Herb Gardener Gift-Giving Idea: Light

I’ve asked five blog contributors to share their favorite herb-related gift ideas.  HSA’s blog will be running one per day during the first week of December. – Paris Wolfe, Blogmaster

By Kathleen M Hale, Western Reserve Herb Society

Being a somewhat difficult person, what I want most during the holiday season is what, by definition, is in shortest supply…light.  Candles in the darkness are very sweet.  But I mean LIGHT.

We are all starved for light in the darkness of winter.  But gardeners, in spite of exchanging hopeful and philosophical images on Facebook about how all the growing things are only sleeping, are left bereft.  Plant and seed catalogs will soon arrive, and whether you consider them aspirational or plant porn, they feed the hunger for the time when light returns and growth becomes visible.  But gardeners are patient. They can wait.

Unless they have a really awesome light rig!  Yes, I have a lot of natural light in this house, when there’s any to come by.  But I also have a three-tier, pebble tray lined light cart, with growing lights on a timer and a gentle clip-on fan to wheedle the plants and seedlings entrusted therein into thinking this is the real thing. It is presently serving the needs of scented geranium cuttings, a bunch of amaryllises brought back to life from last year, assorted Christmas cacti and the mighty Cthulhu, the first aloe I ever acquired, now too big to put anywhere else.

I inherited my light rig from my late mother-in-law, Mertena Hood Hale.  She was an extraordinary gardener. So, in my case, the light is brighter, because it also brings with it the magic of a torch passed from one gardener to another, across time.