Witchery at the Botanical Garden

On the second Saturday of each October, the Western Reserve Herb Society ladies hold their annual fair. Occurring the same month as Halloween, there is more to this grandmotherly activity than meets the eye.

Now in its 77th year, the fair is ostensibly a celebration of herbs and their many uses. It features quaint homemade offerings such as herbal blends, teas, potpourri, tussie-mussies (flower bouquets), and culinary goods. The homemade edible products are delectable, and the olfactory ones, beguiling. 

Enchanted: The Western Reserve
Herb Society Knot Garden

I observed all of this firsthand when I worked at Cleveland Botanical Garden, where the impressive Western Reserve Herb Garden is located. Its centerpiece is its Knot Garden, a form popular during Elizabethan times—when Macbeth’s witches first incanted “double, double toil and trouble.” With its five gigantic millstones, the knot is a scene for something primal and uninhibited by modernity. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Like Shakespeare's weird sisters, Cleveland's herb ladies convene and cast spells. Maintaining their garden requires a bustling, supernatural energy that belies its tranquil appearance.

This society includes all different personality types, from shy worker bees to scheming politicians. Its operations are replete with human intrigue, drama, and herbal hierarchies.

But above all, these ladies work. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning during the warm months, they are there planting, clipping, sowing, reaping, and plotting. Foregoing the on-site café, they bring their own food and feast on lavish herbal lunches.

I now see clearly that the kindly ladies of the Western Reserve Herb Society were up to something more than gardening. They formed a surreptitious sorority hiding in broad daylight, plotting to overcome us one tussie-mussie at a time.

You may recall that herbs were central to the plot of a classic tale about a coven, Rosemary’s Baby. Rosemary’s neighbor from hell, Minnie Castevet, gifted her a foul-smelling amulet filled with the (fictitious) herb Tannis Root. Instead of the commercially available vitamins Rosemary craved, Minnie and her blandly diabolical cohort Laura-Louise coerced her to drink herbal potions “more potent than any vitamins.”

As someone who knew these herb ladies personally and was gifted baskets of their goods as thanks for helping them promote their October fair, I am entranced by the notion that they are witches among us.

I may have been too obtuse to read the signs. I now realize they were hoping to recruit me.

See what you think on your next trip to Cleveland Botanical Garden. You might even be tempted to check out the herb fair in two days. Proceed with caution.