The Sunshine Herb

When I am gone, turn me into a calendula flower facing the sun.

In Greek mythology, the young woman Karlsa fell in love with Apollo, the sun god, and yearned for him each morning at dawn. When she died, melted by her own passion, she became a calendula flower, face tilted always to the sun. I think it would be a nice reincarnation. I have always been a summer baby. In Renaissance England, young men would hand over baskets of calendula to people they fancied, following in Karlsa’s devotional footsteps. At the Story Garden as the winter and dark draws in, I am yearning for something, too: the warmth and light of the sun. 

Wrapped in thermals, a fleece and my big puffer jacket, I get ready to welcome my first Cook Club participants from Kings Cross Academy. I’m pacing the garden, going over the session plan in my head. I’m pacing because I’m nervous, and walking past the herb bushes, community grower beds and the mini fruit tree circles helps regulate my system and prepare me for being the best facilitator I can be today. Despite it being November, and cold enough to see my breath (‘dragon breath’ as my sister and I called it as kids), a certain flower is abundant and warm. Calendula is everywhere, small suns opening up to say hey, it’s cold and dark but we’re still here, we got you. I smile at them, vow to bring their light into today’s session.

The Year 3 and 4 mostly SEND group arrive with the energy of a party, their faces excited, as if about to blow out candles on a birthday cake. I give them a tour of the garden, asking them to touch and smell and guess the names of herbs. Rosemary, sage, lemon balm. An apple mint leaf almost disappears inside one of their nostrils. Visiting the tromboncino squash, someone says it looks like a pair of headphones, which I love. Later, as we draw giant pictures with charcoal collected from the fire pit, the same young person announces that he’s created a galaxy, his paper covered in abstract circles, squiggles and shapes. The following week, he made God through a crack in a takeaway soup pot lid. I love that in something broken, in paying attention to something many of us would just feel frustrated by, he saw God. 

I have a question for the group: can you eat flowers? 

About half of them make a silly ‘yuck’ face and shake their heads. The rest aren’t sure. I give them some clues.

They’re yellow and orange. They look like little suns. There are lots around the garden.

I set them on a mission. They point at various yellow flowers, asking This? This? This? The amount of wrong guesses makes me aware of how much yellow is still flowering this time of year, and I smile. Until recently, when I imagined winter, I saw bare brown soggy branches and browning, lifeless leaves. Now I’m at the Story Garden and there are all these pops of yellow life. Calendula blooms for so long, all the way through autumn and if you’re lucky like we are, even into winter. There’s something magical and rebellious about it; its persistence, its resistance to sleep. 

When the group guesses correctly, we set about picking. Finger and thumb, pull the heads off. I watch their little hands, encourage them to pick gently, to notice the difference between the yellow and orange ones, to leave the ones whose petals remain closed, not yet ready to share themselves. I test them throughout the day: can you remember the name of the yellow flower? Their responses are very funny and sweet, various iterations of ‘callyloolaa’, ‘calleeyoola’. The word is so lovely in the mouth: cal-end-u-la, the soft ‘l’ sounds adding to its charm. I tell them all about calendula’s healing, medicinal properties, but they are 7 and 8 years old – they are much more interested in picking off the petals as fast as they can and sprinkling them into the date cookie dough we’re making. 

We bake the cookies, the delicate petals freckling the dough, and they each take some home in a small cardboard box. As I’m clearing up, I pick up the discarded centres of the flowers, all small and stripped of their yellow. It’s getting dark. It’s quiet. As I look up at the people working in the high rise offices next door, I take a moment to feel grateful for having been outside for so much of the daylight, and to have shared it with young people bursting with energy, and all these little yellow and orange suns. 

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Notes from the Garden