{"id":14021,"date":"2026-10-31T01:22:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T05:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/michael-pollan-on-radical-gardening-and-the-insurgent-botanical-origin-of-the-broomstick-in-flying-witch-legends-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T01:22:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T05:22:27","slug":"michael-pollan-on-radical-gardening-and-the-insurgent-botanical-origin-of-the-broomstick-in-flying-witch-legends-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/michael-pollan-on-radical-gardening-and-the-insurgent-botanical-origin-of-the-broomstick-in-flying-witch-legends-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Halloween\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOh that beloved witch-hazel,\u201d Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, \u201cone loved stalk as hearty as if just placed in the mail by the woods\u2026 witch and witching too, to my joyful mind\u201d \u2014 her garden, across the hedge from which lived the love of her life<\/a>, joylessly married to Emily\u2019s brother, absent from Emily\u2019s arms for a quarter century. That same year, she wrote in a poem:<\/p>\n

\n

Long Years apart \u2014 can make no
Breach a second cannot fill \u2014
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell \u2014 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As a gardener and a poet, ever since she pressed four hundred wildflowers into the teenage herbarium<\/a> that became her first formal act of composition, Emily Dickinson had an uncommon grasp of how the life of plants and the life of feelings interleave \u2014 particularly the forbidden, the subversive, the countercultural. <\/p>\n

In many ways, across epochs and cultures, gardens themselves \u2014 and not only the plants grown in them \u2014 have served as psychoactive agents<\/a> profoundly transforming the human experience: gardening as resistance<\/a>, gardening as growing through grief<\/a>, gardening as finding the roots of happiness<\/a>, gardening as \u201can exercise in supreme attentiveness.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

Gardening as witchcraft for the soul \u2014 defying the permissible, magnifying the possible. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Red poppy by Elizabeth Blackwell from A Curious Herbal<\/em><\/a> \u2014 the world\u2019s first illustrated encyclopedia of medicinal plants. (Available as a print<\/a> and as a face mask<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This defiant aspect of gardening, so foreign to the dominant modern model of the garden as a place of order walled within a lawn-mowed wilderness, is what Michael Pollan<\/a> explores in a portion of his 2001 classic The Botany of Desire<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). <\/p>\n

He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

I sometimes think we\u2019ve allowed our gardens to be bowdlerized, that the full range of their powers and possibilities has been sacrificed to a cult of plant prettiness that obscures more dubious truths about nature, our own included.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But for most of the history of our species, the relationship between nature and human nature has been one of conviviality<\/a> rather than conquest and control. Only in the mere blink of evolutionary time called modern civilization did we begin viewing the rest of nature as a \u201cparallel world.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

Pollan envisions a future that might view our present conception of the garden \u2014 a place for basic produce, household herbs, and pretty flowers \u2014 as \u201calmost Victorian in its repressions and elisions,\u201d which include the modern repression and elision of the garden\u2019s radical past. He traces the subversive botanical roots of the mythic flying witch\u2019s broomstick as one example:<\/p>\n

\n

For most of their history, after all, gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty \u2014 with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill. <\/p>\n

In ancient times, people all over the world grew or gathered sacred plants (and fungi) with the power to inspire visions or conduct them on journeys to other worlds; some of these people, who are sometimes called shamans, returned with the kind of spiritual knowledge that underwrites whole religions. The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species that healed and intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to \u201ccast spells\u201d \u2014 in our vocabulary, \u201cpsychoactive\u201d plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria<\/em>), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based \u201cflying ointment\u201d that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the \u201cbroomstick\u201d by which these women were said to travel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Dorothy Lathrop from Down-Adown-Derry<\/em><\/a>, 1922. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was in one such epoch that Johannes Kepler took six years from decoding the laws of the universe to defend his herbalist-mother in a witchcraft trial<\/a>, while elsewhere in Europe the world\u2019s first prim and proper botanical gardens were sprouting up. <\/p>\n

The Botany of Desire<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 which also gave us the story of how \u201cbroken tulips\u201d shaped the modern world<\/a> \u2014 is thoroughly satisfying in its totality. Complement this fragment with the little-known botanical-cultural story of why NYC is known as \u201cthe Big Apple\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a surprise even to most native New Yorkers \u2014 then revisit Pollan on how one particular plant magnified the bewitchment of Bach<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cOh that beloved witch-hazel,\u201d Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, \u201cone loved stalk as hearty as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}