Right now along the East Coast, the light has shifted into its specific June quality — long evenings, days that push past eight o'clock, gardens at their most demanding and their most generous at the same time. Lavender is showing color on established plants, the buds swelling and the first florets cracking open at the base of those upright spikes. Along moist, shaded stream banks, American skullcap is putting out its first small blue flowers. In California's dry foothills, yerba santa is in full bloom — clusters of lavender-purple tubes on sticky, resin-coated branches that won't look like anything most of you have ever grown.
Three very different herbs, but each one comes with a preparation rule that matters more than almost anything else about it. Lavender, unusually, gets more potent when dried — the opposite of most herbs on this list. Skullcap has to be tinctured fresh or you lose nearly all of the medicine. And yerba santa's primary constituents are resins that won't dissolve in water, which changes everything about how you work with it.
Let’s get into how to harvest, prepare and use all of them: