48 pages • 1-hour read
Garden Spells
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Background
Cultural Context: Herbals and the Influence of Plants
The history of documenting the properties of plants for medical use is as old as human literature, if not older. Burial remains of the Neanderthal peoples inhabiting what is now Europe suggest they used plants for ritual and possibly medicinal purposes (Saba, Heather. “Herbalism: A History—How the Herbalists of the Past Paved the Way for Today.” Herbal Academy, 12 Apr. 2018). The tradition of incorporating plants and herbs into remedies to treat a condition, or into formulas intended to produce a certain effect, can be traced in nearly every human culture across history.
The earliest recorded herbals date to the fourth and third millennia BCE, including texts in Sumerian, a civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, where the properties and uses of local plants were recorded on clay tablets. In early China, the evolution of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) included, among other practices, a system of remedies incorporating herbal, animal, and other products. Ayurvedic medicine, a holistic approach to health and wellness that developed on the Indian subcontinent and is still widely practiced there, advises remedies that combine plants with, sometimes, minerals, metals, and gems. The Ebers Papyrus, dating to around 1500 BCE, lists nearly a thousand herbal medicines known to physicians in Ancient Egypt.
According to the standards of Western medicine, certain claims from other non-Western traditions have not been substantiated. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the US National Institutes of Health, offers a list of plants and herbs for which the benefits and impacts have been established by medical studies designed according to the standards of Western medical research (“Herbs at a Glance.” The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.)
The association of what we could now consider magical properties or influences appears in the earliest herbal texts, showing the link between assumed impacts of physical health as well as the surmised influence of plants on mental or emotional states. Small poems in Old English, called charms, rely heavily on what we would now consider magic in their various prescriptions, which also incorporated herbal elements. Herbals published throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods in Europe frequently attributed magical properties to plants, along with describing proven physical effects, such as impacts on digestion. The attribution of supernatural properties to plants continues in modern Wiccan and other magickal or folkloric practices, and the special properties of the plants in Garden Spells draw from this long tradition.
Literary Context: Literary Novels Featuring Magical Plants and Foods
While the magical or supernatural properties and effects of certain foods or plants have long been a topic of interest in herbal lore and certain magickal traditions, the popularity of this element in mainstream literature is a more recent development. The notion that a preparer of food can influence the emotions or actions of others is part of the plot in Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1989). In that novel, the suggestion that the sad emotions of the central protagonist, Tita, spill into the food she prepares borrows from the tradition of magical realism as developed by Latin American writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. The success of Esquivel’s book spread this trope into the mainstream literary consciousness, and it has since been incorporated into several successful novels.
In the novel Chocolat by Joanne Harris (1999), the ability of chocolatier Vianne to unlock emotions and memories in those who eat the chocolates she specifically prepares or selects for them becomes a metaphor for Vianne’s intuitions about people and part of the book’s broader theme about allowing emotion into one’s life, passion, as well as sadness. Aimee Bender’s 2010 novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, plays with this trope of infusing food with emotions through the character of Rose, who can intuit emotions through what she eats and thus becomes perceptive to the people around her. In The Mistress of Spices (1997) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the narrator’s talent for influencing and aiding people through her preparation of spices is connected to traditions of mysticism native to her country of origin, India, and serves as a vehicle for internal conflict over one’s powers and abilities as much as a metaphor for the influence of cultural traditions and sheer human longing.
The plot device of two sisters reconciled after estrangement, with one helping the other escape domestic abuse, recalls the plot of Alice Hoffman’s novel Practical Magic (1995), though Addison Allen transposes Hoffman’s New England setting to the rural American South. Following the success of Garden Spells, the participation of women in preparing and administering herbal remedies (or poisons) in ways that influence their communities became a trope of women’s fiction, appearing in such novels as The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner (2021), The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Linda Cohen Loigman (2024), and Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See (2023), a historical novel based on a female practitioner of Chinese Traditional Medicine.
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