20 July 2025
I often remember the sweeping backyard garden that my grandparents tended. It covered much of the cleared quarter-acre area before untouched woodland. Those early years left me with a respect and love of Nature that has carried me through these older years of change, moving, turbulence, and gratitude.
Today, even though the periphery garden in a tiny backyard is of no match to my grandparents’ bounty, the attempt to recall the second-nature backyard farming of the past with the conveniences of the present seem to set a particular stage, especially in these times.
I may be misguided, but these days seem fraught with information that is less than reliable. Recalls dot the news as people sometimes opt for quick, cheap products…as marketers’ profits increase in both price and risk. And then there’s the tariffs on the global economy, in which All of God’s creation, of whom “we” are truly just a part, has Her stake.
My grandmother tended a frilly deep green plant with fuzzy leaves and bright blue flowers in her section of the garden. In her Italian, I remember it was borragine, in English, borage.
As a bit of basic available research shows, borage flowers [https://www.nutrition-and-you.com/borage.html] contain an incredible amount of nutrients: Vitamins A, C, GLA – an essential fatty acid containing iron (41% of RDA), calcium, potassium, manganese, copper, zinc, and magnesium. This, apparently was understood by “a nonna” who reached almost 90 years of age, still tending her garden.
Often, the wisdom of the past can collaborate with the ease and advantages of the future, but we still have to be humanly wise, engage, and balance the two into the points of human life, trust, knowledge and work that are within our access today.