Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)