Stellaria media Namul and Mugwort Tteok

    Spring comes with sound. The warbling of returned migratory birds, the murmuring of melting streams that had frozen over the winter, and the dripping of spring rain falling on the eaves of the roof where icicles in winter had hung. I hardly see frozen streams or icicles in winter now, but the sonorous singing of all kinds of birds early in the morning signals that spring has come.

    Spring also brings scent. The scent of various kinds of grass. Ra Tae-joo, a Korean poet, said in his poem Grass Flower 2, "Know the name, you become a neighbor / Know the color, you become a friend," but for a long time I didn't know the names or colors of the spring grasses. The only names I remembered were mugwort and shepherd’s purse. In my early childhood, I used to dig them up with my friend after elementary school. I would bring home a full bag of them on sunny spring afternoons. Then, my mom made soybean paste stew with them. Their fresh scent together with the savory soybean paste made the stew my favorite dish in spring.

    As apartment complexes were built everywhere in the 1980s in Korea, the fields where we dug for mugwort and the like disappeared one after another, and after a point we ended up just reading comic books after school. Since then, I have forgotten the scent of spring grasses—but they seem to be buried inside me and, in spring, sometimes flicker dimly through my memory.

    Hoping to trail the lost scents of spring, I immediately replied to the email  from a fellow alumnus of Seoul National University—who organizes hikes for alumni from time to time—about a Boulder Bridge  hike at Rock Creek Park on the last Saturday morning of April 2021.  I had passed the park, which is in Washington, DC, everyday for nearly 20 years on my commute to work, but had never had time to visit before. It would take about two hours to complete three miles of the trail.

 

    Entering the parking lot near the Nature Center, I noticed several alumni gathered around. Soon seventeen of us stood in a circle next to the parking lot and briefly introduced ourselves with our name, school year, and department. The hike’s leader was Kang Soon-im, accompanied by her husband. She was twenty-five years older than me, yet still physically fit and elegant. In fact, all of the participants except for one were older than me. We took group pictures together against a backdrop of trees with spring buds, before starting on the trail.

    The older women pointed to the grass growing in various colors and shapes along the trail and mentioned their names. Among the senior women, the leader Mrs. Kang, seemed to be the expert.

    “This is Doellingeria scabra. It’s good to eat seasoned, or fresh,” said Mrs. Kang. In Korean she pronounced the plant’s name Chwinamul. 

    A woman named Soo walked with me and the other younger alumna.  

    "Oh, there's mugwort here," exclaimed Soo. 

    When I heard the name of mugwort, I approached to see it, as if my childhood memories had called me. Looking at the mugwort closely, I realized what I had seen in my backyard. 

    "Oh, is this mugwort? I thought it was a weed in my backyard, so I almost pulled it out..." I murmured.

    She picked one leaf, sniffed at it and gave it to me. “How could you not distinguish mugwort with such an aromatic scent?” 

    How could I forget this scent! I’d forgotten it completely and thought that whatever I didn't plant in my yard must be weeds.

    This spring, stuck at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I could afford to spend time in my yard, and cleaned up the garden, which had been desolate during the winter, pulling out weeds. I manually removed the roots of what appeared to be weeds, instead of spraying weed killer and contaminating the groundwater. I still left behind some that seemed too good to be pulled out as weeds, wondering what flowers they would bloom into. One of them was the mugwort. 

    Another bright, light green grass caught my eye along the trail. Pointing to it, I asked Soo: “What is this one? This was creeping along the border of my front garden, so I pulled it out. Is this a weed?”

   “Oh, these are stringy stonecrops!” She called the plant Dolnamul in Korean. “These are native to our country. How delicious they are when you eat them with cho-gochujang.”

    

    “What a bummer!” I thought to myself. How much time and money I had wasted because of my ignorance! I plucked out the precious perennial herbs because I had not recognized them, and kept buying other “edible” plants, planting them until my back hurt. 

    

    “What about this one?” I asked again, pointing to another sprawling green grass, which looked quite similar to what I saw right next to my garage. 

    “That’s Stellaria media," she said Byeol-ggoch in Korean, meaning star-flower. "You can eat that fresh or seasoned as well. It’s savory and nutritious.” She seemed so delighted, recalling all the tastes of wild greens.

    “Its name sounds beautiful,” I said, wondering why it’s called star-flower.

    She pulled me closer to her and said, “Do you see the tiny white flowers? Lower your head and have a good look at them. You're tall and you can't see it if you peek at it just while standing. Its name refers to the shape of its flowers, as it resembles a star.” 

    Sure enough, I noticed white star-shaped, tiny flowers, and said to her, “Oh, they look so cute! I am so grateful for being able to learn this from you.” 

    After returning home from the hike, I looked around my garden. Indeed, those sprawling green leaves right next to the garage door were Byeol-ggoch. How fortunate I felt to have left them as they are! I stooped down to see them up-close. The white flowers were so small that I hadn’t noticed them before. The flowers were surrounded by lots of eggshaped green leaves. “Pretty / With a close look”—the first stanza of Ra Tae-joo’s poem Grass Flower sprang to my mind. He really was right. I cut some of them and made namul, a Korean vegetable dish. After blanching them lightly in boiling water, I mixed them with soy sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds.

    While I was at it, I also cut mugwort in the corner of my backyard, left intact as I hadn't had time to clean it up yet. As the next day was my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I decided to make a mugwort tteok. Following a recipe I found on the internet, I soaked the sticky rice in water for two hours, washed the mugwort clean, drained it, and put the rice in a pressure cooker with chopped mugwort. The scent of mugwort wafted up when I opened the lid of the rice cooker after the steamed rice was done. To make tteok, I had to pound the rice and mugwort. My mom used to pound it with a long wooden pestle in a large stone mortar. Lacking a pestle, I used rolling pins instead. 

    The oblique sunlight of the late afternoon came in with a breeze through an open window. The air and sunshine waltzed across my cheek. Gazing at spring-scented starflower namul and mugwort tteok in front of me, I listened to Johann Strauss’s Voices of Spring Waltz. The cheerful sound of the violin melody and the scent of spring danced together.

(April 2021)

(Author's note: This essay is published in Stonecrop Review (A Journal of Urban Nature) Issue 5: Flora in 2022)