When I was a young girl, a little first grader even, I scraped the inside of my wrist at school. Like most kids, I didn’t give it a second thought. If you didn’t have scrapes, bumps and bruises, you really weren’t playing and I had had much worse. Then something weird happened, it became infected. Let me describe infected for you. Though I don’t remember much, I do remember a sac under my arm near my armpit with a prominent line of red line running down my arm to the scrape at my wrist. We didn’t have much money when I was a kid and at this time in my life we lived in the mountains of southern Oregon. Going to the hospital was out of the question and not just because the town we lived near didn’t have a hospital let alone a regular doctor. My mother tells me instead she went to one of our friends who lived closer to town, and who owned a phone, to call the old hippie doctor who was local. The hippie doctor said I had blood poisoning and told my mom to put comfrey on it and bring me in in the morning if I wasn’t better. Fortunately our friend had comfrey plants from which he gave my mom several leaves. Mom, like most people who aren’t herbalists, had no idea what to do with the leaves now in her possession. So she decided to lay a leaf over the scrape holding it in place with gauze. Eventually the leaf turned black so she replaced it with another and so until bedtime when the last of the leaves went on. Not exactly what would happen in today’s world. Morning came, the red line and sac were gone, the poison had been drawn out.
That’s what my mother told me. What I recall is sitting in a chair with my arm out for what seemed like an eternity with prickly leaves uncomfortably taped to my wrist only to be changed out for new prickly leaves once they wilted and turned dark. As you can tell, I survived the ordeal.
Fast forward to several years ago when I moved close to where my mom then resided in Utah. I was talking to her about the plants around her house one day when she pointed out several green plants with large leaves, asking me if I knew what they were. I didn’t, I had only just begun to appreciate flora at that point. The plants were comfrey. In fact, the plants were the babies of the babies of the original comfrey plant my mom had been given all those years ago (we’re talking more than three decades past, almost four now). Growing up I hadn’t realized she always kept at least one offspring with her, refusing to live without a comfrey plant wherever she went. Now that I was settling down and not moving constantly, she gave me one of the plants for my home which came with me when I moved in with Dave.
I said last time the lavender and the comfrey absolutely had to be moved when we adjusted our garden fence line. I love lavender but if it doesn’t survive the transplanting (and only about half of them have, good thing I have extra) I’ll simply grow more. The comfrey, however, is a part of my history which I don’t want to lose so fingers crossed it continues to show signs of survival (mom swears they are hardy plants so I have faith in it).
When my eldest daughter finally settles down with her fiance in a year, I’ll give her one of the plants from my home. We’re making it a family tradition.
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