MonicaWe were walking on the residential side of Capitol Hill in Seattle, catching up on a friendship that dates back to college years and includes a cross-country couch surfing and camping journey that took Amanda from Jersey girl to renegade sculptor in Belltown, while I winged back to New York City. In the back of the artist co-op where she lived, she had access to actual soil, while I only had a roof garden in five gallon buckets. It was Amanda who suggested I try compost worms, so my soil was generated from a matrix of coffee grounds and the New York Times and my plants were mostly volunteers from the grocery trimmings. A hot city roof is a great place to grow tomatoes!
By the time I moved to Seattle, Amanda had migrated South to Marin County. In recent times I have had more planting room than she does.
So when I didn’t recognize the dried seed pods of a Calendula growing in the circles designed to discourage through traffic (technically civic space but most are tended by volunteer neighborhood gardeners in Seattle) she saw a chance to spread her influence.
Sometime in spring a lumpy envelope arrived. I didn’t have much space left for the seeds by then, so I dropped them in here and there. Four years later, the garden is full of calendula, generating vivid bouquets, clouds of pollinators and colorful salads. If the winter is on the mild side, some plants continue to bloom through frosts and resprout in the spring, and the rest self-seed readily.
Calendula was called Pot Marigold in England, where its uses were myriad – I have only explored a few of them.
Now that I have a ready supply of Calendulas, I pick a bunch most mornings in the summer and hang them up to dry. By September, I have enough to fill a couple of quart jars with dried blooms, the start of the salve-making season. Here is a recipe, with lots of pictures, because in winter we need to bring in sunshine however we can.
And if you don’t have an Amanda just yet, I have a stash of seed gathered last year that you can buy online at my Etsy store, or share with a friend who might have more gardening room than you do at the moment. Although I am pretty sure you could grow this on a New York roof or balcony, in a five-gallon bucket or something more elegant, just so long as it has some sun and you remember to water it.
