Magical Flower Gardening

In the Algonquin calendar, May is the Flower Moon, when blossoms spring up all over. Back when we first bought our homestead, we scoffed at flowers. We would fill our beds and spend our precious time tending useful herbs and vegetables; we didn’t have time to waste for foolish things like daisies and chrysanthemums. That resolution lasted about one year, until we read all the beautiful descriptions of flowers in the seed catalogs and decided that, well, it might no be so bad to get a few perennials; after all, they didn’t take much care after they were established. And the next year perhaps just a few annuals, cheap ones; and it proceeded like that. In time, we grudgingly agreed that hyacinths were just as important as bread.

There’s also the fact that the line between herb and flower is pretty blurry. Flowers like roses, lavender, calendula, and borage are medicinal, and borage is also edible, as is bee balm, nasturtiums, clove pinks, daylilies, and johnny-jump-ups. Once you include every pretty flowering plant that can be eaten or used in medicine or potpourri or plant dye or as an ant repellent, you’ve got quite a blooming garden already. Add to that the fact that we just don’t like lawns generally - they seem rather wasteful when you could be actually growing something besides grass that would look even nicer - and our flower gardens grew.

We generally prefer the older heirloom varieties of flower to the modern hybrids, with the exception of some lovely new colors of nasturtium such as “Apricots And Cream”. The older flowers are hardier and easier to grow, and give a more old-fashioned look, which we prefer aesthetically. If you really like screaming neon gladioli and plastic-pink petunias, be my guest. Each garden is a confection simply for the admiration of its owner, a personal slice of heaven.

A garden can also be planted for specific purposes. One sort is to groups plants with the same purpose together, such as a medicinal garden or dye garden or culinary garden. These are all listed in the Weodmonath chapter, which goes more fully into domestic herbs and their uses. We include here the Edible Flower Garden, which is excellent if you have children, or just like to eat a lot of salads or make flower jams.

For the Edible Flower Garden, plant the following items. Around the edge (low-growers): nasturtium, pansies, johnny-jump-ups, sweet violet, and purslane. Second tier (medium-size plants): borage, clove pink, meadow cranesbill, calendula, and shungiku (Chinese edible chrysanthemum). In the middle (tall plants): bee balm, salad rocket, and radishes such as the Easter Egg Radish which will have different colors of flowers. We deliberately let this batch of radishes bolt, as opposed to their earlier-planted brothers in the vegetable garden which we dig up for the roots. They will grow tall stems with delicate pink and white and lavender flowers, all of which taste faintly and not intrusively of radish.

Any edible herb such as sage, mint, or thyme will also produce edible flowers in their second year, we often stick in some deep red chard or mustard for additional edible color. If you have room, trellis a honeysuckle up behind the garden for its sweet-nectared flowers that you can suck the juice out of. Rose petals are edible if you cut off the bitter white heel of each petal. Daylily blossoms aren’t great raw, but can be dipped in batter and deep-fried. Flowers sprinkled in your salad will amaze guests and children; often it takes some convincing to assure them that they can indeed be eaten. We’ve found that a garden which encourages people to eat flowers is a great guest attraction to your house.

Another sort of grouping includes gardens planted for magical purposes. A garden can be a wonderful spell - it takes a long time and a lot of effort to put it together, and it is a living, growing thing that renews its own energy each year. Flower gardens can form part of a property protection spell, or a land-fertility spell, or just a general good luck and prosperity spell. They can include not just plants but stone walls or labyrinths, figurines, or mosaics.

The first magical garden plots we put in were astrological gardens, as part of an ongoing good fortune and protection spell. There’s no right size for plots like these. They can be two feet across or twelve feet, round or crescent-shaped or square. Fit them into the corners of the land you have.

A Sun garden brings light, fertility, and sunny weather. We use mostly annuals in the Sun garden, in honor of the life-and-death cycle of the solar year. Start with sunflowers, of course; plant a stand of them in the middle where they won’t shade the other plants too much. Add yellow or orange cosmos and calliopsis (annual coreopsis), marigolds of all sizes and shapes, chamomile (the tall annual German variety or the low-growing Roman perennial variety), golden marguerite, orange butterfly weed, feverfew, and perhaps some St. John’s Wort, if you’re careful not to let it spread and take over. We also use the immensely fragrant blue heliotrope, which isn’t yellow but whose name means “turn to the sun”. The bay tree is sacred to Apollo; we have a small one in a pot which we bring inside during the cold months and bring out again for a place of honor in the sun garden. In addition, we painted a wooden sun cut out of plywood and mounted it on a stake in the front of the garden.

