It's coming up right now in the dry margins — dirty-white, papery, the kind of flower you'd walk past every day of your life.

Rabbit tobacco. Sweet everlasting. Used across the Southeast for congestion and a chest that won't open, long before anybody wrote it down. Steam, not tea: a small handful of dried flowering tops in a heatproof bowl, boiling water over, towel over your head, five minutes with your eyes shut. Wait until it stops scalding before you put your face anywhere near it. Not for pregnancy. Don't smoke it, whatever your granddaddy said.

There's no Gaelic name for this one. My ancestors never met it, so it keeps the language of the people whose land it actually is. The settlers called it everlasting because it holds its shape all winter — which is an observation or a promise depending on the week you're having.

What's the plant your people reached for, the one that never made it into a book?

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