Tales from the garden

My garden has been neglected this spring. 

A very wise mentor of mine recently told me to leave myself room to fail—and I have! I have approximately 72 square feet of failure in the front yard (plus, you know, the rest of the yard)!

Sure, the annuals we planted have been pulling their weight. And little bits of zombified compost have popped up through the soil, reanimated tendrils lurching toward trellises—they're sure to offer us a surprise harvest of sorts. And friend who started too many tomatoes offered me her leggy cast-offs.

So it's all chaos out there, but that's okay because it's a beautiful, wild failure.

*****

The same friend who gave me the tomatoes gave me some clustered mountain mint last year.

When I say friend, you should know that this friend and I met on the Buy Nothing Group and our entire friendship is just...the exchange of plants and advice. And it's mostly me taking because—let's face it—my garden is pathetic and I need all the advice I can get.

She's been trying to increase the number of local plants in her garden—mountain mint being one of them. 

Like most mints, mountain mint is a prolific spreader, but it's less of a problem because the shoots it sends out tend to not root very deeply, so it's controllable. Also, it's native, not invasive. 

That mountain mint took to our hillside like it was coming home after a long day and has spread significantly since I planted it at the end of last summer. And that's fine by me. Bees love it—wasps and butterflies, too. It smells delicious.

"Is it edible?" Rachel wanted to know.

"I don't know," I told her. "Most varieties of mountain mint are, from what I've researched. But some aren't and..."

Long story short, Rachel picked a leaf and ate it. 

And she didn't die. And she didn't get sick. 

So, one thing led to another and soon she was chopping up a bunch of mountain mint in the kitchen, steeping it, turning it into syrup, mixing it with cream, and churning it into ice cream.  

And I was...freaking out a little. I mean, I'm pro-foraging, but only with 100% certainty and I was not 100% certain.

After hours and hours of research, I couldn't decide whether or not it was going to kill us. Some places said it was fine. Other places said it was toxic. 

Ultimately we decided to trust (1) the North Carolina Extension Office, which says that leaves can be used in cooking and for making tea, and (2) Yu et al.'s (2024) analysis of pulegone in food products, which demonstrated that while pulegone is toxic in concentrated amounts it's fine in food amounts. All mint (or virtually all mint) contains pulegone and that's what the don't-eat-this camp are afraid of in mountain mint.

But then, if they're afraid of pulegone in mountain mint...why not in spearmint?

So we ate the ice cream. It was good and minty. And nobody died. 

The children noted it had a bit of a basil-like vibe to it—and that makes sense because basil is in the mint family (although it does not contain pulegone). 

I joked about refusing to be the one to make the call to poison control should we get sick. Those poison control people are the nicest people in the world, but I did not want to explain to them that our entire family of eight was sick from eating ice cream that my daughter had spent three days meticulously preparing.

Fortunately the North Carolina Extension Office was a good, credible source to rely on.

*****

Another friend—our backyard neighbour—offered me some Rose-of-Sharon volunteers from her yard. I planted about ten of them late last fall. Five of them made it through the winter, which was more than I thought originally (at Easter I thought only two had survived).

I was glad about that because although Rose-of-Sharon (also known as hibiscus) isn't local, it does claim to be easy to grow. And if you haven't figured it out already...that is the theme of my garden. 

If you need to be coddled, you're probably not the plant for me. 

So I was excited about my five Rose-of-Sharon plants that seemed to be thriving after the winter and I distinctly remember showing the one growing up by our mailbox to Andrew (importantly, Miriam remembers this happening as well). 

"This is a maple tree and I don't want it growing right here by the mailbox. Every year I try to get rid of this thing and every year it comes back. It's just not a good place for a maple tree. But this is a Rose-of-Sharon and I want to keep this."

I stroked the tall, gangly stick-of-a-thing, just starting to bud out.

"That's good to know," Andrew said. "I would have assumed it was a weed."

"It will be more of a bush than a tree if we prune it properly and will look just fine this close to the mailbox."

*****

Fast-forward to this weekend...

Andrew mowed the lawn on Saturday. And he edged the lawn and weed-whacked and did all sorts of things. The lawn looked great! 

But we went for a walk last night and I realized what you've probably already guessed.

"Oh, no!" I gasped. "You didn't!!"

"Uh-oh..." Andrew said. "What did I do?"

"You chopped down my Rose-of-Sharon!?"

"I...don't think I did..."

"Then where did it go?"

"Where was it?"

"It was right here! It was about yea high..."

"Was it just a tall stick with leaves?"

"Yes..."

"Oh, yeah. I mowed that down..."

"That was my Rose-of Sharon."

"Oh, no!"

Yeah, so he mowed that one down and he mowed down the one on the other side of the driveway.

The girls (Rachel and Miriam) said this reminded them of when Grandpa mowed over all the daylilies in Spanish Fork and I reacted similarly. Like, what did you just do to my flowers?!

Chill with the lawn mowers, guys!

Anyway, currently I have three Rose-of-Sharon plants still growing strong...which technically is still one more than I thought I had Easter, so I guess we're doing pretty well!