Prologue

1. Estate Sale

It started with an estate sale. An elderly man in my neighborhood had been a collector of cultural artifacts: music, art, antique books and porcelain, a few specialized tools, lamps and other furnishings of good taste, curios, tchotchkes. He had the same name as an American TV star and ran a nondescript shop on a quiet arterial next to a photography studio I'd walked past dozens of times without noticing anything or anyone inside. He'd been a childless unmarried man more than 80 years old, now passed away. His carefully collected belongings were being sold from his shop by an auction house, with an elegant young woman named Tess acting as his family's agent.

I browsed through his belongings in the shop, chatting with Tess. She was keenly intelligent and perceptive, with an MFA from Brown and no ring on any finger. Her background in art history and literature enabled her to appraise many of the books she represented, though others were too obscure even for her. Inside each book on the shelves was a small square of colored paper with its appraised value penciled on, a note of its condition, and the appraiser's name and agency if Tess hadn't appraised it herself. Her coarse honey-blonde hair was gathered by a purple scrunchy into a loose ponytail, she wore thin gold sandals, a small amethyst pendant bound in gold wire on a thin gold necklace, and eyeglasses in delicate purple frames, had exquisite hands and longish clear fingernails, and sat behind a dark wooden desk with a stack of books on one side, two stacks on the other, and a telephone and an open PowerBook 1400c/166 in front of her. Every minute or two she looked up from her laptop, then made notes on a square of colored paper and inserted it into a book that she moved from one side of her desk to the other. She seemed fully at home as an archivist, though maybe a little restless.

I spent an enjoyable (ecstatic?) though mostly quiet hour browsing the bookshelves and peeking at the record collection, learning something of the character of the former proprietor as I picked out items I liked, chatting with Tess about the ones I found most intriguing. She had a lovely musical voice and seemed glad of the conversation. Many of the books were more than 100 years old and leather-bound, from writers like Kipling, Walter Scott, and George MacDonald, also including slightly newer titles from Lord Dunsany, Leslie Barringer, and Mary Renault - yes, our collector with the Hollywood name had been an Anglophile - plus a few from Americans like Henry Adams, William James, Edith Wharton, and the obligatory Hemingway-Steinbeck-O'Connor-Faulkner canon. There were also biographies from the usual 18th and 19th century English icons like Wellington, Nelson, and Disraeli, classical volumes from historians like Herodotus, Livy, and English revisionists of eighty and more years ago like Gibbon, analyses of works by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca from a distinctly British perspective, sycophantic pre-war histories with titles like "

The Miracle of England

", a highly interesting compilation of Arctic encounters between English expeditions and native peoples who were referred to as "savages" in the earliest stories and gradually became more respectfully addressed, and a $10 volume of delightful and somewhat hilarious Abraham Lincoln anecdotes from a contemporary who'd known him well and outlived him by 40 years. I put that one aside instantly - Tess' note indicated it as too obscure to appraise.

I spent less time with the record collection, mostly because this wasn't Tess' area of expertise, she had little to say about it, and I wanted more conversation with her. Mostly classical with some pre-bop jazz and a fair smattering of showtunes. I set aside a few recordings I remembered my parents playing when I was a child: Strauss, Mozart, the original cast recording of Camelot. I learned how the word "album" came to be applied to vinyl records when finding that some of the older records, 12" 78s with one track on each side, were bound into "albums" containing all the music that would later fit onto a single LP. Not sure when that bit of trivia will come in handy.

The prices cited for my purchases were far less than their assessed value and I spent about $40 on a half dozen old books plus $1 each on a crystal goblet dated c1840 and a small crystal bell that had what I thought was an remarkably calming, mellow tone. It was as much as I could carry on my half-mile walk home. I thanked Tess for her time and company and vowed to return the next day, when I brought home the records and a few more books.

The following weekend, my third visit to the little bookshop, was very nearly the end of the estate sale. The bookshelves were nearly bare even though I hadn't seen anyone else buy a thing on my previous visits. After browsing for 10 minutes and finding just one book remotely of interest, I brought it to Tess for purchase, whereupon she told me that everything was now being given away - her client's family simply didn't want anything to do with their TV star namesake's remaining collection. At my comment that the shelves were nearly bare, she glanced to one side, picked up a key, pressed it into my hand and smiled conspiratorially, and told me it was for the house around the corner where the shop's proprietor had lived, and where a large number of unsorted antiquities still lay. She gave me the address and I left the book I'd found in the shop with her.

