It's not often that a scientific name is prettier than a common one, but in the cases of felon herb, wormwood and mugwort, 18th century botanists improved the ring when they renamed the plants after Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt. The change seems especially fitting after one encounters even a handful of the 500 or so species covered in the genus. The artemisia commonly found in Southern California are so understated yet so affecting that when we come near them, they stamp the senses. Whether a person recognizes it or not, artemisia will have owned that moment in the outdoors.
Advertisement
A natural foil for flowers
GREENING
Artemisia is more about form and foliage than flowers. The silver and blue-green shades are content to remain in the background, setting the stage for showier blooms such as salvia and penstemon to star.
Different kinds are all around us, hiding in plain sight. In the kitchen, they are dinky little pots of tarragon. In the garden, they are billowing stands of wormwood. In the wild, there are great plains covered by sagebrush.
It takes a moment to accept the idea of them as a genus, to allow one's inner skeptic to mentally mutter, "If you say so ... " For the gardener, tarragon seems as unlikely a relation to sagebrush as dill might be to a pine tree. The fit for wormwood is no easier. The shape of its flat leaf brings parsley to mind. Scent might be even more misleading than shape. Their pungent aromatics are what led a number of them to be called "sagebrush" in the first place, when none of them are sages.
From the California gardener's perspective, one of the soundest rules of thumb for approaching the group is that the plants tend to be more about the form and foliage than the flowers. The western native, Artemisia tridentata, is the gnarliest of the clan. Even taken from the wild and grown in the most sheltered corner of a garden, it adopts a dramatic, windblown aspect. Watering the plant more than occasionally will kill it, so choose a dry spot, then use it next to a flowering plant as relief from the Laura Ashley effect of the blooms.
Whatever you mix with it, it will never compete with other flowers. Only the most alert gardeners even spot the columns of tiny, petal-less flowers forming on sagebrush in July. The plants do not produce showy petals because they are wind-pollinated, says Leila Shultz, a taxonomist at Utah State University and presiding American authority on artemisia. As the plant evolved, it did not waste energy producing extravagant floral appurtenances to attract bees that it didn't need for procreation. The plant's woodiness, Shultz says, signals that it evolved to withstand cold winters.
Follow artemisia into more temperate zones, and the woodiness diminishes, and it begins to flop. Artemisia californica can be as wispy as dill and run from silver to, in the case of the curiously named 'Canyon Gray' variety, a more marine green. It's worth looking for it sold by the plug and using it as ground cover.
Technically, the leaves of the gnarly and floppy sagebrushes are edible, but woe betide the consumer. The leaves are intensely bitter. Their charm is in their aroma. Possibly to deter predators, possibly as part of the plant's coolant system, sagebrush leaves are packed with chemicals called terpenoids and sesquiterpene lactones. The same class of chemicals puts the allure in mown grass, crushed pine needles, most sages and freshly squeezed lemon. But the cocktail in sagebrush is special. To hikers and cowboys, this is the scent of the West.
In contrast to its rugged American cousin, tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus) wouldn't survive a French second in the wild, or even too far out of sight in a sheltered garden. If snails don't get it, heat, drought or people will. It is bright green, tender, and if you ever do a Chinese garden around a doll's house, it could stand in as a miniaturized bamboo. Otherwise, the best place to grow it is on windowsills, where it can enjoy more water and less heat and the watchful eye of the cook who paid for it. Its leaves are delicious plucked straight from the plant, like a licorice drop, but even better on chicken with cream and brandy, or with red wine vinegar, olive oil, sea salt and roasted beets.
Wormwoods are commonly sold in the culinary herb section of good nurseries, though recipes containing them are scarce. They are where the kitchen garden meets the physic garden. Although the name is a common one and can mean any of dozens of artemisia, in California chances are good that they will be Artemisia absinthium or A. annua. Both plants have timeless standing as sources of drugs, medicinal and recreational. Egyptians have used A. absinthium as a vermifuge, or to worm sheep, going back to Pharaonic times. The Chinese have long sworn by A. annua to treat malaria (something that now even Western medicine acknowledges is effective). Once upon a time, the English used A. absinthium as a kind of Old World insect repellent (effectiveness unknown), more recently the French as an inebriant in absinthe (effective -- so effective, it is thought to have put the blur in Impressionism).
FEATURED
MORE:
Advertisement
