Monday, December 13, 2010

Poison Garden

A corner of my basement is given over to my bizarre minutiae, random objects of dubious use, which I sometimes sift through a corner of in a particular frame of mind.  Some days ago I came across a bunch of weird old random seeds I’d picked up here and there, some quite old, indifferently stored and thus probably beyond viability.  We had starts for the garden going anyway so I made up a few seedling pots and sewed some tobacco (nicotiana tabacum, nicotiana rustica) and treated some datura stramonium for germination.  The latter, moonflower (or jimson weed or a number of other things)  I have never been particularly interested in as an entheogen (in fact I’ve all but lost my interest in entheogenic plants and fungi, too busy, no room in life for altered states) – it registers way too far along the poison scale.  But it has interesting flowers, and is night-pollinated by moths, which is neat.

Tobacco on the other hand is not just odd but questionable for me to be planting, being the preferred delivery vehicle for the only drug I’ve ever had a frank addiction to.  Another classic of the poison garden in magical herbalism, my own problems with it (now in year 10 or so of a mostly successful remission) having been overwhelmingly transacted via daily rations in little cardboard boxes.  Just what was going on in my mind there?  Not a lot, really.  It seems like it ought to mean something but nothing comes to mind.

None of the seeds sprout.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com May 7, 2009 at 1:01 AM

No comments:

Post a Comment