Too many sweets

[galadhir]

I have a friend who drinks meadowsweet tea for her headaches, and I was telling her that I had a patch of meadowsweet in the corner of my garden. She wanted to know what it looked like when it wasn't in a tea-bag, so I googled for a picture--

And I discovered that whatever that thing I had was, it was not meadowsweet.

I knew I'd been getting it confused with the sweet-cicely I have in a different spot. The sweet-cicely is a really nice edible perennial that tastes of aniseed and goes wonderfully in a summer salad, and I knew one was edible and the other wasn't.

After some head-scratching, I realized that the patch of spiky ground-cover with tiny white flowers and glossy radiate leaves was in fact sweet woodruff, which is fragrant and traditionally used to scent linen cupboards. Probably just as well that I had not tried to make medicinal tea from that one last year while it established.

I have some actual meadowsweet seedlings germinating on the window-ledge, and it's going to be way too confusing to have three 'sweet' plants. So in future, I'm going to call the sweet woodruff by one of its other names - lady's bedstraw. (It used to be used for stuffing the best mattresses because it smelled so beautiful.) My brain is not equipped to deal with all these sweets.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

The sheer number of similarly-named plants overwhelms my brain, lol. My mom always had beautiful gardens when I was a kid, and I used to remember almost everything she grew (and I know sweet woodruff was one!), but now my brain just freezes up when I try to keep them straight, lol.

I do very deeply hope to someday be in the position to have my own yard and garden (instead of a studio apartment without a balcony), and at that point I'll try again!