Sometimes it's the simple things that are the most evocative.

The plants people take for granted, the easily grown herbs, the overlooked ones.

No one gushes 'oh, when I have a garden, I'm going to plant parsley!' - they talk about roses, and wisteria over the porch fragrant in the sunshine and vividly purple. They talk about the bright nodding faces of sunflowers, the pretty variations in dahlias and irises, the fat apples sweet and juicy in the Autumn.

For me, it's parsley. Whilst I haven't moved for some time, it's always parsley I seed first - the flat leaved variety (petroselinum crispum neapolitanum, also known as Italian parsley here), robust and hearty. I eat it straight from the garden, chewing earthy mouthfuls. It reminds me of disguising cigarette smoke by rubbing it on fingers and eating a good amount of it as a kid before going int the house, of early period pains and medicinal doses because we were told it was good for that - it's known to be a hormone regulator and help with flow. 'Eat parsley' my mother would say when she could see it was that time.

But most of all it reminds me of my green thumbed Nana on my father's side, because as a kid running around the mystery of this woman's huge and sprawling garden, full of paths, apricot trees fluttering with plastic bags to ward off the birds, banana plants, fish ponds, terrapins, chalk for drawing on the concrete, my uncle's shed that smelt of surfboard resin and motor oil, vinegar in bowls for mosquito bites, huge soft leaves of an unknown plant, cactus, a fig tree, and chickens, there was always the parsley. Whereas other parts of the garden were off limits, the parsley we could pick. The parsley was at our level. The parsley was made into mud pies, and munched on, and brought in for Nana's kartoffelpuffer.

It is so evocative of my Nana that even many, many years after her death and her house sold, I cannot pick parsley without thinking of her. I wonder what she things of my association of her with parsley. Vegetable soup must have great handfuls of it, stirred in at the last minute. Aglio olio. Potato pancakes. The simple meals always do well with last minute applications of parsley. Cooked, it disappears into the larger dish - raw and added last minute, it is a dish with parsley, proudly.

Thus it is parsley that is my first plant - the first memory that is associated with the idea that a garden can be eaten, the first medicinal plant that I embraced, and the first herb I sow in a new garden.

Ironically, it is also a last plant:

In Greek mythology an infant prince named Opheltes was left unattended by his nurse and bitten by a serpent, resulting in the child’s death. Blood ran from the wound and along with it, parsley sprang forth from the infant’s blood. The child was renamed Archemorus, meaning “the forerunner of death.”

Romans dedicated the herb to Persephone, queen of the underworld and to funeral rites. It became a staple of Greek funeral rituals and was scattered over graves during funeral ceremonies or planted over them. When funeral games were played, participating athletes donned wreaths of parsley. Romans would create these wreaths for their own funerals and adorn their graves with them. It was believed that great fields of parsley grew on Ogygia, the death island of Calypso. There was also the saying, De’eis thai selinon – “to need only parsley,” which was a gentle way of saying someone had “one foot in the grave.” - From Nourishing Death.

I do not need only parsley - there's much life in me yet - but I cannot imagine a garden without it.

This post was written in response to the Hive Garden Community's monthly Creative Garden challenge, which you can find here.

With Love,

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