Herbs in the Garden

Did you know that many of the plants in your landscape are actually herbs and have medicinal qualities? Most of them make delicious teas…

Let’s start with the common landscape/drought tolerant plant:

Lavender: Lavender is good for women’s and children’s health, nervous system conditions, pain relief and it is also a great herb for the skin. Many companies are now selling lavender seed heads to scent the laundry while drying; packets to throw in the bath and many organic cleansers use pure lavender oil. According to the book Growing 101 Herbs That Heal, lavender can be used for a myriad of things: an infusion, tincture, cider vinegar tincture, syrup, compress, poultice, elixir, ointment, salve, cream, balm foot soak, sleep pillow, bath herb, infused oil, honey, butter, suppository liniment, and insect repellent.

Passion Flower: This is a vine: This vine will take off, reaching heights of 30 feet! Be careful where you plant it because it will invade and climb trees. Passion Flower is a strong sedative and a nervine. It can be used an infusion (tea), to make a syrup, a compress, foot soak or for the bath. Use flowers, fruit and top leaves, fresh or dried.

Lemon Verbena: This shrubby plant smells like lemon candy and makes a delicious tea! It is frost tender, so make sure it gets some protection during the winter. Mine is in the back corner of the garden and has made it through the winters so far. You can use it as a calming digestive tea and as a calming sleep herb. It is also a common ingredient in herbal insect repellents. Use the leaves and flowers fresh or dried.

Dandelion: I know, they’re weeds! However…it is considered a whole-body tonic and medicinal action in nearly every body system! It is especially recognized for it’s benefit to the liver, urinary tract, and skin. If you don’t want their weediness in your garden though, you can buy bunches of dandelion greens at the market.

Feverfew: This is not traditionally a landscape plant. Mine came as a gift from some bird or the wind (?) But when it’s in bloom, it’s full of little daisy-like flowers, white with yellow middles. I like using them in flower arrangements. Medicinally, Feverfew is used primarily to treat headaches – especially migraines. You can make a tea with it, an apple-cider vinegar tincture, syrup, medicinal food or a balm.

Purple Cone Flower: Not only is this perennial lovely in the garden with it’s big purple flowers and dark centers, but it’s also great for colds and flu, immune support, and respiratory and skin conditions. Look for it in tinctures or combined with other supplements at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

A few more common garden herbs:

Rosemary – an antioxidant

Oregano – an antiseptic for the skin

Nepeta – Catmint (your cat will love it) but is also considered a sedative and is good for colds and flu.

Here are some of my favorite herb references and guides:

Growing 101 Herbs That Heal: Gardening Techniques, Recipes and Remedies, by Tammi Hartung

Wise Concoctions: Natural Elixirs and Tonics for Health and Energy, by Bonnie Trust Dahan

Rosemary Gladstar’s Family Herbal: A guide to living life with Energy, Health and Vitality, by Rosemary Gladstar

A couple of recipes

“Hot Ginger-Echinacea Lemonade”

A recipe from Growing 101 Herbs That Heal

This tea is a great expectorant and a sore throat soother. Also, it tastes good.

2 cups boiling water

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger root

1 teaspoon dried echinacea flowers or roots

(find these at herbs stores or online)

Juice of 1 freshly squeezed lemon

1 teaspoon honey

In a bowl or teapot, pour the boiling water over the echinacea and ginger root. Cover and steep for 10-15 minutes. Add the lemon juice and boney and stir. Serve warm.

Zucchini-Banana Bread

As a side note, I thought I would add a recipe to help take care of all of those monstrous zucchinis growing in your garden. This is adapted from a few different recipes.

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 cups flour

2-3 cups grated zucchini

3 ripe, mashed bananas

2 tablespoons oil

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon cinnamon and nutmeg

1 tablespoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Mix the butter, sugar, and vanilla in a bowl. Beat in the eggs, oil, then the bananas and shredded zucchini and spices. Mix all of the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl. Combine dry ingredients with the wet. Place in a well greased glass pan. Cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Because of the bananas and zucchini, this bread will be moist verging on pudding. Let cool before eating.

Roberta's latest client

Summer Pleasures

Having lived in Sacramento for nearly thirty years now, Roberta has learned to survive the grueling summers by way of air-conditioning, cool bodies of water and innumerable glasses of lemonade. This summer she has decided to elaborate on her heat escaping schemes here on this blog. We have compiled a very short list of Sacramento eateries that can provide a shady spot in the garden to enjoy a meal or a coffee. Over the next couple of months you will find a smattering of these garden related articles to match the season. It is an experiment, so bare with us. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Enjoy!

the Tower Cafe

Tower Café:

www.towercafe.com

1518 Broadway

Sacramento

Sun-Thurs: 8am - 11pm

(desserts and drinks from 10pm-11pm)

Fri- Sat 8am - 12am

(desserts and drinks from 11pm-12am)

The Tower Café is a local treasure, something to keep in ones pocket when friends ask what to do in the city. Between the consistently tasty food to the titillating décor to the rare and head turning garden, the Tower café has no equal within one hundred miles. As soon as we get close Roberta starts to make note of the garden, like an emerald mirage floating in heat waves and concrete. There is always something to have piqued her attention anew – a particularly full Acer, yet another gigantic cerulean pot, more topiary junipers… We marvel at the lushness of this little oasis and the genius that has gone into it.

