Before the oak at the ancient Dodona oracle became associated with Zeus, it was dedicated to Dione, the archaic goddess that Zeus would marry in that place. Her priestesses were the Peléiades, three women that would divine by listening to the wind blowing among the oak branches. The oak was sacred to the goddess throughout the Mediterranean, before the Indo-European invaders subsumed this ancient cult into their own worship of a male god of thunder and rain. Even so, the oak ended up symbolising the marriage of earth and sky.

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There are times when I want to dwell in places of the mind and heart, reminisce, and relive experiences that shaped me.

When this happens, I usually write poetry.

Poetry writing starts in an unmediated place inside me. Later, I devote time to revising and polishing. At first, though, an emotion (re)surfaces from within, some place where I have left something unsaid or unspoken, where I need to return to make sense of a bit of who I am.

In the poetry I pen from experience, I live multiple times, on various levels, at each re-reading.

A poem can make the reading experience multi-layered.

Here I offer a structured form of poetry: a pantoum.

A pantoum is written in 4-line stanzas, and the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the following one, except for the last stanza, where the repetitions differ.

In the last stanza, in fact, the repeated lines are the second from the penultimate stanza, the third from the first stanza, the fourth from the penultimate stanza, and the first from the first stanza.

The interweaving of the preceding and new lines contributes to the development of the narrative and/or the mood, while also conveying a sense of intensity.

The giant oak stood on the hilltop.

My cousins and I were sitting in its branches.

Guarda, il mare è così azzurro.

Look, the sea is so very blue.





My cousins and I were sitting in its branches.

Laughter and chuckles rolling down the hill

Look, the sea is so very blue.

We stayed on top of the hill, top of the world till evening.





Laughter and chuckles rolling down the hill

Fast forward, into a strange night in March

We stayed on top of the hill, top of the world till evening.

A blizzard came.





Fast forward, into a straight night in March

Wind, lightning, thunder, storm

A blizzard came

And then pitch black.





Wind, lightning, thunder, storm

Ominous silence hanging all around

And then pitch black

The oak burnt down to a stump.





Ominous silence hanging all around 

Its branches scattered like disjointed bones 

The oak burnt down to a stump 

Tonight the sea is an old grey man with foam at his mouth. 





Its branches scattered like disjointed bones 

The sea howls, and rages and pounds against the fateful sky 

Tonight the sea is an old grey man with foam at his mouth 

And I, I close my eyes to be in the oak's branches again. 





The sea howls and rages, and pounds against the fateful sky. 

Guarda, il mare è così azzurro. 

And I, I close my eyes to be in the oak's branches again. 

The giant oak stood on the hilltop.







Thank you for being here and reading Writing with Plants and Flowers and The Magic Fountain.

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As a woman who came back to Italy after years spent in other beloved places, trying to salvage what feels lost, buried and forgotten, I identify as a “pagana,” from the Latin “pagus:” an inhabitant of the countryside, one of those who were outside the bounds of city jurisdiction and administrative power, at the fringes, and therefore not easy to control.

Living about an hour away from the city feels exactly that way, refusing all that Rome, with its long history, came to represent (empire, patriarchy, domination, religious dogma and influence, coercion, grandeur and decadence) while being still mischievously close.

I was born in Rome from a non-Roman family; a family still able to remember the old times of simple and difficult living in the countryside. And yet, in this very native village, the cultural amnesia brought about by Church influence and national pop culture feels very tangible, especially in summer, when the crowds flee the hot city, looking for some ease on the hills, carrying with them their penchant for noise.

I have chosen to come back and take refuge here because this is the way I can retrieve an interrupted connection, by listening to the land, both her beauty and grief. I can’t identify with the modern narrative of what an Italian is supposed to be like. I am delving deeper, through and beyond layers of erasure, denial, dispossession and sorrow.

In Italy, there’s such a huge cultural variance among regions, and even provinces, that experiences and perceptions are bound to be very different. The narrative of the unitary national state has not been enough to mend the fractured alliances, the rivalries and prejudices, not to speak of profoundly different histories and heritages.

Dwellers of the countryside have been the first to become “others” under the rule of the powerful, the state, and the Church, which have exercised their disciplining influences, while forgetting, breaking and homologizing by various means.