It was an interesting place. Jeffersonian columns at the entryway of a small 3-story house. A Murphy bed, which would have been well-concealed had it not been deployed. A distinct smell of old ... something. I'd smelled it in the bookshop without placing it, but it was stronger here. Old books? Mold? Must? The question seemed to reverberate.

Up the ladder to the attic was the real treasure. Shelves and shelves of old books and records. The musty smell was stronger there. Dryer.

An hour later and I was still alone in the house. I'd wondered whether I would be, but I was. So I brought back a dozen books and a half-dozen records. Tess blessed my "purchase" and I would've returned the key, but I said there was a lot more good stuff I would love to carry away if only I'd driven. She smiled.

Tess said it would be just fine if I drove over. I was starting to feel a real connection with her.

I had a small station wagon. Great mileage, but ... small. For this purpose, however, it was plenty ... I took home about 200 records and two boxes of books, somewhat hastily assembled from what I'd been able to find in the house, most of which was not carefully examined. I actually left the book from the shop with Tess ... she rolled her eyes, smiling, but said she understood. And of course I left the key.

It would be many years before I saw Tess again. The house was sold 20 years ago.

I've slowly gone through my haul of books and records. I met another lovely young woman, married, and we're raising great kids that I'm still learning to deal with as emerging adults. The records are what you might expect. Some Mozart and a couple of the showtune albums remain sentimental favorites even if they don't spin on my old turntable often.

About those old books ... there was this one, unadorned by title or anything else. Bound in worn blue leather, hand-written, with the occasional item in wax paper between pages. I'm still not sure what drew me to it in the first place. It took me a decade to begin looking at it closely since being hand-written it was not so easily deciphered, and because there was so much more obvious (and valuable!) stuff to go through, plus a generation of fulfilling family life. The book seemed like a bunch of recipes with ingredients not easily obtained, vaguely worded journaling in between. Central and South American plants and herbs I'd never heard of, though I know my way around the kitchen.

Feminine handwriting. Herbal lore. Hard-to-interpret journal entries. What could possibly go wrong?

2. Herblore

"A bunch of recipes with ingredients not easily obtained, vaguely worded journaling in between," I wrote. Yeah, that's about right. These recipes included ingredients not easily obtainable in England, where the writer of this journal lived, or on the North American west coast where I live now. The book was written from 1868-1915, each entry carefully dated. The earliest were simple lists of harvests, grown in the writer's extensive garden or obtained through channels that would be difficult to reconstruct now, 150 years later. She'd been wealthy, living on an estate with servants. Her daughters H. and C. were born in 1892 and 1898, respectively, and her mother M., whose initial may have simply been short for "Mama", passed away in 1897. The frontispiece was a simple blessing in different feminine handwriting, presumably from the author's mother: "

Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit

".

Accounts became more detailed as the journal went on, including 140-year-old herbs and locks of hair from both her infant daughters, the elder dark, the younger blonde, pressed in wax paper between pages. Then a description of a long American voyage with stops for rarer acquisitions like bushy fleabane and man vine from Belize, and ice vine from Guyana. The writer's home life became an increasing focus. Gardening, of course, but also relations with neighbors, other nearby gentry, traveling companions, notes about servants, family, and suitors; while she never married she had a regular parade of them as she was apparently beautiful as well as willful, intelligent, independently wealthy, and possessing a considerable charm. Neighbors were cantankerous or agreeable, sometimes in consecutive paragraphs, and other gentry were often maddening. All were referred to by an initial rather than by name. The anonymous writer did not have a place in London, unusual among her circle, but wrote about her visits, some spanning nights, weeks, or, in winter, months. An excerpt from an 1891 voyage to South America:

Sunday, December 20th

.-We had a most anxious run down the Uruguay; I shall never forget the intense heat. We were quite unable to sleep, our night spent searching in vain for a cool place between cabin and deck, en costumes 'tres négligés.' Towards morning we made ourselves tidy and rushed for the fore part of the steamer, reaching Buenos Ayres thoroughly scorched, though our headquarters at Mr. Hume's hotel was very pretty with the sun shining upon it. I spend the afternoon in its cool depths chatting with Mrs. R. before she departs for Monte Video with her husband and daughter. I am simply charmed and find her most entertaining, or what is called here 'mui simpatica.' We have a few callers but I'm sorry to say M. is even more exhausted than I.