A Moon garden brings moisture and rain, the complement to the Sun garden. Start with the silver-grey artemisias, named for Artemis, the Greek lunar goddess. They include wormwood and mugwort, both of which grow huge and spread and should be kept trimmed back, and the smaller southernwood, Silver King, Silver Queen, and Silver Mound, as well as the annual Sweet Annie. We added silver thyme, white alyssum, white lilies (especially Madonna lilies), santolina, lamb’s ears, sweet cicely, moonflower vines on a trellis, and lunaria (also called money plant, its seed pods are flat moonlike white disks). Any white flower will do reasonably well if you’re in a hurry. If you have a lot of space, you may want to put in a small willow tree, or a little pond with water lilies. We put a painted moon on a stake and added a white chalice birdbath.

Our Mercury garden is mostly mints. Ruled by Mercury, they are hardy, fast-growing, and come in dozens of flavors. We have peppermint, spearmint, orange mint, pineapple, mint, apple mint, ginger mint, mountain mint, and chocolate mint. It’s best to have a mint garden fenced in with bricks, or they will spread and take over as fast as their speedy ruling planet. Other good Mercury plants are bouncing Bet, clary sage, eyebright, catnip, and fennel. Snip a Mercury symbol out of aluminum and put it on a stake.

A Venus garden is a spell for fertility and lush growth. The ultimate flower of Venus is, of course, the rose, so start with rosebushes or perhaps an arch with roses growing up the sides. They are easy to train this way if you get a tall climbing variety; instead of pruning for the first three years, just weave the branches in and out of the trellis. Other flowers of Venus are violets, columbines, yarrow, hollyhocks, clove pink and sweet William, bleeding hearts, Cupid’s dart, dame’s rocket, elecampane, sweet peas, lemon verbena, lemon balm, myrtle, and lavender. We plant the great ornamental amaranths Love-Lies-Bleeding and Elephant Head; the former is obvious and the latter often makes a flower head like a giant phallus and testicles. Put in a Venus symbol snipped out of sheet copper; if you don’t want it to oxidize to green, coat it with clear urethane.

A Mars garden is a spell to give energy and heat to a frost pocket or cold area, as well as energy to the weary gardener. Plant decorative members of the onion family, such as chives, garlic chives, garlic, Egyptian and Welsh onions, and decorative alliums. Plant chile peppers, especially the multicolored variety. We put in a plot of scarlet runner beans that shoot up a trellis with their bright-red flowers. Indeed, this is the place for all those fluorescent red flowers you see at the nursery. Oregano is a Mars plant, as is mustard, especially red mustard, coriander, and horseradish. The Mars symbol should be made of wrought iron, or at least steel.

A Jupiter garden is a spell for abundant growth. Put in blue clematis, blue-violet lobelia, purple alyssum, purple loosestrife (but watch so it doesn’t spread!), giant lovage, angelica, anise, basil, agastache, and Joe Pye Weed. Plant sage, especially the purple variety. Houseleek, also called hen and chicks, is said to be a gift from Jupiter to ward off lightning strikes, and was put in pots on roofs. If there is room behind it, plant lilac bushes, but give them lots of room. If you can make a tin Jupiter symbol, great; if not, use any silver metal or paint it on wood.

A Saturn garden is traditionally made up of plants that are somewhat dangerous and either should not be taken or need care and discipline in order to use safely. They include monkshood, celandine, foxglove, nicotiana, henbane, jimsonweed, pennyroyal, rue, comfrey, tansy, and parsley. Grow chicory for its precise opening and closing of its flowers for five hours a day, always aligned with north. Put up a Saturn sign - don’t use lead, Saturn’s metal, but something else painted black.

Should one actually want a Uranus garden, either to complete the set or as a spell of newness and renovation of your property, this is the place for those new and weird varieties of flower - the green pansies, the blue roses, the triple-striped cosmos, etc. Put up a Uranus symbol, recycled out of some scrap metal or old circuit board or something else that would otherwise be part of the flotsam of technology.

A Neptune garden will help with dreamwork and being more in touch with the universe. Plant seaholly, blue campanula, any kind of poppies, marshmallow, forget-me-nots, sweet woodruff, skullcap, and valerian. Masses of low-growing blue flowers, like the sea, are also appropriate.

