Nature’s Bounty

It was a warm early summer morning. The sun was shining, the air was clean, and I was harvesting red clover flowers. I would patiently wait for the bees to finish rooting through each pink bloom before picking it for myself. It seemed coincidental that the exact herb I needed was growing for free in a poorly maintained area of my parents' lawn that blended into an empty adjacent lot in their development. That empty lot is now long gone, and the soft pink blooms are no more than stubs of clover leaves in my parents' and their neighbor's grass. Nowhere in that neighborhood do the red clover bloom in profusion anymore. All you can see, is what you see in any standard American neighborhood--green grassy lawn.

Nature is abundant and diverse, and is constantly providing for us, yet so often we label her gifts as undesirable, and eliminate those undesirables without even knowing the benefits of what we are removing. Over the years, not only I have become more and more aware of the "weeds" growing in our untreated yards, but also in awe of the value provided by many of those "weeds."

I lived in Greece for 6 years, and when I first moved there, I was introduced to a traditional dish called horta. It was a blob of bitter boiled leafy greens drenched in olive oil with lemon and salt. "Eat, eat!" I was told, "Horta is very healthy for you." Horta is most often dandelion leaves (chock full of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium, iron, and potassium), but may also be comprised of other wild or cultivated brassica (cabbage) family greens such as chicory, arugula, chard, sorrel, and collards. I was later told, with immense Greek pride, that the people of the Greek countryside survived starvation during their civil war by collecting and eating wild horta. To this day you can still see people in Greece with a plastic bag and a knife in hand, meandering through meadows and fallow fields, collecting horta for dinner.

Once I moved back to the United States, I experienced reverse culture shock. Dandelions grow everywhere in our omnipresent American lawns (when untreated). However, far from harvesting them, lawn owners were paying good money killing dandelions with herbicides and then turning around and paying $2.00 per bunch for dandelion leaves at the grocery store. I was baffled.

When we stop to examine our untreated lawns, there seems to be no end to the healthy and delicious wild plants. Some of the weeds we condemn the most are the most useful. Plantains (a broad leaf "weed") has medicinal qualities and make tasty nutritious "chips" (like kale chips). Wood sorrel, with its delicate clover-like leaves and lovely yellow flowers, pops up everywhere. It is chock full of Vitamin C, all parts are edible, and it has a lovely lemony flavor that can enliven salads. Violets are beautiful, announcing spring with a profusion of vibrant purple. The flowers can be used to make jelly, and have three times more Vitamin C, pound for pound, as oranges. Mallow, as well, has its medicinal uses.

There are many more common backyard beneficial "weeds" that I could mention, but I will leave you with one more, chickweed. I have frequently heard gardeners lament and curse chickweed, calling for herbicides to banish it from their yards and gardens. You may be interested to know, however, that the presence of chickweed indicates fertile soil, and can act as a ground cover that helps to keep the soil moist. It can also be eaten as food, and is high in Vitamin A and C, saponins, and many minerals. I have even known people to make a chickweed pesto.

In its most primal form, gardening is a matter of observing what is in your environment and encouraging that which is desirable to grow in more abundance. Experiment! Leave your lawn untreated and see what healthy nutritious boons nature presents you. Try a step further and let a little patch of your lawn go unmown so the beneficial plants can grow and provide to their fullest potential. Finally, if you choose, selectively garden what you want to keep. I now transplant spontaneous red clover "weeds" in my garden to an embankment near the basement door, and my daughter and I nibble on wood sorrel and collect plantains and dandelions as we play in the yard.

When selecting a test patch in your yard, always choose an area well away from roadsides, or areas treated with herbicides or pesticides. And always do your research before consuming any wild plant. Make definitive identifications based on guides such as "Stalking the Healthful Herbs" by Euell Gibbons (who worked with nutritionists at Penn State University to analyze the nutritive values of many of the herbs in his book), "Backyard Medicine: Harvest and Make Your Own Herbal Remedies," by Julie Bruton-Seal and Matthew Seal, and "Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants," by Bradford Angier.

If nothing else, simply learn about the natural world around you, in your own backyard, and give yourself the permission to take joy in that world.

References:

Bruton-Seal, Julie, and Mathew Seal. Backyard Medicine: Harvest and Make Your Own Herbal

Remedies. Skyhorse Publishing, 2009.

Gibbons, Euell. Stalking the Healthful Herbs. Stackpoll Books, 1966.

Thayer, Samuel. The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing

Edible Wild Plants. Forager's Harvest, 2006.