December 18th

.-Christmas is drawing near and I must confess a bout of home-sick. Moreover, just now I am feeling rather dull and stupid, and perhaps a little nervous, but unfortunately I am one of those affected by my surroundings: if those around me are depressed and quiet I become the same. I must try to shake it off. We spend a most harmless day working, taking a smart walk when we feel up to it. We have had a terrible storm in the night, the rain coming down in torrents, so the weather to-day is therefore much more agreeable.

Visits from ailing neighbors and treatments with herbal remedies, social calls, consultations with others having more specialized knowledge. Humorously disdainful (sometimes rather racist) commentary about less agreeable traveling companions. Recipes, of a sort. Long lists of herbs, vegetables, seeds, and tubers harvested from her garden or gathered wild, some after dark: honey, lavender, pudding grass, wild carrot, St. John's wort, St. Benedict's thistle, flax, vervain, valerian, woundwort, wild yams, rose hips, cohosh, lobelia, marsh mallow, wormwood, mandrake. She sometimes left a token of gratitude on finding particularly valued plants. Table fare like basil, mint, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, scallions, shallots, leeks, and potatoes, though some seem to have been used elsewise. Items procured from grocers: nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, sumac, grains of paradise, Greek hay, coconut oil. It went on for two hundred pages. References to older tomes, another reason to regret not spending more time with Tess.

I looked up some of the plants I'd never heard of and understanding dawned. The author was not only an herbalist, she was a kind of witch. A daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter of witches. And this book was a kind of grimoire.

What is a witch, exactly? Some modern scholars simply equate witchcraft with herbcraft. Healers outside a power structure can be useful to the sick of body and mind, but seem like ungovernable reservoirs of wild knowledge elsewhen. Threatening to those in power. Even feared.

Herbcraft is medicine as well as contributing to damn fine food. It's easy to see how a sufficiently ignorant culture could view it as indistinguishable from magic.

This woman's journal spoke of communal meals like the stone soup shared with her parish several times a year, meals from which everyone went home full and happy. At meals prepared in the homes of her circle, some participants were described as even more satisfied, with the happiest described as staying beyond dessert or even overnight. It was difficult to make out exactly what this involved ... her language usually got indistinct about then, but with careful reading, I began to understand. Another excerpt:

Saturday, May 1st

.-Our pavilion feast was a splendid affair, truly a banquet, with several new guests and many old favorites. Countess W., Viscountess P., Lord and Lady A., their companions, a certain Mr. K. from Madras, and another half-dozen of our friends and their dozen companions. Mr. K. is a captain or subedar of sepoys, minor son of a nawab, and a Shakta adepte whose company I had desired to arrange for some months. Six courses for so large a gathering is a strain on our kitchen, but the staff carried on beautifully. A four-bird version of M. Grimod de la Reynière's extravagantly impractical rôti sans pareil with herbed chestnut stuffing, port sauce, and belle fromage from Sussex Weald prepared in the outdoor stone oven was especially delightful, accompanied by a sticky date and hazelnut cake and followed by poached quince with nutmeg and cinnamon.

Herbal cordials at sundown were sweetened with anticipation of more happy intercourse to come, then our chef and his staff were properly appreciated. Several of our more agile companions leaping between the two bonfires drew gasps of astonishment, while Mr. K.'s Vedic familiarities, mellifluent tongue, and impressive souffrance were a delicious novelty, with repeated service given their relation until he, like most of us, finally succumbed to the bonds of magnetic sleep and the bliss of Selenic unknowing. This most blessed morning, flowers in our hair, we unwound last night's ribbons and slowly danced our maypole en compagnie.

Yeah, she was a witch.

