Beach/House, Fall 2024
Shadows lengthen. The crowds are gone. The weather is at its most glorious. Autumn arrives and cozy season begins on the Outer Cape. It’s the time of year when people here head back indoors to tackle some of the household projects that were impossible to even think about during summer’s hubbub. Evenings that were spent dining outdoors are now savored in front of a fire. In this special edition of the Provincetown Independent's home, garden, and design pages, we’re easing our way into the fall projects that come before the year-end holidays and the promise of the new year ahead.
Shadows lengthen. The crowds are gone. The weather is at its most glorious. Autumn arrives and cozy season begins on the Outer Cape. It’s the time of year when people here head back indoors to tackle some of the household projects that were impossible to even think about during summer’s hubbub. Evenings that were spent dining outdoors are now savored in front of a fire. In this special edition of the Provincetown Independent's home, garden, and design pages, we’re easing our way into the fall projects that come before the year-end holidays and the promise of the new year ahead.
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Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | <strong>Fall</strong> <strong>2024</strong> | 21<br />
On a Former Gravel Pit,<br />
a Healing Garden Grows<br />
By Dorothea Samaha<br />
Fiona Mulligan is wearing a shirt<br />
that she hand- dyed using indigo<br />
she grew herself. The color is<br />
a dusty purple- blue that stands out<br />
against her deeply suntanned skin.<br />
Mulligan, who designs edible landscapes<br />
for others, tends her own in<br />
Eastham. She spends as many hours<br />
as she possibly can in her garden.<br />
“I’m not always doing work,” says<br />
Mulligan. “I like to watch the bugs.”<br />
Hers is a no- spray operation —<br />
not even the organic stuff. She trusts<br />
that the beneficial insects will devour<br />
the harmful ones. On one side of her<br />
land, a froth of flowering greenery is<br />
crawling with tiny black- and- orange<br />
bodies.<br />
“This was a celery plant that went<br />
to flower,” says Mulligan. She plunges<br />
a hand fearlessly into the mess.<br />
“All of these bugs here are called soldier<br />
beetles. Their larvae will eat the<br />
larva of pests.”<br />
It’s also a no- till operation. Mulligan<br />
walks barefoot down her swale<br />
walkways, careful not to tread on the<br />
dirt beds where her plants grow. “One<br />
step can hold a lot of pounds per inch,”<br />
she says. To make the beds, Mulligan<br />
broadforks them only once. They’re<br />
never compacted again. “That way,”<br />
says Mulligan, “the plants are able to<br />
root very deeply without struggle.”<br />
By mid- August, her eggplants and<br />
tomatoes have grown tall.<br />
Compacted soil causes all kinds of<br />
issues, says Mulligan: erosion, poor<br />
water retention, nutrient deficiencies.<br />
She’s protective of her painstakingly<br />
maintained loose dirt. The<br />
idea of people wandering around her<br />
garden, reckless and unsupervised,<br />
she says, “would be like if someone<br />
walked in and just took my boyfriend’s<br />
surfboards off the wall and<br />
started using them.”<br />
Her plants, which easily reach the<br />
deepest dirt, have good immune systems.<br />
At the end of the year, she cuts<br />
everything flat or pulls it up. In the<br />
spring, she adds a layer of compost on<br />
top. “That’s it,” she says. “It’s ready<br />
for the season.”<br />
Mulligan grows all the vegetables<br />
she might need for dinner:<br />
carrots and garlic, cucumbers and<br />
eggplants, peppers and tomatoes and<br />
beans. She also grows the ingredients<br />
for her tinctures, soaps, and salves,<br />
the things she sells labeled Healing<br />
Hands Apothecary.<br />
For her soaps she dries calendula,<br />
rose, evergreens, and lavender. In the<br />
rental cottage in Eastham she calls<br />
her herbal studio, she’ll grind the<br />
leaves or flowers into a powder, then<br />
pour it into the soap in the making.<br />
The result after one to two months of<br />
curing: speckled rectangles, colored<br />
blush, yellow, gray- green, and white,<br />
scented with essential oils, and ready<br />
to sell. The top of each soap is decorated<br />
with dried flowers, hinting at<br />
the scents within.<br />
She makes witch hazel products<br />
from her own hamamelis. There’s an<br />
