Things do not have to be beautiful to be useful. Nor do things have to be of use to be good.
Nor does a thing have to be good, though I am familiar with the impulse.
While walking through Prospect Park the other day, I stopped to identify a plant with white flowers, one I noticed when it was in bloom last summer. I’d pinched off a sprig to put in a bud vase, but discarded it when it dried and turned brown. At first I had thought the plant was a relative of Queen Anne’s lace, the tall, waving wild carrot flowers that I grew up seeing, sprouting from cracks in the sidewalk. The identification my app provided said something else: Achillea millefolium, also known as the common yarrow.
The first part of its name, Achillea, comes from Achilles, who carried it to treat war-wounds; millefolium describes its feathery, fern-like leaves. Yarrow grows tall and brushy; its stems, dark green, sometimes grayish, can reach three feet tall. Atop each plant is a branched cluster of creamy white flowers, each disc-shaped head itself a collection of tiny white florescences. There’s a prairie feeling to yarrow, the way it leans and takes up space; it looks properly wild, a weed, an honest herb, covered in tiny native pollinators. I saw it growing in a scrubby patch near the roller rink, the clusters of flowers forcing their way past the corded wire fencing. It didn’t seem to care where it was planted; it was not ornamental. Yarrow is an old herb. It has had many uses: analgesic, wound-healer, fever-breaker. Dried yarrow stems are used in I Ching divination. In British folklore, a yarrow leaf could be used to determine if one’s romantic feelings were requited. The leaf was placed in the nose and a verse recited: Green ’arrow, green ’arrow, you bears a white blow, / If my love love me, my nose will bleed now.