CHARLEMAGNE'S COMPLETE PLANT LIST & MODERN GROWING GUIDE ~ No Email Sign-up Required
From Charlemagne to the 12th Century — and What Was Lost Between Hildegard von Bingen’s herbalism is perhaps the most frequently cited and least accurately understood figure in the contemporary Western herbalism revival. She appears on tea tins and wellness websites, her name attached to adaptogenic blends and ‘medieval wisdom’ skincare. She is claimed by…
“The plants have virtues hidden from us, and the physician who does not know them labours in the dark.” — attributed to Galen of Pergamon, 2nd century AD Something is circulating online — a clip, a quote, a breathless caption — claiming that your houseplant senses your arrival from two kilometres away. That it responds…
“The Druids make it their business to know many things by heart, and so they spend twenty years in training. They consider it improper to commit their doctrines to writing.” — Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI.14 A Coin Hoard and a Question About Gaulish Herbal Inheritance At the beginning of the twentieth century, a farmer…
On criticality, cascade, and what we set in motion Part II of a continuing meditation on being and calling The first thing to understand about an avalanche is that it does not begin with force. It begins with a threshold. What We Set In Motion A single crystal of snow shifts. On most slopes, on…
A meditation on finitude, calling, and the weight of being specifically you . . . What it means to live fully is not, finally, an abstract question. There is a signal firing in your brain that has never fired in exactly that way before, in any brain, in the history of the world. Neuroscientists recently confirmed…
The €67 Spring Cure and the Physician-King Who Got There First Somewhere online right now, someone is reading a sales page about their body’s spring transition. It will tell them that winter caused toxin accumulation. That their liver, kidneys, and intestines are saturated. That spring is the moment to purify and re-energize. That they need…
A British man appeared recently on the internet, armed only with honesty and a sense of proportion. “America has got pew-pews, space and lots of confidence. In the UK, we’ve just got Greggs and rain. There’s no match, honestly. We are like America’s tiny, tiny little baby brother and sister.” The video — which you…
In the year 812, the Emperor Charlemagne issued a decree. It covered the administration of royal estates across the Frankish empire — their grain yields, their livestock, their accounting practices. Buried in the middle of this administrative document, in a section that most medieval historians have treated as a footnote, is a list of plants…
