It was a gorgeous sunny day for the eve of the Winter Solstice – the shortest day and the longest night of the year. What else is a herbwife to do when presented with such a day but go wildcrafting on the mountain? I am out of so many things for the shop and evergreens are always in season, so off I went with my shears and my giant blue ikea bag. The mountain was beautiful; everything touched by the low-hanging sun like the longest sunset you’ve ever seen and there were birds everywhere singing. There were fruits everywhere – snowberries, rosehips, holly berries, hawthorn berries, juniper berries…
I found five tall Rocky Mountain Juniper trees, the only native juniper west of the Rockies, and hit the juniper berry motherload. I’m even going to back for more when my harvesting bag isn’t so heavy with evergreen boughs. I snipped some of the juniper’s boughs as well for making smudge blends and smudge wands. Rocky Mountain Juniper is smooth like cedar, not prickly like common juniper and can be easily confused with Western Redcedar if it weren’t for the smoky purple-blue berries.
I walked on the dirt path through the forest of tall trees, bare branches contrasted against green firs and cedars. I harvested boughs of Western Hemlock and Cedar to go with my juniper and filled up my harvesting bag. The forest never truly dies here as so much stays green: the sword ferns, the Oregon grape, the salal, the evergreen vines, and even the blackberry vines never lose their leaves. It is a beautiful combination of life and death in winter on the West coast.
I soaked up all the green, the browns of dead leaves and bare earth, and all the flowing streams coming down the mountain. I visited my favourite lone hawthorn tree, still covered in fat red fleshy berries. Then I walked out of the woods and back into civilization to visit a friend who lives on the mountain for some hot tea to warm my cold cheeks and then home I went with a solstice gift of clementine-maple-cinnamon mead and my harvest of evergreen boughs and berries.
