The Sweet Cicely Miracle

…a discussion on things new and old

Photo Cliff Scholz

When I was about 12 or 13 years old I had the idea of digging up a small section of the back yard to plant an herb garden. I drew up a plan on a piece of notebook paper, presented it to my parents, and was granted permission to start pulling up sod. I’d been inspired by a book on herbs that featured black and white illustrations and short descriptions of many herb species and varieties. Upon this I based my list of desired plants, many of which I’d never heard of or seen before.

This would have been in about 1974 or so. Typical American gardens were just emerging from an era when yards were commonly dominated by annual flowering plants like petunias. The early seventies saw renewed interest in herbs and perennials, but they were far from commonly available.

Eventually my little herb garden hosted thirteen different varieties of thyme, two kinds of santolina, plus sage, lemon balm, several kinds of mint, garden rue, borage and other fragrant and culinary herbs. Overall they performed admirably.

One species I’d put in my original plans was sweet cicely. It sounded nice in the description, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. To take its place near the rear of the garden, I substituted borage, an annual with bright blue, star-shaped, nectar-filled edible flowers, which conveniently self-seeded. Surprising to me, I was able to find my first borage seeds at a local hardware store. For most of the rest I saved up money I got for mowing lawns and purchased the plants from an herb nursery — a very unusual thing back then — located outside a small town fairly close by. I don’t remember where I got my rue plant, but after reading somewhere that both Michelangelo and Leonardo daVinci had praised the plant for its effect on their vision, I made sure to eat a leaf or two on a regular basis when in season. It’s extremely bitter.

I kept up with the garden through high school. After my parents sold the place a couple years later, I moved some of the plants to my brother’s backyard, including the rue and some of the family’s hens and chicks, and there I could continue eating a leaf or two of rue whenever I visited. Years later when Mary and I had a yard of our own, some rue plants showed up unasked for, tossed roughly into their pots and place on our back steps. They turned out to be a gift of our next door neighbor, Carol. She had no idea my history with rue. Sometimes plants recruit humans to help them get where they need to go. When we moved to our current home, we brought some rue with us.

However, my long-desired sweet cicely eluded me. Fact is, I sort of gave up on it as a goofy youthful fantasy based on nothing more than a black and white photo in an old book. Then one day about ten years ago a large order of seeds that I had not purchased arrived from a rare seed company I’d previously done business with. When I called them about it, they said the order was supposed to have been delivered to a customer in Colorado, and they had gotten the address wrong. They thanked me for calling and told me to keep the seeds. One of the packets was labeled Myrrhis Odorata or Garden Myrrh, aka: sweet cicely. Surprised and delighted at this thing finally coming to me unbidden and unpaid for, I followed the directions for germinating the seeds in flats. I failed. Nothing grew.

A year or two later, and by then more than forty years after I’d drawn up my initial plans for an herb garden during middle school, I spotted a strange plant growing near the zucchini in the back of the vegetable patch. It was a fairly large, well-established plant. Amazingly, it was flowering so I can only guess it was probably at least in its second year. How had I not seen this before?

Thus began the second phase of my relationship with sweet cicely. When I thought about it, what probably happened was that I had recycled the potting soil I’d originally planted the seeds in, and they finally decided to grow in the garden. Anyhow, meeting the plant in person at long last, I learned that the immature green seed pods are sweet and taste like a subtler version of Good n’ Plenty candy. Just pick and enjoy them. I wanted to share this delightful thing and found that it can be remarkably tricky to transplant the seedlings. It was amazing though, after all these years that a plant I had singled out as worth interacting with, based on little more than hearsay, was in fact quite lovely and magical. In retrospect it was kinda like basing a lotta romantic hopes on a personal ad. And I was utterly charmed by the fact that it had made its way to me despite the odds, forty years later.

Another ten years have gone by since then. The original plant is now a self-seeded little patch and they are now flowering again in the garden. Meanwhile, the garden has since expanded well beyond them, making them almost central now.

And there’s a larger point to this story, I’m sure of it.

Because every time I see these plants growing in the garden, I think about how they came to be here. And they are now part of my shared experience with Mary, who knew nothing of the sweet cicely dreams of my long-ago past. It sprouted in Mary’s life as something completely new to her. Odd thing was, in reality it was new to me, too. Truth is, at first when it showed up I didn’t even recognize the plant. Of course, as I said, at first I didn’t see it at all. But then, after I finally saw it growing there, I initially even suspected this thing I’d long ago desired and dreamed of might have been poison hemlock, the plant source of the brew made famous by Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. The species do look kind of similar. In other words, even after I finally saw the sweet cicely plant, I did not initially recognize it for what it was.

How many times have I done that in my life? I wonder. And am I doing it right this minute? How would I even know?

It’s a bit like when we yearn and pine for love or fantasize about romance and don’t pick up on the fact that a very attractive person is flirting with us, right here, right now. If we’re lucky, a friend may point it out for us: “Hey, ya know she’s making eyes at you, bigtime. Why don’t you ask her out?”

“Huh? What? You’re kidding, right?”

“No. No, really! Look!”

Happens all the time. Then we look again and sure enough we see the shy smile, or the sultry grin, or the mischievous look, any one of which can cut through the clouds in our heads like a flash of lightning…

…and we realize: Dang! How did I miss that? The opportunity we’d been longing for was right there in front of us. We just didn’t see it.

In fact I think this happens to most of us sometimes in one way or another. Life can be such a flirt! Best to pay attention when she winks at us.

And please, in writing this I am not trying to entomb my miracle sweet cicely with words, to encircle her with intellectual concepts, or to weigh her down with the baggage of excessive interpretation.

That just won’t do. We are talking about a gift here, after all. A gift long-awaited for, true, but a gift. And I hope this doesn’t sound overflown, but things like this just amaze me.

Besides, here she still is, now flowering extravagantly in all her lacy finery, doing her sweet thing, surrounded by her children. And while it’s true after all these years that I might know this plant better than I once did, to suggest much more than that would be to miss the point entirely.

Even when I’m standing right next to her, and even having now tasted her sweetness and tended her lovingly for years, she’s still a mystery. And I think this moment of realization and waking up is at least as important as these other amazing things, because without the awakening we could miss the rest of the magic entirely.

So we keep growing into that mystery, sweet cicely and I.

This writing just happens to be how I’m flowering this year in response to her.