[I went today to the herb sale mentioned in this 2018 post. Sadly, it was canceled for two years in a row due to the Big C.]

OLD LADIES, like so much else, are a thing of the past.

Yes, old women still exist in large numbers — and more are on the production line. But old ladies are a dying subcategory. An old lady doesn’t belong in the modern world. There are many reasons for this. For one, she has a lousy resumé. She reached her maturity before the hey day of women’s liberation. She has lived in relative chastity and has mostly flourished in her domestic sphere. She dresses modestly and with femininity. She wouldn’t be caught in a T-shirt, tight jeans or designer eyewear; it would never even occur to her to wear these things. She has never had plastic surgery, typically does not dye her hair or wear make-up. An old lady is not aggressive or sexy or avant-garde. Her reticence has no place in this dog-eat-dog, materialistic, feminist universe. That’s why you see less and less of her.

In my experience, two places continue to be reliable for sightings of this nearly extinct species: book sales and plant sales. Their labor at these events is essential and unremunerated, a fact which points to another significant quality of old ladies: they possess more time and leisure than the current pace of things allows. In that sense, they are true aristocrats.

Old ladies belong with books the way fishermen belong with the ocean. Books are often wise and they take patience and time to catalogue and label for sales. Old ladies often possess an alternately passionate and tender affection for plants, an affection cultivated over many years. They naturally belong at plant sales too.

An old lady who is an herb lady is a special being. Erudite and earthy, she radiates the wisdom that comes from close contact with some of nature’s supreme gifts: the fragrant herbs of the field, cultivated for thousands of years and famous for so many culinary and medicinal uses. An herb lady has often read the earth itself. She has a sensitivity to beauty (a useless, unmarketable sensitivity to beauty is a characteristic of all old ladies.) She will work for hours to sustain the delicate and evanescent scents and colors of plants, although truthfully most herbs are easy to grow.

Every year in May, I go to an herb sale run by the local unit of the Herb Society of America. The herb ladies there can answer with encyclopedic accuracy any question on the culinary and ornamental plants lined up for sale on tables in a big, typically wet field. They run their hands knowingly and even brusquely (you treat an intimate companion with this sort of brusqueness) over the leaves of the specimens before them and explain the character of the different sages, thymes, lavenders and scented geraniums without the slightest hesitation. I can’t fully explain what it is about these women because it’s certainly not just their practical knowledge. It is them. Like granite or old trees, they are worn and crafted. One can see through the aged and parchment-like exteriors to the delightful gardens of their souls.

Gardening cultivates not just the land, but the soul. True beauty — and the earth is full of it — is a spiritual force. God constantly communicates his magnificence to us through nature. But we are not in Paradise. Something has gone awry. Gardening teaches those who are receptive to being taught how to cope with frustration and disappointment. It teaches us how to keep coming back from failure. It instills an awareness that there is never any end in this world to dangerous enemies. The battle must go on even so. Just because we are overmatched doesn’t mean we should give up. The garden is in that sense analogous to the inner life. We constantly face weeds, pests and diseases within ourselves. If we persist in fighting them, we will not triumph necessarily, but we will definitely improve. And the effort itself matters.

Gardening teaches a stern lesson: Nothing in this world lasts. In winter, the herbs are as if they never were. The most talented gardener who ever lived could not prevent the change of seasons. There is no trick to defeat winter. Wisdom is possessing an answer to the bitter fact of mortality and the imagination to inhabit summer when winter has come.

Perhaps this is why the herb lady who has spent so many seasons in the garden is special to be around. She has been humbled by herbs.

A salvia at the herb sale

Please follow and like us: