a month with meadowsweet
By mid June I yearn to see the meadowsweet flourishing in the forest. This year I’d been away for a book launch and, returning for the last ten days of the month, there she was, the frothy, sweet-scented queen of the meadows, making an avenue along the forest track. I often find June a month that mixes the sad and the sweet, and this June was no exception, with news of bereavement in the family. By July, I was ready for a month with meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria).
She’s a beautiful herb, her creamy flowers cooling, the sweet note of almond above a slightly bitter, more astringent note, hinting at her pain-killing properties. Meadowsweet is high in salicylates, making her supportive for headaches, period pains, aches, and giving her scent a tang of wintergreen-freshness beneath the almond-sweetness.
Salicin was ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth centry and extracted from meadowsweet and willow to make aspirin. Her oiginal Latin name was Spiracea ulmaria and aspirin was named after her. Her analgeasic and cooling work on muscle and skin as well as internally, and she is a lovely herb to add to a bath or an end-of-shower rinse.
She is traditionally thought of as a slightly drying, balancing herb, but I’ve always experienced her as slightly moistening. It’s certainly the case that she soothes hot, inflamed, acidic tissues and helps where there is lax tissue (as in diarrhoea) or overly damp tissues (as can happen with muccousy conditions or fatigue). But t heart she is always about balance and harmony. Her sweetness tones is nutritive, which is traditionally a moistening action and this is especially so when she is working with someone who is already feeling ‘dried up and burnout. And she is as likely to soothe hot, dry irritated tissues that have too much inflammation, as to soothe hot, damp irritated tissues. Meadowsweet is a subtle healer, she listens to the body she is responding to with nuance, sometimes slightly drying where needed, sometimes subtly moistening.
We see this in her ability to buffer stomach acid, which in turn helps with acid reflux and can bring a sense of ease and flow. She calms inflammation not only in our tissues, but in heart and soul too, making her a gentle but powerful ally where there is rage or grief, where there is any emotional rawness…
She is a herb of water — always working with flow and grief. And she is a herb of air — cooling and light, her soft radiance bringing clarity. And she is a herb of the solar plexus — working with digestion and inflammation — physically, emotionally, spiritually…
When I think of meadowsweet, I think of Blodeuwedd from Welsh mythology (you can read her story in this post) who was created from flowers. The Druidic tradition sometimes lists nine, sometimes nine herbs, but meadowsweet is always one of them. Blodeuwedd is my touchstone for refusing dualisms — she is both flowers and owl and her story originated not far from where I lived in North Wales and wove itself into my poetry and my dreams:
Metamorphic I
Mudstone to slate, flowers to owl,
we live with alchemy in this place.Cwmorthin slate for a Roman fort, Tomen y Mur,
transforming the place of Blodeuwedd and Llue.Flowers for a girl to make him a bride.
Primrose, nettle and broom.Mudstone to slate, flowers to owl.
Cockle and bean, meadow-sweet, oak.Mudstone to slate, flowers to owl.
Chestnut and thorn. She wants to be flowers.Mudstone to slate, flowers to owl.
Flowers for a face, fair dexterous one.
She wants to be flowers;
they make her an owl —y gofod rhwng merch a ddyn —
the space between woman and man —Mudstone to slate.
Flowers to owl.She wants to be…
In the Druid tradition, she is one of the most sacred herbs and represents transition, blessing and celebration. Her creamy foam of misty blossoms were used in marriage celebrations and traces of wine from heather, fern and meadowsweet have been found in Scotland in drinking vessels from Neolithic times. She was found at a burial site in Wales above Llyn y Fach, the lake where the legendary herbalists, The Physcians of Myddfai later originated, inheriting their skills from a much longer oral tradition.
But of course blossom is fragile and short-lived, and she is also a reminder of that change is always with us. Some change is joyous — a wedding, a birth, a new phase of life… Some is hard to negotiate — a death, a loss, a world on fire… but meadowsweet reminds us to be in each moment, to pay tender attention to all of it. The Druid tradition also calls on meadowsweets at funerals as well as weddings and there is no more profound transition than death. She accompanied me in July to a family funeral and I am eternally grateful.
Each day a few drops of meadowsweet on the tongue to begin the day.
Each day I was home walking in the forest and spending time simply gazing into the face of those blossoms as soft as sea-foam.
Each day I was home, a pot of bath tea to pour into the water — meadowsweet, lavender, rose. (Infuse the herbs for 7 minutes in boiling water and pour in hot, but ensure you add cool water to balance the temperature).
Each day, attending — seeing with the unworn sides of the eyes, as Thoreau put it, seeing with the heart.
She whispered what I expected — nourishment, cooling, soothing the inflammation of lupus, the inflammation of griefs…
And she whispered what I did not expect. In dream after dream I revisited moments of transition that had not been honoured, that had sometimes come too early, too unbidden. The child made responsible for unadult parents, trading in play for watchfulness. The teenager married too young, trading in exploration for control. The young woman becoming a young mother, feeling her way unmothered with a partner even more at sea, ill-equiped to be the oak to her birch.
She breathed the scent of innocence back into moments that had been neglected and trampled. We think of healing so often as for this present pain, so easily neglect the pains we’ve tucked away so deep we hardly recall them. But the herbs know that time loops and weaves in our bodies, that even the forgotten scars can be soothed.
Those transitions were what they were, but in touching them again, they can be, softly, slowly, transformed. For all her frothiness, meadowsweet is able to go with us into the shadows and do profound work.
This work is for all of us, for those of us with privilege, who by sheer good fortune happen not to be living under seige, our children and grandchilren deliberately starved. And it is, or should be, for those who are living under such conditions. Innocence is in short supply when children are not allowed to grow up playful and unafraid. And if we can do so little, we can at least witness to those places and people whose innocence is being trampled.
After all, meadowsweet is a herb of water — always working with flow and grief., a herb of air — always cooling and light. A herb of transitions, breathing her fizz of creamy innocence and deep healing of pain into our lives, even where the shadows are at their darkest.