arnica salve that incorporates cayenne,<br />
comfrey, and ginger for muscle<br />
pain. A glass jar, glowing in the lateafternoon<br />
light, contains a concoction<br />
for the face: cold- pressed apricot<br />
kernel oil and rosehip oil, infused for<br />
up to six months with other plants<br />
Mulligan has grown and dried. The<br />
blend, she says, will change based on<br />
what’s growing when she’s mixing<br />
her products.<br />
Mulligan, is certified in advanced<br />
clinical herbalism — a designation<br />
she earned through the American<br />
Herbalist Guild. But she says she’s<br />
grown weary of how trendy herbalism<br />
can be.<br />
Mulligan’s multipurpose calendula: it decorates her handmade soaps,<br />
is brewed in oil for her tinctures, and looks beautiful in her garden.<br />
A glass jar contains a concoction for the face: cold- pressed apricot kernel oil<br />
and rosehip oil, infused with a variety of helpful plants Mulligan has grown.<br />
Fiona Mulligan’s handmade soaps are scented with essential oils and decorated with herbs and<br />
flowers from her own expansive garden. (Photos by Agata Storer)<br />
“A lot of the information out<br />
there has been scaring me,” she<br />
says. “People think what they’re doing<br />
is safe just because they’re using<br />
plants.” She doesn’t sell her herbs as<br />
medicines, she says. “I don’t want<br />
someone taking a willow tincture<br />
just because they heard it’s good for<br />
something.”<br />
Mulligan grew up in Rutherford,<br />
N.J., then farther west, in the town<br />
of Harmony. At 18, she moved to England<br />
to attend Newcastle- Upon-<br />
Tyne University, where she studied<br />
nutrition. There she had a realization,<br />
she says: “Eating and growing<br />
much of your own food and living<br />
a life close to the land is one of the<br />
most timeless ways to be happy and<br />
healthy.” She pursued that idea on<br />
stays in India and on travels in Ireland,<br />
Peru, Puerto Rico, and Ecuador.<br />
In each place she found herself<br />
studying village farms and exploring<br />
herbalism. In India, she said, “I<br />
Mulligan gathers comfrey in her no- till garden.<br />
was tilling fields with horses at one<br />
point.”<br />
Back in the U.S. and looking for a<br />
place to farm, she followed the advice<br />
of a friend who lives in Brewster and<br />
moved to the Cape, where she met her<br />
boyfriend, Matt Rivers. He hired her<br />
to work on the land behind the house<br />
where they now live. “He wanted a<br />
vegetable garden,” says Mulligan.<br />
She decided the garden should be<br />
bigger. Now it stretches to something<br />
like 100 feet long.<br />
For her birthday last year, Rivers<br />
bought her arched trellises, which<br />
frame the entrances to the garden.<br />
Climbing up one of them is a schisandra<br />
vine, a plant native to the forests<br />
of northern China, the Russian<br />
Far East, and Korea. Also called the<br />
five- flavor berry, it’s considered<br />
an adaptogen: a plant that helps the<br />
body to respond to stress.<br />
Tucked beside the trellis are<br />
three varieties — Krishna, Vana, and<br />
Kapoor — of tulsi, which is native<br />
to tropical and subtropical regions<br />
of Australia, Malesia, Asia, and the<br />
western Pacific. Mulligan doesn’t include<br />
tulsi in the products she sells<br />
— the plant is sacred in India, she<br />
says, so she doesn’t want to monetize<br />
it. “The leaves are fun to crunch<br />
and smell,” she says, handing over a<br />
sprig. Vana tulsi, especially, is enticingly<br />
aromatic; it smells like a blend<br />
of clove and cinnamon in a strong,<br />
warm tea.<br />
She moved to Eastham for<br />
her relationship, she says, but she<br />
wouldn’t have ended up on a farm in<br />
Maine, like the one some friends of<br />
hers just bought. “I need to be close<br />
to the ocean,” says Mulligan, even<br />
though it means farming only a very<br />
small space.<br />
“I always envisioned 50 acres for<br />
myself,” says Mulligan. “I’d love to<br />
have cows and pigs and chickens.” On<br />
the other side of the property, there’s<br />
a little orchard — “not ideal,” says<br />
Mulligan. “Long story.” The soil is<br />
sandy and prone to erosion, she says,<br />
since the whole property used to belong<br />
to Brewster Sand & Gravel.<br />
But Mulligan grows what she can.<br />
“The hazelnuts are actually pretty big<br />
and fat right now,” she says.