Granted, the dock that is growing at the margin of my garden doesn't look like much. It's a weedy green stalk, about three feet high, with clusters of tiny green flowers clinging to the stem and a whorl of large, crumply-edged leaves at its base. This is Rumex crispus—yellow dock or curly dock or just plain dock.one of the unruly volunteers that are making themselves at home in my garden on this spring day.
Dock is no stranger to me, however, and when it shows up in my garden, I let it stay put. The green flowers will turn into reddish-brown fruits as they age; they'll look something like coffee grounds plastered around the stem. In fact, they look enough like coffee grounds that the plant is sometimes called coffee-weed. When I was about ten, my cousin Mary Jean and I "brewed" a coffee-can of dock "coffee" in the sun and drank a cup of it. I shudder to think of this now (I could have been drinking jimsonweed tea, for heaven's sake!). As it happened, we chose a non-toxic herb to experiment with. Dock is said to be a blood cleanser, to nourish the spleen and detoxify the liver, thus promoting overall good heath. But my ten-year-old spleen didn't need much additional nourishment and my blood hadn't had a chance to get dirty yet, so I'm not sure that the dock had any particular effect.
It certainly did one of its jobs a couple of days ago, however. Wearing shorts, I backed into a nettle and got stung good and proper. But since the dock was handy, I grabbed a couple of those big green leaves and rubbed. Hard. And while I rubbed, I chanted a charm that was first recorded in the fourteenth century:
Nettle out, dock in,
Dock remove the nettle sting.
It worked, of course. Dock's astringent leaf eased the nasty sting, just as it did all those long centuries ago. I said a grateful thanks to the dock, and left it, both welcome and desired, among the other good and wholesome herbs in the garden.
Read more about dock, nettle, and other valuable weeds:
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