This week seems like a perfect week to write about the dandelion. It will soon be sprouting fresh leaves and sunny yellow flowers. I love it when dandelions coat lawns in yellow, then I know it is spring! While it is a little early for eating the leaves and flowers, the root is still around […]

This surprisingly common and useful plant is Hypericum perforatum. It is most often called St. John’s Wort. I have also seen it referred to as St. Joan’s Wort. Its flowers and leaves are both very distinctive. The small (less than 1/2 inch in diameter) flowers have black dots along the margins and appear fuzzy in […]

Considering the commonality and usefulness of the mint plants, I am surprised I haven’t shared them here already. This is a  plant (well, really several related plants) that can be found growing in many places including heavily populated areas, often cultivated and/ or escaped from cultivation. As my mom always told me, once you have mint, […]

Happy Valentine’s Day week! This week I thought I’d elaborate on a Valentine’s Day classic, the Rose: there are many species, in the genus Rosa. Warning: don’t eat the ones you got for Valentine’s Day! Growing wild (sometimes called invasively) you are likely to find Rosa multiflora, or multiflora rose. These have small white flowers, […]

For this post I would like to share an amazing  plant that I have recently had cause to use; Yarrow- Achillea millefolium. The quality it is probably most well known for is its ability to stop bleeding. It gets the name of its genus- Achillea- from its legendary usage by Achilles to stop the bleeding […]

Greetings, It’s a new year for those of us who count our years from Winter Retreat to Winter Retreat. Yesterday I returned home after 3 days of martial arts, meditation, contests, cultural studies, cold weather, hot rooms and not much sleep. Those of you who have experienced the Shin Ho Kwan Winter Retreat know how […]

Here is a nice seasonally appropriate plant. It gets its name from its ability to stay healthy and dark green all winter, often enduring underneath the snow. This will be my second in a series of two posts about low growing ground creeping plants with oval- ish dark green thick waxy leaves and bright red […]

Another post, another medicinal plant- as you may have noticed, I enjoy learning and sharing information about plants, especially their edible, medicinal and utilitarian uses.  There are so many plants with so many uses! I’d like to offer a few thoughts about plant usage. I may have written this before, but it is important; as […]

The other day as I was leaving from the lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant in downtown Ithaca, I noticed a beautiful frilly plant growing sandwiched between the building and the sidewalk. It looked out of place, but familiar- almost like dill- of course, it was fennel! As soon as I realized what it was […]

Greetings. As you know from Master Shaffer’s latest post, we are changing our blog post schedule, and this is my first post in the new system. This year summer has become my busiest season, since it is the first year my kids have gone to school all year in Delaware, then spent the whole summer […]