On a deep level, this national state I was born in doesn’t feel aligned with the longing in my soul. I have felt the depths of belonging in the Scottish Highlands, and in the Baltic forests, and now, in this half-forgotten corner of the Italian countryside, even though here my belonging is more frayed with friction.

My way of dealing with this is through deep attuning and listening to what I can observe and experience in my surroundings and in the interwoven lands of the imagination. Both crossings are passages into subtler perception: thus, flowers, plants, trees, birds, insects, animals, features of the land, mountains, lakes, rivers, people, and emergent feelings and stories, theirs and my own. Wherever I am, I listen, also when it is difficult to make out feeble voices and inarticulate emotions.

I offer one-to-one guided poetic and narrative journeys. You can book or contact me here.

I started this publication to offer creative engagement with plants and flowers, as a way to reclaim and retrieve what was lost, forgotten or overlooked, plunge into the imaginal dimension, and deepen my relationship to the land I inhabit.

I am a poet and writer trained in creative arts therapies, literature and anthropology. I care about the imagination, as that wild, fertile, pathless land where everything originates and takes root first.

How can you walk into a pathless land?

You make way. This is how the imagination acts: subtle perceiving walks you there. And it doesn’t happen on a linear, already laid-out path.

I am drawn to what is not immediately evident, the unknown and subtle, the mysterious and unstated. As someone who considers writing her medium, I see my task as listening, bringing back and “translating” insight into story and poetry, in a way that tends the dream and deepens intuition and the capacity for vision.

This is why in my creative practice I explore the field of story as something alive and responsive and also facilitate imaginal pathfinding through poetic and narrative journeys that enable you to tap into a relational imaginative space.

Imagination comes before creative output. Imagination is the underlying, generative ground that nourishes everything, including creativity.

It is a force that enables you to sense and dream possibilities into being, and to listen to what already is.

The words, sounds and images that arise from this hidden force are qualitatively different. They are not mere creative products. They are ways of being in relation and holding the tension between the manifest and the un-manifest.

To take an alternative poetic or narrative journey with me, contact me or book here.

This wonderful rose with only five petals is ancient, resilient, graceful, wild. In folklore, it is associated to love that goes beyond time and death. In my life, it is connected to nostalgia, or better still Sehnsucht, the German word for an undefined yearning for something unknown, mysterious, discreet, profound and secret, maybe an inner home-coming beyond all experienced circumstances.

When I walk in the wood, or the country lanes surrounding my place, the wild rose heralds advanced Spring, yet it is all except an uncomplicated season, as where I live Spring often comes with showers and lightning storms. The wild rose holds contradictions in a nice poise: sweetness and bitterness, beauty and wildness, strength and grace. It is about the ancient “both… and” mindset that used to be a feature of magic: the ability to hold contradictions not as incompatible, but as dynamic polarities along a spectrum.

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Beyond the neat distinction between reason and common sense on one hand, and fantasy and wishful thinking on the other, we enter the vast expanse of the imagination, a dimension tapped into by creative artists of all times, but not acknowledged enough in common parlance.

Analytical philosophy and cognitive psychology have given both abstract and empirical accounts of this “image-making faculty.”

These approaches are not wrong, but partial and reductive, because they rely on a bidimensional anthropology that contemplates a human being composed of mind and body only, functioning in a mechanical way.

As already pointed out, humans are multidimensional beings.

The imagination is more than an individual faculty; it is an elemental force field, the most direct pointer to our multidimensionality, and the existence of psyche and spirit.

Psyche, or soul, is the relational element of the human being embedded in a complex web of relations and interactions. Spirit is the fire, the vital spark in us.

Emotions and intuition are the tools of the imagination, in that they provide energetic information about the way something affects us.

In fact, when we visualize or construct a sensory picture of a situation, our emotions shift and change, and our neural activity is affected too. MRI scans prove that the body-mind does not distinguish between a simulation and an experience of something. In both cases, we feel emotions and register them as “real.” Thus, working with the imagination through sensory detail arousing emotions is effective. The reverse is also true: spontaneous intuition and emotions give us access to the imagination and to the multidimensional body of the human constitution.

Paying attention to the intuitive feelings and emotions we feel in our bodies is a gateway that enables us to retrieve the alphabet of the imagination, as the main language of our whole being.

When we imagine a situation, our physical body is involved too through the experience of emotions. In the same way, embodiment can affect and enhance our ability to tap into the imagination, as in the case of acting out a scenario, for example.

