and those we may not be familiar with yet. The average child in America knows fewer than ten backyard plants and animals; perhaps we need to reintroduce them to their kinfolk: the toad and salamander, pipsissewa and plantain. Kin that sting, kin that eat tomato hornworms, kin that pollinate the food we eat. Artisanal work can help rebuild these communities of kith and kin, which can occur anywhere—an agricultural landscape, seaside communities, urban and suburban yards. When we participate, we reclaim an alternative to the impersonal, the robot-made. In the process, we can craft local alternatives to preserve the cultural inheritance of our kith and kin in a garden right outside our own door.

I have greater faith in the future when I see local schools placing orders with nearby farmers, and see the kids touring those same farms, where they learn firsthand about an aquifer, a turbine, and life in a colony of bees. I take hope from a chef friend who bought up a local farmer’s entire hail-damaged harvest to make frozen soups for the school system instead of watching a neighbor suffer the loss of an annual crop. I saw my community buoyed as a local farm distribution hub adapted services to deliver vital spring produce to a population in pandemic isolation. Local industries keep us resilient when we watch systems “too big to fail” fail.

In many ways, we are rebuilding from the ground up. The richer we make the soil, the more meaningful the harvest. Gardeners live artful lives. Each year that we cultivate, the earth teaches us more about the skills to craft a life and livelihood from seeds and stems. We learn of the harmony that comes from turning barren earth into a colorful and fruitful artist’s palette. Each season, our roots and desires to live sustainably inform design inspirations framed by the natural world around us—from luscious spring green through harshest winter gray. Apple cider to zinnias.

Garden historian Mac Griswold had it right: “Gardens are the slowest of the performing arts.” As performing artists, every pot of herbal tea we make is artisanal, a blend of art, craft, and science. Each garden bed, the artistic vision of our inner painter, chef, and perfumer. Each compost pile, the artist’s medium, the activist’s plan of action, and a sandbox for kid engagement—and rogue pumpkins. Gardens are bringing back time for reflection and connection. They can offer a snail-paced still life that helps us to savor the fruits and flowers of our accomplishments and remember the gardeners who taught us, even if only for a few sacred moments in a busy week.

Artisanal skills can provide a good meal or a livelihood. They offer a form of play and innovation that keeps us entertained and intellectually challenged throughout the seasons of our life. Artisanal living gives us an opportunity to vote with our forks by supporting the farms, gardens, and agritourism sites that crop up in its wake, not the strip malls, processing plants, and food deserts that sadly remain too prevalent in corporatized dystopian landscapes. Artisans skillfully dovetail hands and heart—and as all gardeners know, that can surely heal the earth, even if only one backyard at a time.

Bee Balm

Bee Balm Is A Fragrant native herb with bright tubular flowers full of citrusy floral nectar. It is a boon for bees and hummingbirds and a sweet, soothing balm for families with frayed nerves. Fortunately, it is also perfect for inclusion in herbal teas, salads, and cocktails.

The generic name of this tenacious sun-loving perennial honors Spanish physician and botanist Nicolás Monardes, whose Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde Worlde (1577), which extolled the virtues of bee balm and other New World plants, encouraged settlement in the Americas. After nearly two hundred years of the same settlers overlooking indigenous plants and importing familiar plants from Europe, we had our first native plants movement, at the outset of the American Revolution. Colonists, intent on cutting ties with Great Britain, banned imported black teas and designated bee balm as one of the premier Liberty Teas (substitutes for black tea); it was a highly effective embargo that ultimately helped to win the war with balms instead of bombs. By the Victorian era, bee balm had become our homegrown alternative to the Mediterranean citrus bergamot, the chief flavor note in Earl Grey tea.

In the garden, bee balm is a perennial favorite and airy spark of color. As with so many plants, its common name suggests its use: today, we recognize bee balm as a key plant for reviving declining populations of bees and other pollinators. We also know this resinous plant as a balm, a fragrant ointment used to heal or soothe the skin and beleaguered spirits. When I don’t have access to the fresh plant, I sprinkle the essential oil around my house, or put a drop on my pulse points when I need a lift. All aerial parts of the plant can be used fresh. The tender leaves can be chopped finely and added to salads and summer vegetable dishes, or made into teas and balms. However, the flowers (particularly the red ones) are my favorite edible part of the plant; they are full of an Earl Grey–like floral nectar and offer a fun kid candy from the garden. They are beautiful frozen into ice cubes for summer drinks, or turned into a simple syrup for refreshing cocktails and confections. Monarda didyma is the red-flowering South American type documented by Monardes; its mauve-flowering cousin, M. fistulosa, is a North American native. Both species are quick to spread via underground runners, so I will often fill teapots with the thinnings I pull up from the ground to keep it contained.

Many patented native cultivars have been selected or developed to reduce height, primarily in order to fit on the cramped shipping carts used to supply box stores; others are bred to be more resistant to powdery mildew. However, this Yankee organic gardener and citizen scientist has long noted that bees have a strong tendency to ignore plants that have been sprayed with growth inhibitors. Furthermore, I have yet to see a plant (even those inclined toward powdery mildew) develop a chronic case of that fungal disease if top watering is avoided; it also helps to apply a generous two- to three-inch mulch of pine needles to the bed where they grow prior to the start of the season. Above all, I have seen monarda work as a magic balm when engaging children in gardens. There is great reward in teaching kids to sit still with a flower in hand, long enough to be visited by a hummingbird. There is an equal joy to make time to do the same for ourselves.

Biodiversity

Biological diversity is the sum total of all living organisms that exist on our planet, the remarkable variability among organisms and ecosystems that comes down to us from hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history. We can see it in humans, but many people have difficulty distinguishing variables in the earth beneath their feet, and the wall of green they see when they look at nature. Genetic diversity among plants is critical, for the same reasons that captive animal breeding programs need to introduce new mates from wild populations. Species with wide genetic diversity tend to produce a wider variety of offspring, some of them potentially the most fit variants. In contrast, a species with little or no genetic diversity will produce offspring that are genetically alike and therefore more susceptible to diseases.

Similar circumstances occur in the plant world. The potato famine that drove nearly two million people to flee Ireland, my paternal grandmother among them, may be traced to the lack of genetic diversity among potatoes. There was only one “lumper,” and when it became blighted, all its genetic clones did, too. A lesson we would have done well to learn from. Yet instead, over the last hundred years, we have lost more than ninety percent of the genetic diversity among crops that fed the world. A recent United Nations biodiversity report confirmed that species loss is due to human activity, and scientists report that we are losing almost two hundred species per day. We are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.