So, I’d been noticing this little patch of purple flowers in the backyard for ages. You know, Viola yedoensis, or whatever the fancy name is. I just called them ‘those purple weeds’. Didn’t pay them much mind, to be honest. Then, one spring, I got this really annoying patch of dry, itchy skin on my elbow. Tried all sorts of creams from the store, nothing really did the trick. It just sat there, mocking me.
My Little Experiment
I was complaining about it to my neighbor, old Mrs. Henderson, while trying to fix a wobbly fence post – another one of those weekend jobs that never seems to end. She peered at my elbow and said, “Oh, that looks like what my mother used to use ground ivy for… or was it those little purple fellas? Said they were good for ‘cooling the blood’ and skin troubles.” She pointed right at a clump of Viola yedoensis growing near the fence.
Now, I’m not usually one for old wives’ tales, but I was pretty fed up with that itch. And frankly, wrestling with that fence post in the sun, I was feeling pretty ‘heated’ myself. So, later that day, I thought, why not? I went out, picked a few fresh leaves and flowers. Didn’t have a clue, really. I just washed them, crushed them up a bit with the back of a spoon – made a sort of green, pulpy mess. Didn’t look too appealing, I’ll tell you that.
I decided to just dab a bit of this homemade goo onto the itchy spot. It felt surprisingly cool and soothing. I left it on for a while, then rinsed it off. Did this for a couple of days, morning and night. Can’t say it was a miracle cure, you know? But the redness did seem to go down a bit, and the itch wasn’t driving me quite as crazy. Maybe it was just the coolness, or maybe there’s something to what Mrs. Henderson said about ’em.
- Picked fresh leaves and flowers.
- Washed them thoroughly.
- Crushed them into a rough poultice.
- Applied to the affected skin area.
It’s funny, ’cause around that same time, I was having this massive headache dealing with the council. I wanted to build a tiny shed in the garden, nothing fancy, just for tools. You’d think it was straightforward, right? Oh no. The amount of paperwork, the phone calls, being passed from one department to another… it was a nightmare. One guy, Mr. Periwinkle, or something equally daft, kept insisting my plan wasn’t “aligned with sub-section C, paragraph 4 of the regional landscaping directive of ’98.” Nineteen ninety-eight! I mean, come on. My shed was going to be smaller than his desk.
I spent weeks, literally weeks, going back and forth. Emails that never got answered, forms that needed to be printed in triplicate, only for them to tell me they’d gone digital last Tuesday but hadn’t updated the website. Classic. My blood pressure was through the roof. I’d come home from work, try to decipher their latest hieroglyphic email, and just feel this rage building up. My wife said I was more stressed about that shed permit than when we bought the actual house.
And in the middle of all that bureaucratic hogwash, there I was, mashing up these little purple flowers in my kitchen. Something so simple, so direct. Pick, crush, apply. No forms, no Mr. Periwinkle, no “regional landscaping directives.” Just me and a weed. It was almost therapeutic, the contrast of it all. The shed, by the way, took six months to get approved. By then, I’d almost forgotten why I wanted it. But that little patch of Viola yedoensis? It just kept quietly doing its thing in the garden, no fuss, no bother. Maybe that’s a lesson in itself, eh?
So, did the Viola yedoensis work? Who really knows. Placebo? Maybe. But it didn’t make it worse, and it felt like I was doing something proactive when those fancy creams weren’t. And frankly, it was a darn sight less stressful than dealing with the council. Sometimes, the simple things are the best, even if they’re just weeds from your own backyard.
