Hello,
A big, warm welcome to this week's newsletter.
What a week!
We released the winners in our Natural Beauty Awards 2025, find your new bathroom heroes here!
My uncle came to visit from the States with his family and we had some wonderful cousin time in London and on the Sussex coast. Iris has already started creating cards and letters to send to her cousin, filled with declarations of love.
I also got my bleed and had a day of lying in the sun, watching butterflies and reading books - yay!
Also sea swimming, hanging out with friends in the delicious shade of big trees, digging for history and more lovely stuff...
Here's What Else We've Been Up To:
Harvesting Borage Flowers
My dad's grown a bumper crop of borage (borago officianlis) this year and we've been harvesting the flowers to make tea.
You can eat the flowers straight off the plant and they have a almost cucumber taste - pop them into ice cube trays for the prettiest drinks! Also decorate salads and desserts with their beautiful blue starry shapes.
As a medicine, I think of them mainly for their ability to ease stress and anxiety. Their mucilaginous properties can be calming and soothing for our bodily systems. They support adrenal health and can be used as a tea to soothe fevers and inflammations.
The flowers, being blue, are extremely attractive to bees, they're one of the best pollinator plants. And the flowers regenerate daily during the season, so they just keep on producing nectar! Plus they self seed so once you have established a plant in your garden, they'll keep giving year after year.
Read on for how I use the flowers in a tea to calm anxiety...
