#wildflowerhour

Eight days out from the equinox month. The blackberries have gone bitter and the goldenrod has come up along every ditch in Georgia like somebody lit a fuse.

The old people called this the second harvest. The corn has stopped talking — the tassels gone brown and papery — and the side-street trees have hit that dull dusty green that means they are finished growing for the year and are only holding on now.

Tha an talamh a' cuimhneachadh. The earth remembers. It has done this turning nine thousand times without asking anyone's permission, and it will do it again after every person in today's headlines is dust.

What's gone over where you are this week?

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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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Nine feet up in the tallgrass, leaves turned north and south to duck the midday sun. That's how it got the name, and it's how lost people once took a bearing on open ground.

Silphium laciniatum. Blooming right now through September. Children of several Plains nations chewed the hardened resin off the upper stalks as a mouth-cleaning gum; Pawnee practice used the pounded root as a tea. Nineteenth-century doctors made claims I won't repeat as advice — so let me be plain: this is a plant to plant, not a plant to dose.

Everything you can see of it is built to be burned off. The taproot runs fifteen feet down into ground that hasn't been broken since before there was a state there. Some of them live close to a century.

Prairie is among the most destroyed habitats on this continent. Putting one in the ground is a fifteen-foot root laid into soil that will outlive you.

Cha bhris am freumh — the root does not break.

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