Meadow Keep: Celebrating the History, Folklore and Superstitions of Herbs

By Elizabeth C. Burgess

MEADOW KEEP is a journey into the world of herbs that have nourished, cured, and delighted mankind for centuries.

Did you know that the Pied Piper of Hamelin actually lured the rats with dried valerian? His music was but a decoy.

Did you know that William Wallace used blue dye from the woad plant to make war paint for his men to wear into battle?

Queen Elizabeth of Hungary used rosemary water in her bath every day and it kept her young and beautiful. The King of Poland, a handsome man of 54 declared his undying love for her beauty and asked for her hand in marriage and she a woman of 72.

Llewelyn, Prince of Glamoran lived to be 108 years old by drinking lemon balm tea every morning.

You might want to make a trip to your garden center and pick up several rosemary and lemon balm plants and many of the other plants mentioned in this collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491822630

Elizabeth C. Burgess

This is Elizabeth Burgess’s second book of poetry. Her first is Meadow Keep: A Celebration of the History, Folklore and Superstitions of Herbs, told in poetry and prose. She calls this collection “life poems.” Burgess spent 25 years teaching in North Carolina schools, including Durham, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and Scotland County. In 1994 she received the Terry Sanford Award for Creativity in Teaching. She was a member of Delta Kappa Gamma Society International for Key Women Educators, Omicron Chapter in Scotland County, North Carolina. She spent 5 years teaching for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools in Schweinfurt, Baumholder, and Nuremberg, Germany. In the Far East she lived on the huge 7th Fleet Navy Base at Yokosuka, Japan. In 1978, she returned to Germany with her 5-year-old son, Chris. They lived on a small dairy farm in Rohrbach, Germany. She taught in Baumholder, and Chris went to school there. During her years abroad, she visited schools in Germany; Moscow, Russia; and Yokosuka, Japan. After her retirement in 1995 she turned her attention to writing. Her first book was Prison Camp Road, mainly fiction, and set in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Next came A Day In Cascilla, fiction mixed with nonfiction set in the 1930s and ’40s in rural Arkansas and Mississippi. The Twins Café, set in the 1950s in rural North Carolina, is a work of fiction based on the historical fact of the January 1958 clash between the Ku Klux Klan and the Lumbee Indians. Guess who won? Everyone remembers this and continues to talk about it. She has published work in the N.C. Poetry Society’s 60th year anthology Here’s to the Land, Harp Strings, Main Street Rag, Pinesong Awards, Gravity Hill, Potato Eyes, South by Southeast, haiku, Hungry for Home short-short stories, The Book of American Traditions short-short stories, and other anthologies. Burgess held a state office in the N.C.P.S. during Robert Collins’ presidency. At 83 she continues to write and publish. Her next publication will be her second children’s book, set in the 1950s and located in the foothills town of Hudson, N.C., scene of her first book, Prison Camp Road. Titled The Turkey Shoot, it will be a book mainly for boys ages 6–12.

Book preview

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