Content Notes: grief, death, chronic illness, mental health, disability, ancestral memory, gardening folklore, herbal magic, reflection on grief and ancestral memory

Welcome back to the Den.
This is The Crippled Cryptid.
It’s Folklore Wednesday.

The lights are lower than usual.
The air is listening.

This is the day we loosen the knots and let the old stories stretch their limbs.

On Folklore Wednesdays, we talk about the things that learned our names before we learned theirs.
French spirits and English ghosts.
Indigenous stories that remember the land better than maps ever did.
Old gods. New monsters. Familiar shapes wearing unfamiliar faces.

This is the day of hedge magic and hearth magic.
Of charms whispered into sleeves.
Of creatures that don’t wait for nightfall and spirits that have never respected bedtime.

Some of what lives here bumps in the dark.
Some of it walks openly in daylight, unbothered, unafraid, and very aware of itself.

You don’t need to believe.
You just need to be respectful.
You just need to listen.

Pull your chair closer.

Folklore is a living thing.
And today, it’s awake.

On Today’s Menu: Dirt Magic: Gardens, Graves, and the Power of Planting

There’s a reason so much folklore treats gardens as liminal spaces.

A garden is where the living tend the dead and call it growth.
Seeds are buried on purpose.
Bones become soil.
Hands learn patience or they learn nothing.

If you didn’t already know this about me, I never saw myself as the kind of person who wanted a garden.

I grew up in gardens. My grandmother and even my great-grandmother had one for as long as I can remember. I remember watching her plant things. Pick things. Occasionally, I would help.

The kind of help where a child is playing more than they are contributing.
The kind where attention flickers and then wanders off.

Of course, I would turn the sprinkler on and off when she would ask too. And then that was it. Until she passed away in 2023 and left the garden, and this world, behind.

M&M and I tended what was left of it that August. We pulled the weeds, we picked the vegetables. We cared for whatever grew. The following year, with a friend’s help, we tore up what remained.

To some this sounds shocking. Maybe even disrespectful.

We put in new raised garden beds. Something I suspect my grandmother would have hated. She was particular. She liked her raised beds that were already half-rotted into the earth, edged with plastic that promised to keep the weeds out and never once kept its word.

We planted everything she had. And more.

2024 was a very good garden year for us.

It kept us, and our friends sustained with enough to donate to our local food pantry. Enough to gift to neighbors. Enough to call abundance.

Tomatoes. Green beans. Peppers of every variety we could get our hands on. Pumpkins. Melons. More.

For a while, it felt like we were making magic.

It was the first thing I truly felt we shared.

I couldn’t wait for spring to come again in 2025.

But 2025 was not kind.

Not to my mental health.
Not to my body.
Not to the garden.

Hopefully, this year will be gentler.

To the soil.
And to me.

Across cultures, spring planting is spellwork.

Charms sewn into sleeves.
Names whispered into furrows.
Offerings left at the edge of the field so nothing takes offense.

Gardens appear in folklore as places of testing.

Eden. Persephone’s fields. Witch gardens with rules you must not break.

Planting is an act of belief.

Not certainty.

Belief.

You put something fragile into the ground and trust the world to do less harm than it did last year.

Some days, that’s the bravest magic there is.

Plant Magic and Ancestral Threads

Many of the plants we grow carry stories and magic of their own.

• Tomatoes: Protection, fertility, abundance. Folklore says a tomato plant guards against lightning in some traditions.
• Yarrow: Courage, healing, and divination. Used in teas and tinctures to strengthen the body and spirit.
• Basil: Love, purification, and attracting good fortune.
• Parsley: Protection, cleansing, and helping you see hidden things.
• Raspberry bushes: Memory and sweet reward, rooted in storytelling and remembrance.

Some short folklore stories I love include Ojibwe and Cherokee traditions of offering a bit of plant to the spirits when planting, or Iroquois guidance about tending raspberry bushes carefully so the sweet fruit honors past generations. Every plant can carry an ancestral memory if you listen.

For teas and remedies, yarrow, basil, and parsley can all be brewed into gentle infusions. They are not just plants, but allies in daily magic, carrying old knowledge from one hand to the next.

Gardening is itself a practice of care and remembrance. For me, it is a way to honor my Native roots, to connect with the land, and to honor M&M’s Metis and Iroquois heritage. In tending the soil, we honor the generations who taught us to notice, to care, to keep stories alive.

Even identifying the plants we grow carries its own enchantment. Some of my favorite ways to explore this magic include:

• Apps: Seek, PlantNet, iNaturalist- these can help you learn the plants around you and remind you that every leaf and stem has a story.
• Books: Botany for Gardeners, The Green Witch’s Garden, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
• Online inspiration: TikTok and Pinterest for practical tips, layered with ancestral memory and storytelling.

Gardens are living classrooms and laboratories, sacred spaces where magic, history, and survival meet.

If anyone wants to support our little garden of magic, I do have an Amazon Wishlist with garden items. You’re more than welcome to send anything, but we never expect anything from anyone at all! Just reading, sharing, and keeping the magic alive is already an offering.

The Closing of the Circle

That’s where we’ll leave the circle open for now.

If something followed you out of this story, you’re not in trouble.

Folklore has always liked company.

If something here felt familiar, trust that.

Old stories recognize their own.

Folklore Wednesdays are about remembering. About honoring what survived being passed mouth to mouth, fire to fire, body to body.

Thank you for sitting in the magic with me.
For listening instead of demanding proof.
For letting strange things exist without taming them.

Until next time, keep a light on if you need it.

Or don’t.

Some of us see just fine in the dark.

Love you. Now say it back.

-Sky

© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability, folklore, and survival magic.
(And always a little bit of dog fur for morale.)

🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa

No pressure to donate. Staying, reading, sharing is already an offering.

If you want to support the long, slow work of staying alive and telling the truth:
💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility