Marcia E. Cole Remembers the Herb Garden

DC poet and playwright Marcia E. Cole recently shared some photos and memories of her time as Peirce Mill’s herb gardener. And she explained how a chance encounter in the late 1980s led her to the little garden beside the old mill. On a walk in Rock Creek Park, she stopped at Peirce Mill and happened to ask about an overgrown, fenced-in plot of land. She learned that this weedy patch was supposed to be an herb garden, but there was no one to care for it. Cole immediately volunteered to help, though she didn’t know much about gardening–yet. 

Cole began by weeding the overgrown patch, and was soon drawn to the smell of the herbs–especially rosemary. She found that she preferred working in the morning, when the park was quiet and still. She learned that if she arrived early enough, she’d discover the garden’s resident bees still sleeping under velvety leaves.

As the sun rose, walkers and joggers stopped to chat with Peirce Mill’s new herb gardener. On colder days, Cole warmed up by an old potbelly stove inside the mill.  Over the years, she added flowers to the little herb garden. She studied the history of each plant and their traditional uses, and offered garden talks and other programs for park visitors.

Cole eventually left Peirce Mill for an internship at the National Arboretum. But memories of the herb garden stayed with her. She found herself drawn to the stories places told, and began writing poems and plays inspired by Black History. One day she happened to stop by Peirce Mill and was saddened to find the herb garden once again overgrown with weeds. Cole wrote a poem about the place she had once tended, called “Musings on the Demise of the Peirce Mill Herb Garden.”

The herb garden at Peirce Mill is long gone, and today the space in front of the mill is an open plaza for public events. But there is an orchard just up the hill, filled with abundant flowers in the warmer months, and plenty of places for a bee to nap on a summer morning.

–Angela Kramer

Musings on the Demise of the Peirce Mill Herb Garden

by Marcia E. Cole

I visited that little spot
where I had lavished love and care.
It look so weary and forlorn
with few remaining plantings there.
A carcass of a thing

Picked and plucked over.
Scarcely worth remembering
but remember it well I did.

Mornings when I raced the sun
to see who’d get there first.
To see which new blossom had burst open with tender bloom
Leaving little room for the rest.

How the look of morning’s dew
made every limb and stem seem new.
I found myself in unknown ways
in that humble garden of bygone days.

It caused me great distress
to see neglect by those who loved it less
I guess.