Adelma Grenier Simmons and the Lucidity of Herbal Adoration

By Katie Terezakis, PhD, Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology  / Edited by Russell Powell

Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997) was an herbalist, writer, educator, and host to thousands of people

 who came to her Connecticut farm, Caprilands, to experience her gardens, food, and lectures. At Caprilands, Simmons was practicing “farm to table,” “back to the land,” and “slow food” before they were cultural movements. Beginning in the 1940s and ‘50s, when few in the United States were listening for it, and continuing into the post-Cold War Era, Simmons delivered innumerable lectures, gave hundreds of interviews, and wrote dozens of books, many of them developed from pamphlets that she first made for Caprilands’ guests. 

Although she never finished high school, by midlife, Simmons was a productive scholar across a range of disciplines, blending plant folklore and mythology with horticulture, poetry, and history. Simmons usually conveyed her life stories of herbs in the most practical forms: recipes, garden designs, and crafts. She brought a strong current of whimsy to her functional, craft-based books, and more subtly, she also wove a fascinating philosophical position into them. 

Simmons’ most widely read book, 1964’s Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, (D. Van Nostrand Company) begins with a twofold promise: first, that attending to herbs will increase one’s appreciation of the value of seasonality, and second, that celebrating the seasons will draw the herb-lover’s attention to the conditions of seasonal patternicity and change, or to the mystery of earthly generation, degeneration, and regeneration. Simmons offered Caprilands as her primary example of a life devoted to herbs and the great and small mysteries they manifest. In a 1992 pamphlet, she wrote:

The times that we choose to celebrate at Caprilands revolve around farming, planting, entertaining, and the production not only of good times, but also of craft, work and meaningful decorations. In the gardening year, we travel the whole cycle of production from the seed to the end product … the origins of the plant life involved has been of special importance to us. […] Our hope is that in the reenactment of these ancient tales some of the lost magic will emerge … (9).

Simmons regularly spoke about invoking that earthly magic; her Caprilands visitors often remarked on the enchanted qualities of the place. Yet Simmons never tried to systematize her position. Instead, she kept sometimes episodic, sometimes meticulous notes on philosophies and philosophers, as well as on visionary poets who she thought achieved the kind of attentiveness she found to be aroused by the cultivation of both words and plants. 

Comparing these journals to her published works, we see how Simmons repurposed theoretical concepts in her descriptions of an everyday life devoted to herbs. For example, in a notebook she kept in the 1950s, Simmons cites from T.S. Eliot’s essay “What Dante Means to Me,” where Eliot says that in Dante, the “thought may be obscure but the word is lucid or rather translucent.” Simmons seizes on the possibility of “a poetic as distinguished from an intellectual lucidity”; she highlights the potential of what may be glimpsed through a translucent word, frond, or shoot. Like Dante’s words as Eliot read them, Simmons found that plant material delivers an immediate, lucid experience of itself, along with a translucent encounter with its source. Poetic lucidity can be achieved not only in the cultivation and arrangement of words but also of plants.  

Soon after writing the notes on T.S. Eliot, in a pamphlet that later became a book, Simmons calls a good salad “a gardener’s poem.” Here, we find her transforming the visionary possibilities that Eliot saw in Dante’s verses to the everyday activities of cultivating gardens and creating salads from them. A good salad is “one of the most beautiful food pictures imaginable … and over this gardener’s poem we sprinkle Chervil, Parsley, Burnet, a spring of Tarragon… the tops of the Egyptian onion … Marigold petals…” Caprilands’ most famous dishes were its salads: geometrically arranged, brightly colored, full of edible flowers decades before such things were marketed. Later, Simmons added that by eating, drinking, and really noticing these arrangements, we too can be “transported back to where truth, legend, and magic merge.” 

Simmons recognized that insights like “a salad is a gardener’s poem” could sound quaint, evoking an old-fashioned mode of feminized “wifery” or trite domesticity. And she regularly played on those kinds of assumptions, loading her writing with folksy stanzas alongside stores of historical erudition that belied any assumptions about an unsophisticated farmwife. 

Ploughing into the cliché and through it, Simmons made her herbal recipes poetic, turning the most ordinary acts into occasions for aesthetic attention. A person taking in the surprising tangs and colors of one of Simmons’ salads might, after all, become enchanted by its material. And if she did, then in and through adoration of the particular plants before her, something of their productive ground would emerge, as if through a beautiful translucency. 

