Panacea

Sit down and have a nice cup of tea

I have spent a lot of time this spring in our untidy garden and I feel much the better for it. A sanctuary from the accelerating madness of our mis-governed world, it provides an oasis of sanity as well as essential occupational therapy.

Our garden is a small space and I am filling it with as many edibles as I can make room for. This is a modest personal project but it feels like reclaiming a tiny piece of individual agency. Though we are fortunate to have ready access to good, fresh, locally grown food, the producers talk always of the increasing challenges and I cannot take it for granted.

The next generation of our family have started growing too, within the constraints of their living arrangements, and my stepdaughter recently took her young family on a foraging course which covered some common herbal remedies. She seems inspired to learn more, so it must have been serendipity when we visited her last week and I found a copy of The Green Pharmacy on a second hand book stall. Rather that as a first resort than the digital hell of the drug-pushing NHS, as far as I am concerned.

I don’t know that a cup of tea is really a cure-all, but it is a reassuring constant in a fast-moving world. When I wrote this poem a few years ago, it reminded me of drinking tea after lunch on hot days in my grandmother’s back garden. I need that connection through the generations and the continuation of family rituals. I feel it my responsibility to keep the thread strong.

PANACEA

Her garden holds a witch’s brew
of feverfew and valerian,
balms to calm delirium,
smiling heads of camomile
nodding off in unmade beds.
With the ministrations of a mother’s love,
she tends to the needs of these
self-seeded adoptees.
Guardian against tidiness and horticultural trends,
she defends this, her semi-wild dispensary,
an apothecary’s chest of restful cures
for all the same cares as of old,
though sold by new names now.
She knows how to blend a decoction of verbena,
Grandmother’s verbal guide to the herbal
distilled in her, still fresh, eternal.

Each warm afternoon in the appled
shade of the orchard’s glade
she will sit, knit and sip
a draught of her favoured remedy:
the cure-all –
soothing stimulant, healer of ill humours,
morning eyebright, evening nightshade,
companion in solitude, bringer-together of friends;
powerful in its ordinary subtlety,
no blunt narcotic.

Alone among her range of restorative
recipes, this is not home-grown.
Imported exotic scented with bergamot,
measured into its own bone china pot,
hot-infused with ceremony,
timed to perfect potency,
hit the spot and energise the senses.
Treasured lifter of the spirit:
Camellia sinensis.