The Tower Café, opened in 1990, is named after the Tower Drugs store that once occupied the space that the cafe took over. The Tower franchise of the Solomon family: Tower Books, Tower Records, etc., was born from this same Tower Drugs store. The Tower café and the adjacent theater are both memorial to and singular survivors of the Tower legacy. The theater was built during a moment of the uninhibited and curvaceous lines of Art Deco - making it the oldest theater still functioning in Sacramento, né 1938. Today the Tower theater plays independent flicks and it was there that I first saw and fell in love with Amélie. At ten o’clock pm when the movie finished, the café was still open for coffee and dessert - the décor of the café offering an appropriate follow up to the fantasy of a movie.

There is not a corner of the Tower Cafe that is not host to a gaggle of competing sculptures. the devotees of innumerable creeds, cast in concrete and wood, pray and genuflect amid ficus trees, orchids and busts of Frida Kahlo. The ceiling is hung with lanterns and streamers, wall hangings, tapestries and vases with four foot sprays of gladiolas - a cavern of chlorophyl stalagmites and woven stalactites. The motif is undeniably South American with a twist of the indiscriminate antiquarian. There is an air of the English study brimming with stolen goods and appropriated culture – it’s rich, decadent. The idea is for the cafe to be “Sacramento’s own little global village”. The cuisine is also a mélange of tender appropriation and imagination: Mexican hot chocolate in a four-inch saucer, “Eggs Tower” - a version of the classic Benedict, the “Greek” breakfast, Chile Relleno, Chinese chicken or Brazilian Chicken salads.

Naturally Roberta and I sit outside whenever possible, even if it means asking for a heat lamp to be turned on in the early morning. The patio, or garden area, is brick. The tables totter in the middle of this patio, surrounded by a dense planting that shields the patrons from the road. A fence of Italian Cypress towering thirty feet high, Acers (Japanese Maples), Thujas, Elephant Ear, Yucca, tree ferns and a giant Cedar comprise the verdant wall, all of which is belted by a delicate metal fence covered in Morning Glories. Sitting amid this hand forged jungle it is easy to forget that one is practically swimming upstream a Sacramento thoroughfare at the corner of Broadway and sixteenth street. The Tower café is a magical urban grotto of lush indulgence, local history and sumptuous food. Take comfort in their ambience that transcends, as if by magic, the harsh seasons.

the Coffee Garden

Coffee Garden:

www.thecoffeegarden.com

(916) 457-5507

2904 Franklin Blvd.

Sacramento

Mon- Sat 6am-11pm

Sun 7am-10pm

You may have overlooked the stucco façade of the Coffee Garden on first pass. It is camouflaged by a lack of décor common in most Sacramento strip-malls. A string of lights and a few potted palms have been placed outside the front door, something like balloons tacked to a mailbox, signaling that there is more going on inside than meets the eye.

Beyond the deceptive exterior there is indeed more to be had. Inside the Coffee Garden there is a jumble of small tables, comfy chairs and artwork all higgledy-piggledy about the room. The jolly staff is helpful - quick to make drinks and answer questions.

Roberta and I visited on a mild Wednesday afternoon. We ordered and took our enormous cups, overflowing with foam, to the back garden. We found a table in the courtyard which is carpeted by decomposed granite and skirted by a vine-covered fence. The foliage is mainly comprised of plants in pots – tropical ferns, palms, orchids, and hibiscus. The owner and gardener had been an exotic plant dealer before opening the Coffee Garden.

We sipped our coffee, contentedly swaddled in the back-yard atmosphere. The muffled crunch of footsteps on decomposed granite, a low murmur from the patrons and a diverse family of flora to keep our eyes moving over the landscape made for a lovely setting. The Coffee Garden made our list of public gardens to escape to during the summer.

High-Hand Nursery

High-Hand Nursery

(916) 652-2065

www.highhand.com

3750 Taylor Rd.

Loomis, CA 95650

Open: Mon-Sat 9am-5pm

Sun 9am-4pm

This is undoubtedly the Disney Land of nurseries. We went to High-Hand – the name references a high-hand in cards - for lunch on a Sunday afternoon and found it bursting with people. The restaurant structure resembles a barn converted to a solarium. The walls on two sides are open to the nursery and the entire thing is topped in glass. Bright yellow and orange umbrellas dapple a completely outdoor section of seating and inside old world charm competes with new world functionality - rolling metal doors lock down the facility when it is shut. Upon arriving we were handed a beeper as the host told us that we should expect a twenty minute wait. Neither of us was upset, we were looking forward to exploring the nursery.

The grounds, departing from the restaurant to cover a broad expanse of land, looks more like Pleasantville on steroids than a plant nursery. There are fully grown trees with black Mondo grass and Sedum Ogon tumbling from their planters. Shrubs are stacked like presents in a tantalizing array of colors and shapes - like a Bengal Tiger rooming with a King Penguin these specimens share living quarters for the sake of the show, in blatant disregard of natural order. We were startled by a life-size bronze boy pushing a cart through a patch of petunias. Even someone with no interest in plants could appreciate this show. We explored the isles of Echinacea and Acorus grass, bright red Roses and yellow Peonies. Across the yard we came to another barn-like structure that contained mountains of ceramic pots in glistening umbers and navy blues. By the time our buzzer went off we were dizzy from all of the marveling we had done.

The food however, was not to be upstaged. I was prepared to bet that the ambience had taken precedence over the cuisine, likely relegated to a third rate chef and iceberg lettuce. Me of little faith – our lunch, much of it grown on location – was delicious. My green-bean salad in pesto was delicate and well thought out. Roberta’s prawn salad was equally fresh and interesting. It is rare to be able to interact with nature and a garden while dining out. High Hand offers a uniquely intimate experience - eating in the midst of a nursery, flanked by the grounds growing supplying our meal. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole experience.