I must admit that this singular voice from the past was inspiring ... she aroused my spirit, which had settled into inactivity as my children began outgrowing the nest. I'd been content rediscovering a well-worn trail of herbs and other comestibles in the kitchen that so many better chefs had blazed before me, but this woman took gardening to a whole new plane. So, it being late winter, I set about getting seeds or cuttings for some of the wonder plants this woman had named, to plant in my own suburban garden. Surely our seed catalogs had improved since her day, right? I already had lemon balm, oregano, Herb-Robert, two struggling thyme plants, and a little St. John's wort growing wild, plus a fragrant-leaved plant I'd noticed many times but not known the name of. Consultation with the local nursery revealed it to be feverfew. My rosemary bush had begun failing shortly after my wife and I moved in and needed replacing.

I started with roses.

3. New Neighbors

Or anyway, I tried to start with roses. Because right about the time I started visiting the nursery, which had little beyond seeds and rose cuttings in late winter, our new next-door neighbors began a project of their own to demolish the old chain-link fence between our properties and replace it with something taller, more private, wooden. This took well into the autumn and they kept having delays. Workmen falling from the roof, a scam contractor taking prepayments and then folding up his company, a different scam contractor completely botching the job of repairing a retaining wall. I'd hoped to plant rose cuttings on the property line but with all those workmen stomping around I figured it would be wasted effort, and in fact some of my other plants near the property line did indeed get stepped on. So I dug out my garden instead. This was in our side yard, and the previous next-door neighbors had allowed two evergreens to grow very tall, blotting out the afternoon sunlight, so I'd been neglecting it in recent years. But the new neighbors chopped those trees down as part of their yard redesign and I looked forward to finally having sunlight to share with vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

The new neighbors were kinda terrifying in a cute suburban rich kid kind of way. In this area no one who isn't loaded can afford a house anymore, so this young couple must've had to lean hard on their parents, who we saw a lot of as their initial projects bore fruit. They cleaned out their basement, including killing or chasing off the rats that'd formally called it home, cleared all the noxious invasive English ivy that had formerly sheltered still more rats, fauna left over from an earlier resident who'd died while living there, possibly from being an inveterate hoarder. At least they got a bargain on the house, but they surely did rip up the yard, looking adorable all the while.

Our other neighbors didn't seem to get along with them any better than we did, which is to say our new next-door neighbors hardly acknowledged us or anyone else even though others closer to their age tried harder than we. The young husband seemed pleasant enough, but mostly spent his off time playing golf or console games. The slender petite young future golf widow wife with the enormous blue eyes she mostly hid behind long straight untrimmed brown hair and baggy clothing was the designer with the big ideas. Neither was worth a damn picking out contractors.

My garden came along nicely through the tumult. I salvaged some boulders that had functioned as the previous fence's retaining wall and repurposed them to raise our front yard's rock wall, replacing a decaying wooden timber and providing level space for botanicals like rosemary, sage, penstemon, and yarrow, with feverfew popping up wherever it pleased. Lemon balm thrived and multiplied throughout our yard, and I found a use for it in a tea: about 3 parts lemon balm and 1 part sage, but infused separately with proportions worked out by taste. I sent a gallon to my aged Mom. A single feverfew leaf masticated for half a minute and then swallowed was bitter but nothing short of miraculous for migraine symptoms. Lemon verbena, chives, fenugreek, parsley, dill, onions, beans, pattypan squash, tomatoes, sprouting potatoes, even a thyme plant that had been struggling for years, almost everything thrived beautifully (Note to self: next year the dill and squash might do better if I plant it earlier.)

Then the neighbors pulled out the front part of their fence, drove a Bobcat into their yard and ripped up everything there again, rebuilding back stairs, pouring a new concrete patio that wasn't nearly as nice as mine but at least was better than their old rotten wooden deck that the rats had called shelter, and lined the entire border of their yard with expensive ornamentals, mostly in huge pots. Their first batch of ornamentals had all died, probably because they'd planted after the spring rains were done, probably more than $1000 in dead exotic nursery flowers, and it looked like they'd spent 3 times as much on replacements, but at least these would have two wet seasons to establish roots.