Borage for Courage & Joy

Happy Full Moon – April 6, 2023

Inviting Borage into Your Garden

As you gather seeds for spring planting, consider adding borage (Borago officinalis) to the list. Borage is a hardy annual with vibrant star-shaped flowers, usually of blue and lavender (but there is a rare white variety). It is a wonderful companion plant, repelling pests like cabbageworms and tomato hookworms. And it is also a dynamic accumulator, a plant that because of its deep root system will bring minerals up from the subsoil. Borage can then be cut and used for mulch or added to the compost to access these minerals.

And bees love this plant. Sowing it around fruit trees and berry bushes will ensure lots of bees for pollination.

Borage flowers are some of my favorite edible flowers. Their color and shape liven up summer salads, and their mild cucumber flavor is delicious. Flowers can also be frozen into ice cubes to add to summer drinks. Leaves can be used for tea and young leaves can be added to salads. It is a multi-purpose plant.

Energetic Properties of Borago officinalis

Borage is a delight in the garden for all of the reasons above, but there is more. The energetic qualities of this plant include courage and joy and so planting it in your yard provides inspiration and access to those attributes. The beauty of the flowers alone can invoke joy.

Maude Grieve, in her 1931 classic, A Modern Herbal, explains that European herbalists over many centuries enlisted this plant to drive away sadness. melancholy, and broken heartedness.  The scientist Francis Bacon, writing in the 1500s declared that borage  hath an excellent spirit to repress the fuliginous vapour of dusky melancholia.  How about that for a prescription for a broken heart?

Borage teas, tinctures, and amulets were also prescribed to counteract fear and increase courage. Grieve notes that the plant’s name may have derived from a Latin variation of the word for courage. Soldiers carried borage with them into battle to hold onto this trait. Hopefully you are not heading into battle anytime soon, but you can take a sprig of borage with you to a job interview or a difficult meeting to be inspired to speak up for yourself.

Easy Cultivation

Borage is easy to grow from seed. It is not fussy about soil types although like most plants, prefers a well drained soil. Sow seeds after the last frost and it will germinate fairly quickly.

Borago officinalis is an annual, however you’ll probably only need to plant it once. It re-seeds readily. The seeds are also very easy to collect to share with others and spread the  joy to friends.

Because if re-seeds easily you may have borage popping up in places you don’t want it. You can solve that problem by pulling up the extra plants and adding them to the compost. Borage also can be quite gangling. Again this is easily solved by trimming the plants and keeping them to a reasonable height.

If you can’t find borage seeds locally, I recommend Baker Creek Seeds. They carry the traditional blue borage seeds as well as a rare white variety.

So think about inviting borage into your garden this year. You will have a beautiful plant, edible flowers, and the energetic qualities of courage and joy. That is quite a package in an easy to grow plant!

Lunar Blog Post Series

This post is part of my lunar blog series.  Each full moon I write about one plant, many of them are plants featured in my book, Growing Mindful.  Each new moon I write about a topic related to gardens, mindfulness, and spirituality. For more details and a list of past lunar blog posts, click here.