All About Thyme: June 2025

Finding a little more green in your life

June’s Special Days: A Potpourri of Celebrations

Herb of the Year for 2025. Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla). Selected by the International Herb Association
Birthday Flower for June: Honeysuckle
June is National Dairy Month, National Rose Month.

Week 1
June 6. National Gardening Exercise Day. You know what that means.
June 7. National Chocolate Ice Cream Day. If you observed yesterday's celebration, you have our permission to indulge in an extra scoop.
June 8. In ancient Rome, the beginning of the annual festival in honor of Vesta—the goddess of hearth and home.

Week 2
June 11. St. Barnabas Day. The patron saint of peacemakers. Traditionally, the day to make a Barnaby garland in praise of peace. Here are ideas for an elaborate one—make yours as simple as you like.
June 12. National Red Rose Day.
June 14. Flag Day. A very good day to remember exactly what it means—and celebrate that.
June 15. Father's Day. Thanks to all our amazing dads!

Week 3
June 19. Juneteenth. Commemorating the end of slavery in America and the beginning of the long, challenging road to racial justice, marred by contemporary potholes.
June 20. Summer Solstice. The longest day of the year.
June 22. National Onion Rings Day. Yes, onions are an herb, too—and good for you (although not necessarily when they're deep-fried).

Week 4
June 23. St. John's Eve, a traditional European celebration of Midsummer's magic.
June 26. National Chocolate Pudding Day—in the U.S. and in Australia, where chocolate pudding is . . . well, a little more like chocolate upside-down cake.
June 27. National Orange Blossom Day. Sometimes also celebrated as Indian Pudding Day.
June 28. Another pudding celebration: National Tapioca Day.

Cucumbers on the Move

From ancient India to eighteenth-century pickles and more: a brief history of a well-traveled vegetable

Plants get around—more than we give them credit for. The cucumber, cousin to the Persian melon, has been globe-trotting for at least three thousand years. It originated in India, then migrated east to China and west to the Mediterranean, eventually landing in Europe.

Before Amerigo Vespucci lent his name to a continent, he was a savvy ship chandler in Seville, outfitting voyages—including some of Columbus’s—with preserved goods like pickled vegetables and meats. These briny staples weren’t just for flavor; they were a frontline defense against scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency that decimated crews on long sea voyages. While the link between pickles and scurvy prevention wasn’t scientifically understood at the time, the practice of stocking ships with pickled provisions helped keep sailors healthier on their transatlantic journeys.

So, like many plants we now consider native or naturalized, cucumbers became global migrants—carried in seed sacks, traded on ships, and replanted in new soils. They came with the pilgrims to North America and a promising career on a new continent was underway.

But by the late 1600s, some back in England were having second thoughts. The raw cucumber, they decided, might be dangerous. “This day Sir W. Batten tells me that Mr. Newhouse is dead of eating cowcumbers,” Samuel Pepys lamented in his famous diary. “Fit only for cows,” sniffed another writer. The unfortunate cucumber had fallen into ill repute.

Cooked cucumbers, though? Totally different story. You could eat a plateful and live to tell the tale—especially if they were prepared according to The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), Mrs. Raffald’s wildly popular cookbook:

To Stew Cucumbers
Peel off the outer rind, slice the cucumbers pretty thick, fry them in fresh butter, and lay them on a sieve to drain. Put them into a tossing pan with a large glass of red wine, the same of strong gravy, a blade or two of mace. Make it pretty thick with flour and butter, and when it boils up, put in your cucumbers. Keep shaking them and let them boil five minutes, being careful not to break them. Pour them into a dish and serve them up.

Fried and boiled: surely that would neutralize any threat. But there was another route to cucumber redemption—pickling. In England, pickles became a 17th-century fad, popping up in barrels at coffeehouses for snacking on the go.

Cucumbers had medical street creds, too. Apothecaries stocked them for their healing powers: seeds treated bowel and urinary inflammations (and expelled tapeworms), while the pulp and juice soothed skin conditions and sunburn. Even Cleopatra was said to rely on cucumbers to preserve her celebrated complexion. Today, beauty consultants still swear by cucumber slices to calm tired, puffy eyes—and raw cucumbers (yes, raw!) are served without shame in the world’s finest restaurants.

Samuel Pepys would be shocked. And probably delighted.

Further reading:
For a deeper look at how plants travel—by wind, animal, ship, or trade route—see Stefano Mancuso’s The Incredible Journey of Plants (2020). It’s a short, delightful read.

June’s To-Do List

In honor of Vesta, craft an herbal smudge stick. This useful how-to uses herbs from your garden. Sage, lavender, rosemary, mugwort, bay, and juniper are traditional smudging herbs.

Photo by Edz Norton on Unsplash

Celebrate Father's Day by baking Dad's favorite cookies, Ruby Wilcox's Hot Lips Cookie Crisps. (China gets more requests for this recipe than any other!)

Roses may be the flower of passion, but red has its own story. Here’s a book that looks deep into the power of the color: A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Greenfield. It’s a rich, unusual history of the centuries-long search for the perfect crimson dye—part science, part politics, part alchemical obsession.

Juneteenth honors African American freedom and achievement and encourages respect for all cultures. For this year's Juneteenth, enjoy an authentic Jamaican Jerk Chicken. Easy marinade of herbs and spices produces a uniquely delicious blend of flavors.

Trace the storied history of Indian Pudding, one of America’s oldest desserts. I love old recipes, especially those with stories. If you have one, please share it in the comments.

Look for more about the green world on June 23, when the Cancer issue of Growing Green with the Zodiac (plus its workbook) lands in your inbox.

That does it for June’s All About Thyme. I’ll be back later this week with a post about Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, our Guerrilla Read for June. I hope you’re joining our band of intrepid readers for another read-along! And I’m just about finished with the serialization and digitization of the first of the Pecan Springs books, so I’ll have launching that series in late June, for paid subscribers.

Thank you for reading—comments on this post are open to everyone. I’d love to hear from you!

Note: This issue was prepared with the assistance of Silas, my AI research and writing partner. Silas supports fact-checking, historical context, and editorial cleanup. You can read more about Silas here.