62 Elecampane and Mullein: Herbs for Healthy Lungs in the Cold Season
“Gather close. Keep the warmth at the center. And breathe, slowly, together, until the light comes back.”
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61 Samhain: The Ancestors’ Table and the Turning of the Celtic Year
We’ve been thinking all week about why this season matters so much, especially for those of us who’ve lived long enough to have a long table of the dead. When we’re young, Samhain is spooky. It’s about ghosts and masks and being a little bit afraid of the dark. But somewhere in midlife, it changes. The dark isn’t strange anymore. It’s full of people we love.
And there’s another turning that comes with it, if we let it. At some point, we realize that we are going to be somebody’s ancestor. The recipes we make, the way we tend a garden, the herbs we teach our granddaughters to recognize along the roadside, the way we speak to people in the checkout line. Someday someone will set a plate for us. Someday someone will make our soul cakes, or our version of them, and won’t quite get them right, and will laugh about it, and say our name.
That doesn’t feel morbid to me. It feels like the most ordinary kind of hope. It means the table goes on.
58 Putting the Garden to Bed: Fall Cleanup the Herbalist’s Way
As the first frosts arrive, Brenda shares the old way of putting the garden to bed: tucking it in rather than stripping it bare. Learn what to cut back, what to leave standing for birds and native bees, how to plant garlic at the New Moon, and the folklore of witch hazel, New England’s native autumn bloomer.
56 Elderberry Syrup for Cold Season: The Herbal Craft of Putting By
“Putting by isn’t only about pantries. It’s a whole way of moving through a year — noticing what’s abundant, and doing the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure it doesn’t…
52 John Barleycorn & the First Loaf: The Story of Lughnasadh
“The field gives back what the field was given.”
50 Our Grandmothers’ Herbs | The Thread That Came Down Sideways
She saw the devil in it. I see an old friend — this is grandmothers’ herbal wisdom, plain and simple. Welcome back to another dose of grandmothers’ herbal wisdom. Some…
46 The Sun in a Bottle| St John’s Wort at the Summer Solstice
“In February, when the light is thin, you take down that red jar — and you are holding the third week of June in your two hands.”
44 Once in a Blue Moon
“The rare moon is a doorway. And rare moons open onto rare possibilities. The things we have been carrying privately, year after year, deserve a doorway sometimes.”
41 Creating Seasonal Rhythms: Herbs & the New Moon in Aries
“For those of us navigating intensity — planetary, personal, or simply the wild energy of early spring — they offer exactly what Aries fire sometimes forgets to give itself: steadiness, and release.”
40 Fierce and Nourishing: What Nettles and Dandelion Teach Us About Strength
“Dandelion is the plant that will not be erased. Every attempt to remove her simply disperses her further — her seeds carried on the wind, landing in new places, beginning again.”