Herbs & Forbs

The queen of poisons. She has never pretended to be anything else.

Sleep on it. Wake when you are healed.

Named for the archangel. The naming was not casual.

Whatever it calls itself, the bees have already made their decision.

The beautiful lady who grants visions — and silence.

Dock pudding served at Easter. A northern dish. The south never learned it.

The fairy wood announced itself before you entered it.

Ego borago gaudia semper ago — I, borage, always bring courage.

The burr that invented Velcro. The root that fed the hungry. The plant that refuses to be ignored.

It faces the sun all day and will not look away.

Named for the healer who could not heal himself.

The most gentle thing in this archive. Which is not the same as the least powerful.

The clear eye that opens what it closes.

It latches on. This is also what it does for the lymph.

The flower comes first, alone, before there are any leaves. It is still winter when it arrives.

Knitbone. Boneset. The plant that remembers what the body has forgotten.

The keys of Saint Peter, dropped in the meadow and never recovered.

The weed is a category invented by people who stopped paying attention.

It does not grant visions. It takes you somewhere and leaves you there.

The violet without a scent. The most common, the most overlooked, the one Shakespeare walked past every spring.

Helen of Troy wept into the earth and this grew from her tears. The name preserves it.

Named for a witch. Found in every shadowed wood. It never promised to be innocent.

A tiny white flower with a yellow eye, in every poor meadow. It has seen everything and says nothing.

Sweet anise breath of ancient roads, it remembers everything.

For the pain behind the eyes. For the things that keep returning.

It grew where men fell. It will outlast every monument.

It arrives where fire has been. It covers what fire has left.

The heart that heals you can also be the hand that stops yours.

A pale impersonator of deadlier kin, holding its own secrets.

Break the stem. The orange bleeds immediately. The plant has no hesitation.

Love-in-idleness. Pansies for thoughts. The flower pressed into Oberon's scheme.

It smells of mice and cold stone. It grows where the dead have been.

The smell of it alone is a warning. Few plants are this honest.

Four leaves, four petals, four sepals, one dark berry — and a symmetry that unsettles.

The sedative in the beer. This was not an accident.

It silences dogs. The name is a specific claim, not a metaphor.

Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

The weed that fed empires, forgotten in abundance.

Melissa means bee. The bees knew first.

Beggars blistered themselves with it and held out the wounds for pennies.

The sweetest smell in the woodland. The most dangerous thing in the garden.

Cuckoo pint. Wake robin. The names are all innuendo and none of them are wrong.

The leaves are spotted white on green, like a diseased lung. The herbalists took this as instruction.

The poor man's bread. The first healer of the raw and swollen.

A root that screams, a root that heals — sometimes the same root.

Blue as a sky seen through old woodland. It asks nothing and lasts the summer.

It flowers in autumn with no leaves, no stem, no context — as if arriving from somewhere else entirely.

The sweetness of it carried on water tells you where it grows.

The older mint. Cooler, greener, less insistent than its hybrid child.

The name says who it is for. The second name says what it does to the heart.

Before all other herbs, remember mugwort.

The hag's taper — torch of the cunning, lung of the meadow.

It offers sleep. What sleep offers is another matter.

The smallest of the mints. The one with the most to answer for.

Cool on the tongue, older than the gardens that grew it.

The white man's foot. It followed every conquest and healed the people who survived them.

First of the year. First of the fairies. First through the grief.

Lethal to horses. Essential to everything else. The conflict is not resolvable.

Blood-purifier. Bee-keeper. The luck of three and the magic of four.

The herb of grace. The herb of repentance. The herb of things left unsaid.

A nervine for the frayed and the overwound. The helmet tells you where it works.

It grows in the shade of old things and asks nothing of the light.

Cut at midsummer, at the height of its power, it bleeds red.

It bites the hand that does not know how to reach for it.

It turns its face to the sun all morning. By afternoon it has made up its mind.

They rubbed it on the dead to keep the flies away. Then they rubbed it on themselves.

The heads were used to raise the nap on wool. The water that collects in the leaf cups was said to cure eye complaints. Both uses are still in practice.

Courage, passage, and the smell of the hills above the sea.

Butter and eggs on the railway bank. A snapdragon no bee can open by accident.

The earth bleeds gold, and memory follows.

The smell of it keeps cats and insomniacs faithful.

The druids called it the sacred herb. They did not give that name casually.

The Doctrine of Signatures read the spotted stem as scales and the nutlets as heads. The bees read it as a feast.

Not a sedative. Not a philosopher's death. Convulsions within the hour.

England's mandrake: a pale root shaped like a man, and no less dangerous.

The blue that Caesar saw. The colour of a people who knew what they were defending.

The windflower lives where nothing else dares to, in the bare weeks before the canopy closes.

A quiet guardian with a long memory.

Bitter before all else. Then the other things begin.

The soldier's herb — where blood flows, yarrow follows.