A Lemon Verbena Love Affair

My love affair with Lemon Verbena has a story, as all good loves do.

Mother plant, 2021

Babies from cuttings

2024, spring has sprung

It started in 1993, when I was studying herbal medicine with Shatoiya Jones (now De La Tour) on her land at Dry Creek Herb Farm in Auburn. Once/month, for nine months, I journeyed to the foothills of the Sierras to the wild gardens that thrived under her Taurus tending. At the end of my 9-month medicine journey, there was a beautiful graduation and my parents flew in to attend.

Or maybe, it started when I was just a little girl in Minneapolis, driving weekly with my father out to Jordan, MN, where we rented a tiny plot of soil to have a vegetable garden, to put our hands in the dirt, to water, to weed, and to fall in love with this earth that provides us with food and sustenance.

Or, perhaps it goes back to the primordial soup that I was born out of, from the dark, dank, putrid muck that became life, that became plant, and animal, and from where consciousness arose.

Well. That went somewhere unexpected!
No matter how far back the story goes, the particular threads that wove the bond between me, my father, and Lemon Verbena took root on the sacred Sierra landscape. As my parents explored the expansive herbal garden at Dry Creek Herb Farm, my dad became enamored of the scent that Lemon Verbena emits. If you have never smelled a live Lemon Verbena plant, never rubbed the rough sturdy leaves and inhaled the aroma, you have no idea what you are missing. Head directly to a plant store, do not pass go, do not collect $200, and sniff.

Dad working the front yard

Meanwhile, my father, back in Minneapolis, had by the mid-90s transformed the front yard of the home I grew up in into a native woodland environment, and spent winters scouring plant catalogs finding new plants to order for the following Spring. Lemon Verbena was now on his radar. The problem is, Lemon Verbena does not survive Minnesota winters. And so, every year, he would buy a young sprout, plant it in a pot, and treat it like an annual instead. His discovery of this delightful herb, at the place where I studied herbal medicine, forged a deeper connection between our mutual love of these gifts of nature. And every year when I would visit, I would see her, smell her, and be reminded of how my father had come to know this plant. I was also recruited to weed the yard every year, even though I was on vacation, but that is an entirely different story.

Lemon Verbena in Minnesota

Fast forward to 2016. My father died suddenly, and unexpectedly, in November, just a few days after the election. My personal thinking is that he simply did not want to stick around to see what this event portended. I don't blame him or begrudge his departure.

Dad's chard, 2016

When I arrived back home, the Lemon Verbena, despite the November chill, had hung on to its leaves. My dad's chard had grown to gargantuan proportions, reaching up offering life, even as winter descended, even as my father left behind his own.

Buried with my father

And so, my offering to the gods, to the Spirits, to his grave, to Mother Earth, to the medicine, to the mycelial network of consciousness that unbidden, and mostly unbeknownst to us, knits us together ... was this pairing of her/their sweet medicine, given just as we are taken, with love.