A Pluto garden should be at least partly shaded. If you have the room, plant elderberry trees - you will need at least two, of different varieties, in order to cross-pollinate and get berries. Pluto plants include tarragon (the “little dragon”), periwinkle (the “sorcerer’s violet”), agrimony, vervain, hyssop, horehound, and mullein. You can put in those flowers that are so dark a red they are almost black, such as black lilies, iris, and hollyhocks.

You can also create gardens to your favorite deities. We don’t the room to list them all here, but you could, for instance, plant an iris garden to Iris, goddess of the rainbow, in order to keep the rain coming regularly. We have one garden each for the Goddess and God, the male and female aspects of deity.

The Goddess’s garden is full of those plants which bear Her name; through the ages, if a plant had the word “lady” or “Mary” in them, it was code for either a “woman’s herb” or a Goddess flower. They include lady’s mantle, lady’s bedstraw, rosemary, costmary, high mallow, lily of the valley, and rose campion. Obviously, plants of the Moon and Venus are also appropriate. We have a ceramic “Mary on the half-shell” that was left to us by an elderly Italian neighbor who died; we repainted her to symbolize the Mother of Earth and Sea, clothed in the green of the fields, the red of the Mother’s color, and the starry black of the Milky Way.

For the God’s garden, we have centaury or bachelor’s button (named for the wild centaurs), winter and summer savory (whose botanical name means satyr), lupines (the wolf plant), coltsfoot (sacred to the horse spirits), hops (for the beer god), pheasant’s eye, love-lies-bleeding and colored lettuce (all sacred to Adonis), and a multitude of thymes, traditionally considered a “male plant” by the Greeks.

You could plant a four-way “medicine wheel” garden sacred to the elements; either four different gardens or one divided with boards or bricks into quarters. Plant delicate pastel flowers in the Air quarter, bright red, yellows, and oranges in the Fire quarter, blue and violet and low growing foamy white flowers in the Water quarter, and lush green herbs or ivy in the Earth quarter.

A protection garden can be made by making a small wooden house - painted with exterior paint so it won’t rot - and then placing it in the middle of a garden bed, surrounded by concentric rings of flowers. It should symbolize your own house, and so should be painted the same colors. You could create rows of brick between them like a labyrinth, or you could also add non-flower items sticking up between the rows, if you’re careful whenever you touch or work in the garden. These could include broken bottles, shards of broken pottery and brick, large nails, or rusty pieces of metal. Good plants to put around it are: roses, especially the old-fashioned variety with lots of thorns; thistles; borage; pumpkins (pumpkin vines are so nasty that in central Europe they believed that all pumpkins left out after Samhain became vampires); bittersweet; protective herbs such as agrimony, rue, and vervain; barley (the old-fashioned variety with the long spines); burdock; and possibly small saplings of hawthorn or blackthorn. Let the garden grow up around the house until you can’t see it, and it will protect its bigger copy with its power. Obviously this is not a garden for the front yard, where your neighbors can all see its mess and overgrowth and small children can hurt themselves on the sharp plants.

Flowers can also be used for spells once they are picked and dried. In Elizabethan times, bouquets of flowers were called “tussie-mussies” and there were a whole host of meanings that changed over the next few hundred years until the Victorians had made the language of flowers into a complex art. If you are interested in studying this, there are several books on the market which list theses floral meanings. They were used largely to send messages, but can also be used for spells. Simply dry your flowers, separately or in a bouquet, and then combine them for the meanings you wish to strive for in your life. You can also make astrological bouquets, or God or Goddess bouquets as offerings. Dried flowers can be woven into or tied onto a wreath, which can then hang on a wall or door as a permanent spell.

Fresh flowers can be cut and placed in a vase as a subtle spell to enhance someone’s day. We find that a fresh-flower spell is especially good for invalids; those who are recovering their strength appreciate bright Mars flowers for energy; those who are ill can use a healing bouquet of Moon flowers, and so on. The custom of bringing flowers into a sickroom is more than just appreciation. You can also help to clean and purify a house by placing a vase of magical flowers in each room; we suggest Sun-type flowers, or possibly a different sort for the kind of energy likely to be built up and sluggish in each specific room. For example, a bedroom that has been the scene of romantic fighting could use some Venus flowers, whereas a study that has seen fights about money could use the vibrations of generous Jupiter.