The embodied imagination can help us access new concepts and understandings through veritable shifts, insights that are signalled by a change in the way we describe and inhabit a situation.

In other words, language itself signals these shifts in intuitive understanding through heightened metaphors.

According to Greek etymology, “metaphor” means “to carry across.” This is usually interpreted as transferring a quality from an object to another to stress their common attributes. However, in this light, metaphor is also what carries us across, over and beyond our current ways of understanding and processing experience, into the next.

In this sense, metaphor can signal a shift in the way we come to experience, know and register situations and events.

We can feed the imagination to evolve or manipulate. We can also cultivate imagination as a portal to living with what is from moment to moment: to awaken and abide by the mystery of existence, and become stewards in service to life, in its multiple relationships.

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Today it is a cross-quarter day, and the beginning of glorious May, the month of the roses. The wild rose epitomizes the beauty, resiliency, and wild spirit of nature, thus it is one of my favourites, even if it is not as glamourous as cultivated roses.

I associate this unique rose with five petals to rebelliousness and independence, as well as poetry, for the spirit of poetry can only thrive when the heart refuses to bow down to all that deprives the soul of its true inheritance.

The wild rose is simple and ancient at the same time. In the Mediterranean area it is very widespread.

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Martin Ruland’s Lexicon of Alchemy, a book published in 1622, contains the following definition of imagination:

Imagination is the star (astrum) in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.

Carl Gustav Jung noticed this definition with exhilaration, as it opened up his own perspective regarding the parallels between Depth Psychology and the Great Work of alchemy.1

To his eyes, suddenly imagination appeared as the ‘subtle body’ between dense body and abstract mind, the very stuff of the Unconscious. Jung was a psychiatrist, and wanted to secure the status of the theory of archetypes within the domain of materialistic science; yet, on a deeper level, he was tapping into something else altogether.

These enigmatic declarations become clearer when considered from the point of view of the multidimensionality of the human being.

In other words, despite materialist accounts that only recognize the existence of matter, or mind and matter at best, according to mystics from Western and Eastern traditions, the human body is made up of seven “bodies”, or dimensions of consciousness. The physical body is only the densest and the one directly visible. The others are subtle energy bodies interconnected, and nested within one another, which we can observe only indirectly, through their actions and effects. Here is a synthetic list, to be considered as a “map” to the territory:

1. Physical body

2. Etheric or vital body

3. Astral or emotional body

4. Mental or rational body

5. Causal body

6. Spiritual body

7. Monadic body

The third body, the astral, is the one that registers all the emotions and emotional effects of external stimuli, turning them into internal ones, and conversely, generates internal emotions and images that influence our perception and ideation.

It is the subtle body that is affected by, and at the same time affects, emotions, dreams, images, symbols, ideas: it is the substance of imagination itself, acting as a bridge linking the physical and the emotional on one hand, and the emotional and mental dimensions on the other.

This action is well visible in the dream state, which is capable of creating images without receiving sense impressions, but also of recreating impressions and emotions received during waking time.

Throughout Western history of philosophy, imagination has been seen as either recreative or productive, capable of receiving and replicating, or producing and creating internal images. At the same time, the multidimensionality of the human being has been progressively reduced to one dimensionality: mind and matter, or matter only.

For the alchemists, imagination is key:

Ruland’s definition of imagination is a constitutional metaphor, if we take metaphor to be much more than a mere rhetorical device to embellish language, as something that is wired in the human being as the way we imagine, think, embody and make meaning every day, and therefore “we live by.”2

We cannot understand imagination fully if we divorce it from the multidimensional constitution of the human being on one hand, and the embodied character of metaphor on the other. We are metaphorical beings, in that we think, feel, and act in metaphors and all we create and ideate is an “image” of something else, going deeper and deeper, in the attempt of making meaning, and finding a way of sharing it.

Behind even the clearest and most “neutral” statement and image, there are other images, and the assumptions connected to them: imagination is constitutive, not derivative, and our realities are constructed. Creative imagination is what makes them possible in the first place.

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Coffee and Omelette

I sip coffee at the table 
of an old shop where
they serve asparagus omelette
with onion, and a sprinkle 
of pepper. The waitress
has a welcoming grin
and an old-fashioned notepad
to take orders.

