June – Linden Blossom Tea

Every June we’re brought to our senses by the ubiquitous perfume of the Linden Trees.  A hot Sunday afternoon, time out from chores, we sit under their massive boughs and synch into the hum of hundreds of bees. Someone is dozing in the hammock there, dreaming of Linden Flower honey.

Under the soporific spell Henri toys with a flower and asks his Tata Claire if she knows how to make Linden Tea.  Nap time ends abruptly.

First, John saws off several low branches that beg for pruning.  We perch inside a fragrant heap of leaves and flowers teeming with insects and take instruction.  I had thought making linden tea was a matter of tossing some flowers in boiling water.  Instead Claire transmits a lesson received from her nounou (nanny or governess) who came from a tiny village in the Cher, the heart center of France.

Henri, a botany passionista is all antennae – we keep only the slender leaf (the children call them “helicopters” when they fall swirling from the trees later in the summer) and the open flowers. This Linden (genus Tilia) has “perfect flowers” meaning hermaphroditic.  Henri worries out loud about the evolutionary viability of this reproductive method with the risks of inbreeding, then he concedes that Nature must know what she’s doing since for centuries, Linden Flower tea has been a folk remedy for anxiety and insomnia.   A small “aha!” as we all yawn drowsily.

We sit for a few hours plucking apart leaves and blossoms, the mounds of branches yielding slowly to our repetitive gestures.  It takes a lot of flowers and patience to make a few cups of tea.

So of course as we pluck, we talk.  We recall watching our anciens doing the same thing.  If it wasn’t preparing linden flowers it was shelling peas or pitting cherries or quilting, knitting, darning… As they worked, they talked, and the young ones absorbed. When I was a little girl, my grandmother, mother and aunties maintained a circle around a table making raisin bread, and while we kneaded I learned a bit about making bread, and a lot about how to choose a husband, which was one of their favorite subjects.

While peeling a barrel of potatoes, my grandmother scolded the eight year old me – the thickness of my peels was evidence I would make a bad housewife: “waste not, want not.”  It wasn’t so long ago that people really spoke in proverbs.   The circle “gossiped” about the hard working nephew, the cheating husband, the lazy farm hand, the miserly sister, the altruistic grandmother, the out-of-wedlock baby, the jealous brother, those who got free from indentured servitude, those who had gone off on a devil’s path… cautionary tales reminiscent of Aesop but without the animals.

When Claire was a mite, watching her nounou make apple or plum “eau de vie” or rhubarb tarte, she was also absorbing an encyclopedia of values via the running commentary about who was sick, elderly or lonely and must be visited, the hot issues worth fighting for in the school or Municipal Council, or how to amass enough energy from the villagers to collect and transport emergency goods to an orphanage in Rumania.

During our Linden Flower Session, we wax nostalgic about the days of our elders when we hung around conversations about “dog soup,” dandelion tea, home grown yeast, the best compost for roses, remedies for warts, teething, colic, fevers, head lice… Usually we were a circle of girls.  But on this day Henri drills us with questions.  When can we make chamomile tea?  How do you make an anti parasite from nettles?  What do you do with the bark of the willow to make an aspirin substitute?  How can you tell which is the good horsetail plant and which is toxic?  Lavender for headaches?  Parsley seed tea for mouth sores?  Thyme against  bacteria and fungus? Geraniums against flies?  Why don’t people know this stuff anymore?

From our meandering chit-chat he is surprised to learn that women had been the major medical practitioners in rural parts of Europe for centuries, respected by their communities for treating illness with “folk” remedies. During the witch hunts of the 16^th century thousands of these women were executed, and much of their knowledge was snuffed out or sent underground.

The image of the Fool in the Tarot comes to mind. They have a canny way of collecting things others consider useless and storing them away until a propitious moment.  Henri winked at us and carried off a big bough laden with blossoms.  He is heading to Madagascar this Fall where he will live among villagers in out of the way places, studying their plants for medicinal purposes.