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By Carina Magyar in Herbs —

I: Thrift

Was Benjamin Franklin a spy?

primidi, the 21st of Floréal, Year CCXXXI
A butterfly enjoying the sea thrift. Photo by S N Pattenden / Unsplash

Good morning. Today is primidi, the 21st of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le statice, an herb that tosses up pink blooms by the seaside.

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Whereas the saltbush from two days ago absorbs salt from otherwise inhospitable soil, today's herb has a remarkable ability to eat copper. Sea thrift grows along shoreline habitats at the edgeline between vegetation and beach, so it's generally tunnelling its roots into mineral-rich ground. As one of the few plants that can tolerate both salt and copper, a predominance of thrift is a sure sign that copper deposits are nearby. One place to see lots of thrift is on Ireland's Copper Coast just southwest of Waterford, where the pink flowerheads sway this time of year to the exclusion of anything else.

The very essence of thrift may be that famous line from Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin: "A penny saved is a penny earned." That proverb alone may be the reason the penny has stubbornly clung to life as a coin in the United States despite being inflated to nothingness decades ago. But more interestingly, Franklin's personal frugality was ... well, let's just say some things are easier said than done.

We begin with the strong suspicion among some historians that Ben Franklin spent his critical years in Paris – when he negotiated the military assistance of the French in the Revolutionary War and coordinated the fateful Treaty of Paris that truly gave birth to the independent United States – as a double-agent spy for the British. And, while doing so, brazenly spent 100,000 pounds of the Continental Congress's money.

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