Protective & Ritual

Sleep on it. Wake when you are healed.

The wood that does not rot in water. The tree that bleeds orange when it is cut.

Named for the archangel. The naming was not casual.

The world was made of it. The world is ending in it. These things are related.

The candle wax came first. The medicine followed the scent.

The tree that poisons its own ground to reign alone.

It flowers before it leafs. It gives before it warns.

From sacred waters, a flower that opens the dreaming mind.

The fairy wood announced itself before you entered it.

Smell it when you are knee-deep in Highland water and you will understand everything.

The handle was the metaphor. The plant was always the point.

It has stood sentinel on these hills since before your name.

At the margin of every body of water. Neither land nor water — something older than both.

Before the cultivated rose forgot itself, this was what a rose was.

Guardian of the threshold between worlds.

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

The silver ghost that purifies air and poisons dreams.

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

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

When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion. It is never out of blossom.

You may rest beneath it. You may not cut it down.

Wisdom lives at the bottom of the pool where the hazelnuts fall.

The moor in August is a purple sound as much as a colour.

The undying king. Red berries in December. The tree that was here before Christmas arrived.

Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

It does not kill what it climbs. It simply outlasts it.

The berry that made gin. The smoke that cleared temples. The bush that hid the prophet.

The smell of it is a memory of somewhere you have never been.

It rises from black water, untouched by what made it.

It touches neither earth nor sky. That is precisely its power.

Before all other herbs, remember mugwort.

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

The Druids did not worship in groves. They worshipped in oak groves. The distinction matters.

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

The oldest sentinel still exhales its resinous memory.

For remembrance. For the dead. For everything in between.

Plant it by the gate. Something is always watching for a reason to enter.

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

It grows in every lawn. Most people who need it most are walking over it.

The first tree back after the ice. It has always known how to begin.

Evergreen in midwinter. Fragrant in January. Poisonous always.

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

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

A rose that smells of apples, with thorns that mean it.

It smells of nothing while living. Cut it, dry it, and it becomes the scent of old forests and May wine.

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.

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

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

Grief. Divination. Aspirin. The tree knew about pain long before chemistry did.

It blooms when all else has surrendered to the cold.

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.

The name means pliant, not witch. But the witch association arrived anyway and stayed.

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

It was old before the church was built around it. It will be here after.