All About Thyme: April 2024

Finding a little more green in your life

April's Special Days: A Potpourri of Celebrations

Herb of the Year for 2024:  Yarrow (Achillea millefolium). Named by the International Herb Association
Flower of the Month for April: Daisy
April is Stress Awareness Month (those taxes, you know)

Week 1
March 31. Easter Sunday, observed by Christians of every nationality.
April 1. Egg Salad Week, dedicated to all those eggs you and the kids colored on behalf of the Easter Bunny.
April 1-30. A Wilder Rose (Kindle edition) is on sale all month for just 99 cents!

Week 2
April 8. A full solar eclipse across a wide swath of North America, including our corner of the Texas Hill Country.
April 9. End of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.
April 10. Arbor Day. First observed in 1872, in Nebraska. Planting trees helps us tackle the climate crisis.
April 11. Licorice Day. A cup of licorice tea, anyone? An immune-system booster, licorice (yes, it’s an herb!) helps to stave off respiratory ailments.

Week 3
April 15. Step outside, take a deep breath, and appreciate spring. Assuming you've finished your taxes, that is. Today is Tax Day.
April 16. National Orchid Day. In A Plain Vanilla Murder, China Bayles discovers that vanilla is an orchid!

Week 4
April 22. International Earth Day. Please. Let’s not get so busy with our daily to-do lists that we forget the crisis we've created on our planet.
April 23. St. George's Day. Be on the lookout for fleeing dragons!
April 22-29. The Jewish celebration of Passover.
April 25: National Zucchini Bread Day. (Nice, but in April? Doesn't this belong in July, when zukes are coming out our ears?)
April 29: On this day in 1796, Amelia Simmons' American Cookery was published, the first cookbook by an American author.

A Dandy Little Herb

What’s in a name? Plenty, at least when we’re talking about dandelions. Take its Latin binomial, for instance: Taraxacum officinale. Taraxacum may derive from the Persian talkh chakok, or "bitter herb," which in medieval Latin became tarasacon. Officinale means "of pharmaceutical value," and comes from the Latin officina, "workshop" or "pharmacy.”

Persian and Latin are just the beginning. Dandelion is the way English folk pronounced the French dent de lion, or tooth of the lion. A reference to the plant's toothed leaves? Or the blossom's color—the same yellow used to picture medieval heraldic lions? Or both.

The dandelion’s other folk names are also descriptive. The devil's milk pail refers to the sticky white sap that oozes from the crushed stem and root. Swine's snout describes the closed, puckered-up blossom. Puffball is exactly the right name for the fly-away seeds. (Remember making a wish when you blew them off?) And monk's head is a good way of describing the bald blossom head that’s left at the top of the stem when the seeds are gone.

The Medicinal Dandelion

We can find a clue to the plant’s medicinal use in the inelegant name piss-a-bed, which tells us that the plant stimulates the kidneys to produce urine. Because the dandelion is high in potassium, a vital nutrient lost when the kidneys do their job, herbalists prefer it to chemical diuretics. In the centuries before modern medicine, the dandelion was also used to treat heartburn, liver complaints, gall stones, jaundice, and dropsy (what we now call congestive heart failure). And our foremothers made dandelion salve as a pain-relieving standby. No wonder the flower has become a symbol of healing, hope, and resilience in so many cultures. (Not, sadly, in ours, where it’s more often considered a damned-delion.)

The Culinary Dandelion

If your backyard dandelions haven't been sprayed with something noxious, they can also put in an appearance at your table. The leafy greens are a zestier version of arugula and add a nice bite to raw spring-green salads. Cooking calms them down. Use in any dish that calls for kale, chard, collard greens, or mustard greens.

Or how about a pesto? Here's one made with dandelion greens and pumpkin seeds that will charm any pasta/pesto lover. Dandelion jelly is an old-fashioned favorite, and dandelion wine was my grandfather's spring specialty.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue;
But they don't get around
Like the dandelions do.
–Slim Acres

For more about medicinal wild plants, consult these useful guides:

A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs (Eastern and Central North America), Peterson Guide, by noted herbalists Steven Foster and James Duke

Identifying and Harvesting Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places by Steve Brill

Your April To-Do List

Watch for the first episode of my new short serial, “The Khat Who Became a Hero.” Dropping into your inbox on Wednesday April 3 and the next four Wednesdays.

Check out these Passover recipes. 30 classics from Taste of Home. And here are 20 Ramadan favorites.

Celebrate Earth Day by choosing at least one way to modify your lifestyle this year, to reduce your footprint on the planet.

Ask me for an invite to our (private, invitation-only) Thyme, Place, & Story Facebook group, where we can share photos of gardens, crafts, landscapes, celebrations. Leave a note in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

Find out what St. George has to do with dragons. From Roman soldier to Christian icon: how a legend is created.

Zucchini bread is better with garlic. This unusual recipe from TheFreeRangeLife makes a great flatbread (super with a bowl of tomato soup) or pizza crust. We like it with rosemary, rather than an herb blend.

Take a look at Amelia Simmons' famous 1798 cookbook, the first written by an American woman for American women. Through the magic of the internet, you are looking at the original pages of a book that is a treasure of its time. My candidate for most interesting recipe: “A Foot Pie” (p. 24, using the page numbers at the top). A “neet” is a cow or ox.

Soothe tax-day stress with these helpful herbal fragrances. Choose scented candles or use a diffuser with essential oils.

• Rose, for depression, irritability

• Orange, for apprehension, nervous tension

• Ylang-ylang, for sleeplessness, nervous tension

• Lavender, for tension, anxiety, and sleeplessness.

Tell your librarian to put you on the waiting list for the new China Bayles mystery, Forget Me Never, coming June 4!