My character, Jaden Bruxelle….

I love herbs, spices, and flowers. Herbs and spices are in my blood; they are imbedded in my DNA.

As a tribute to our family line, going back to England, we all grow, including Caden: thyme, sage, rosemary, parsley, oregano, lavender, Canterbury bells, hollyhocks, lilies, irises, sweet peas, cosmos, red poppies, peonies, and rows and rows of roses.

My mother and Grandma Violet both taught me that herbs have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Some worked, some didn’t. Some healed, some killed. Some were neutral, there was no effect.

Hyssop was inhaled if one had a sore or scratchy throat. Large doses were terminally bad for one’s health, so one had to watch it. Horehound could soothe and calm a bite from a nasty serpent or kill worms wiggling away inside you.

Mistletoe has been used in the past to help with heart disease and with “falling sickness,” gout, and a variety of nervous disorders. It is also, unfortunately, poisonous.

Monk’s hood, quite poisonous, was used to kill.

         The witches in my family line have always grown herbs and used them in food, for healing sicknesses and giving someone a sickness, for love, revenge, protection, and to make people die they thought should go.  They’ve also been used for spells and chants.

It was those spells and chants that got two of my ancestors, born Iris and Rosemary, into trouble.

Iris and Rosemary, the rebellious daughters of Henrietta and Elizabeth, who started The Curse in our family, were literally chased from their estates outside London by a torch-wielding mob that wanted to flog them after they cast a few drunken spells in a bar.

“As they thundered away on horses,” Grandma Violet told me, peering through her glasses, blue eyes serious, “one of the witch’s petticoats caught on fire. You’ve heard your mother and I use the term a “petticoats on fire” problem? There’s where it came from.”

I remember gasping. “She was on fire?”

“A spark from a torch hit her. Her brother and her cousin’s brother ripped the petticoat off and they all hopped back on those horses and galloped down the road through the night to the port. The brothers told them to change their names from Iris Platts and Rosemary Compton, to Faith and Grace Stephenson, before they scrambled onto the ship to America.”

  My grandma reached up to a shelf to reorganize her endless, clear bottles of herbs and spices. “They figured that if they were named Faith and Grace, not only could they hide their identities as reputed witches, they would appear more holy, more Christian, and less likely to be accused of being witches again. Faith and Grace never forgot who they were, despite the torch wielders, and they taught their daughters everything they knew about herbs and spices, spells and chants, like I teach you, Jaden.”

I do not grow herbs for spells and chants, because that is ridiculous, though my otherwise sane and deeply intellectual mother and Grandma Violet taught me a multitude of them as a child and both said often, “Once a witch, always a witch.”

I grow herbs in my greenhouse to make my meals yummy. I grow herbs and flowers because then I feel connected to my mother, Grandma Violet, and all our women ancestors who grew the same herbs and flowers that I do.  I grow them because I love to nurture living things…

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