Great Journey 🇸🇪 Day 528
Eva Gunnare is known in Jokkmokk and beyond as the Herb Fairy. She combines a love of nature with the knowledge of the Sámi (Sámi are an indigenous people in northern Fennoscandinavia (I had to Google the term myself) and conjures up incredible things from tree bark, herbs, berries and whatever else she finds out here in Lapland.
Sámi, as the Sami call themselves, means swamp people. At the moment, at -23 °C, there is no sign of a swamp. Snow everywhere.
I read in the events calendar of Jokkmokk (I love this place name, I could write and pronounce it all the time!) that Eva is offering a herb walk. I wonder how that will work in winter, but she will probably know how. I immediately book a place (Gerd is currently looking after the furniture) and stand in the deep snow with a few others, hanging on Eva's every word.
She reports that the seeds use the inner, less coarse bark layer of the pine to supply themselves with minerals and vitamins. We nibble on small fermented, bitter-sweet pine cones and drink tea made from herbs, which bloom in abundance here in summer.
And then she trudges off, we like the seven dwarfs behind her. She tells us about evil and dear pine trees, digs with all her energy through 50 cm of the latest powder snow to show us blueberries and many other berries. She boots ahead, lets us taste syrups from her basket, and degust dried and fermented blossoms, stems, roots and tree bark. We drink birch water and learn that there are different birches, those from the north and those from the south. Then she rubs the branches and shows us the differences.
And tells. And beams. If it hadn't been so bitterly cold and all our feet hadn't slowly frozen into ice lumps, we could have listened to her for hours. After two hours I crawl into our heated Felix, warm my hands in Felix's preheated glove compartment and my feet on the hot water bottle. And I'm beaming.
Thank you Eva for your overflowing energy!
