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Gardening is saving my sanity and my life. I mean, I am amazed at how many drugs come from the garden.

We’ve heard how heart patients benefit from Digitalis (foxglove). Or how the bark of the yew tree takes the bite out of breast cancer. One of the chemotherapy drugs saving my life today, called Vincristine, is from the vinca (periwinkle) plant.

With the help of chemotherapy and radiation, I have a 90 percent or better chance of curing my rare form of cancer and gardening until I am as old as dirt. I can hardly wait. Imagine what we will know then that we don’t know now!

The Oregon Garden in Silverton has a concept going that just makes me woozy with synergy. The garden’s planners want to put in a medicinal garden full of the plants that save the lives of people we know and love.

I hope they call it the “Jim Browne Medicinal Garden,” after the garden’s marketing director. You see, Jim also has cancer — B-cell lymphoma. One tumor was so large it fractured several of his ribs. Another tumor, this one in his face, is robbing him of his eyesight.

Jim says his chemo regime includes the cancer drug Etoposide, created from the May apple.

Can you imagine a garden full of plants, their synthesized medicines and cures? What a wonderful educational tool. And a great tribute to an affable guy who teaches us so much about Oregon’s premier botanical garden.

It would be heady stuff to find a cure for cancer in my own garden, but without the medical degree and Merck’s lab in my back pocket, I’ll have to leave the understanding of the high-tech stuff to my doctor.

Still, I think I’m onto a cure. The first booklet I picked up at his office is called “Coping With Cancer,” and what would you guess is one of the first coping skills the experts suggest? You got it! Gardening. I thought to myself, “Man, I am going to ace this class. Score!”

The best part about experiencing the goodness of gardening is that you don’t really have to get your hands dirty or dig a hole to get in on it. For me, this month it has been the trees. Have you noticed how vibrant the leaves are? No, it’s not another one of Anne’s wild, drug-induced hallucinations. The deciduous trees are really showing off this year. The shorter, cooler, sunnier fall days changed the sugar content of the leaves, making them pure eye candy.

So I am closing my eyes, visualizing my inner garden, while a cure for my cancer courses through my veins. (I would suggest this for any of you who are forced to work and held hostage by jobs that keep you from your love of gardening.) I visualize the colors of the leaves and the children who roll in them, and I hear their gentle rustling while I bask in my homemade Kodak moment.

The wise ones say that what we cultivate around us can’t help but grow in us. Some of you have been kind enough to share your footsteps for me to follow in this path toward continued emotional wellness. A surgeon took out the lump in my throat (that’s where they found the cancer cells), but not a day goes by I don’t experience that lump we all get in our throats when we feel thankful.

If you would like to send the Oregon Garden’s Jim Browne some great wishes and help the cause (I think it would be a natural for pharmaceutical companies to sponsor a medicinal garden), write to him at Jim Browne, Marketing Director, The Oregon Garden, P.O. Box 155, Silverton, OR 97381.

I’m going to take some time off now. Let’s get together in the February Tribune, when our garden paths will cross again!

Anne Jaeger is an Oregon State University master gardener.