For example, imagining what a May Day party and its crafts and foods might evoke for partygoers, Simmons wrote:

Do you remember when you were very young how the house smelled when you brought those handfuls of May flowers into warm air? … that indefinable smell—the woods in spring—composed of sweetness ascending from mold and decay—the breath and the hope of young life rising from the cold. That is the odor … when the May Wine is poured into the May bowl.

Simmons then goes on to list both the variable and the nonnegotiable ingredients of Caprilands’ May Day punch. 

Simmons often played with the imagery of witchcraft, both brushing away interviewers’ questions about her witchy ways and playing up the witchy aesthetic at Caprilands. If you asked her—and many did, though many more simply gossiped—she both was and was not a witch. Simmons at various times said that she got her reputation as a witch merely from how she wandered her gardens at night with a lantern, or that it attached to her because of the long history linking the herbs themselves with baneful and beneficial powers. 

In her books, Simmons used herbal folklore and history as if tradition was her crafting supply shed, full of materials preserved and ready for the projects that might bind them together, from tropes about the wickedest of witches to the wisest of healers. For example, in A Witch’s Brew (Clinton Press, 1975), after describing the design for a doorway swag, she explains why the mix of Artemisia, Wormwood blooms, and Rowan berries would be “a perfect protection from all witchcraft.” Yet just a few pages later, we find Simmons listing witches’ favorite herbs for things like appeasing hunger, curing madness, and other forms of “magical healing.” 

Simmons tells her readers to treat the whole study of plant magic lightly, as entertainment. She insists that joy must be the guiding feeling in our tending of herbs. Then again, as she put it in Herb Gardens of Delight (Hawthorn Books, 1974), the lure of herbs should be approached with “a sense of rare adventure.” When we learn, for example, of plants dedicated to the saints, we should enjoy traveling back to the scenes of their consecration. Tending an herb that trails such rich history should allow us to feel “the zeal of the religious approaching a shrine” (14). For Simmons, blending stories about Christian saints and pagan philosophers with the advice of medieval herbalists, the inspiration of old grimoires, poetry, music, and the folklore of plant witchery was a craft in itself, designed to evoke the sublimity at the heart of the human-plant relationship.  

Moving playfully from clichéd slurs about frightening hags to anecdotes about the treasured wisdom of the village healer, Simmons turned the familiar suggestion of her witchery back at her audience. In her hands, the word “witch,” like the word “saint,” was poetic. As potentially “lucid or rather translucent” words, both witches and saints were the vestments of performances. And as she said in several interviews in her later years, Simmons herself could be best understood as a performer because she held open possible worlds onto which others could project their own associations. 

For all her privileging of practice and playfulness over theory, Simmons did occasionally try to identify with a known philosophical position. For example, in the mid-1940s, she admitted in her journal: “How I love to dig in the earth–all my farming ancestry, the peasant in me shows–I love the elements and the earth–a pantheist and hedonist par excellence.” Whereas “witch” was the more public term Simmons teased, “pantheist” was her private formulation. 

In both cases, Simmons’ real interest was focused on how humans relate to the other-than-human strangeness of plant-being. She reveled in the way that plants, specifically herbs, were both physically abundant in their relation to us—commanding our sight, taste, touch—and metaphysically withdrawn from human mastery. While herbs will respond to our cultivation and glow in our concoctions, we still can’t fully explain why they smell so beguiling, why they inspire our desire to create. Our representations of herbs inevitably fail to take in all that herbs are. Working with herbs turns us back toward an awareness of our experience, even while herbs’ aspects continue to seduce us to desire more knowledge of their being. 

The position that emerges from Simmons’ herbal how-tos is motivated by her insight into the way that working with herbs invokes the conditions within which they become meaningful to us, albeit while remaining distinctively themselves. For her, plant-work brings us not to “God” or “Nature” as neutral terms for what is outside of us, but to our own experience of the patterns and surprises of a generative Earth that resists our representations and continues to rouse them. While she knew that pantheism came closest to describing her intellectual position, Simmons remained less interested in intellectual paradigms and more devoted to sharing the poetic lucidity available in the adoration of herbs. 

Katie Terezakis is Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology and Co-Director of the John William Miller Society at Williams College. She is the author of The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy 1759-1801 (Routledge 2007); the editor of Engaging Agnes Heller: A Critical Companion (Lexington Books, 2009); of Lukács’ Soul and Form: A New Edition (Columbia University Press, 2010); and of works on German idealism and its critics, critical theory, and the phenomenology of language. Her latest book, The Reinvention of Idealism: John William Miller and Other Navigators of the Critical Turn in American Philosophy (Lexington/Bloomsbury) is forthcoming spring 2025. She has just begun research for a biography of Adelma Grenier Simmons.