Soft, fragile hints
in a world where they give us
chatboxes to talk to
and pour our hearts into,
and forget about the smell of
fresh coffee, and the beauty
of a human touch:

a waitress serving asparagus
omelette with onion, holding her tray
with a bright smile on her lips.

This small oil painting by Édouard Manet belongs to a still-life series he painted in 1880. According to art history, the art critic Charles Ephrussi bought it for 800 francs, but then decided to give the artist a thousand. Shortly after, Manet painted a single sprig of asparagus and sent it to the critic with a note saying there was a missing sprig in his bunch. Below, his The Sprig of Asparagus, nowadays in the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris:

Art historians highlight the artist’s wit, in establishing a direct equivalence between the actual object (asparagus) and its representation (the painting), to show his gratitude. Apart from this anecdote, what is striking is the vibrancy of the bundle painting. The asparagus are alive with colour, texture and detail, while the depiction of the single sprig is reductionist in kind. To me, they represent two very different ways of connecting to the same subject.

The vibrancy of the asparagus bunch painting is the fruit not only of artistic talent, but also of keen perception, which in turn come out of careful looking. When we observe something with a similar care and accuracy, we establish a relationship to what we are observing.

The depiction of the sprig is a further elaboration of the subject, whereby the artist experiments with a version of asparagus that is much less immediate. In other words, it is a statement about the painted status of the asparagus.

Reflect and jot down your answers to the following two questions:

Which version do you prefer? Why?

What kind of observation and engagement with the subject do the two versions entail from your point of view?

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I have been circling over the topic of this piece for a couple of days, in the attempt to pinpoint and convey a strong existential stance, through a seemingly counterintuitive take on the beauty of plants, imagination and well… everything else.

Albert Einstein said it best:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

We live in a world saturated with information and knowledge, not always of the best and most trustworthy kind; however, knowledge is more readily available and accessible than in any previous era. And yet, thinking, knowing, feeling, have become flattened and more superficial in the continuous hustle and bustle of life run on the cogs of a giant, global machine-like system of life.

I was reading a lyrical essay by David George Haskell describing his interaction with four different wildflowers in Atalanta, his hometown, when I came across this statement:

Celebrating wildflowers is not an anaesthetic — attentiveness reveals loss as well as beauty — but a grounding in the world as it is. Because flowers so entrance our senses, they offer memorable lessons reorienting us back to the living Earth.1

Indeed, this is what I feel and write about in Writing with Plants and Flowers: the sense of weaving our existence in the tapestry of the plants living on the land we share, as an antidote to the sense of disconnection induced by current news and lifestyles, and a pathway to the joy of belonging and sharing here on Earth.

I would add that communing with plants and flowers through observation, engagement, and stillness enhances our imagination, in a way many philosophers and thinkers of old already knew.

I will reserve to expand on this in other posts; here, I intend to draw attention to the imagination itself, even if grouping plants, flowers and imagination may seem somewhat arbitrary. Please, bear with me.

Globalized culture has a pendant for categorization typical of western thought. Thus, we mostly think of the imagination as a cognitive faculty, an ability that enables us to “form mental images, sensations, or concepts of things not currently perceived by the senses, including creative, fantastical, or remembered scenes.”2 More specifically, according to the definition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

1. the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality

2. a) a creative ability

b) ability to confront and deal with a problem

c) the thinking or active mind

3. a) a creative product of the mind

b) a fanciful or empty assumption

c) something that only exists in one’s mind

What jumps to the eye in this definition is its abstract, disembodied quality, proceeding from the most inclusive to the most exclusive, or even pejorative, case.

Imagination is considered an attribute of mind, which is not the whole story.

There are other frameworks such as Dr Murray Hunter’s 8 types of imagination, which define imagination depending on its most emphasized function in any given endeavour. Thus, imagination can be combinatory, constructive, imaginative fantasy, empathetic, strategic, emotional, dream, and memory reconstruction.3

I could go on and on, quoting philosophers and psychologists, and showing that there are also other functions attributed to imagination, such as pretence, surmise, filling in the gaps, projection, etc.

However, this is not the direction I am going in here. It is enough to point out that imagination has had an ambiguous or subordinate status in Western rationalist thought.

What I intend to reclaim here is imagination as a specific mode of knowledge that is not located primarily “in the head” of a subject, but is a diffuse, sensory and embodied power. Passing though feeling, it is a gateway to intuition, according to a participatory logic where there is no hard split between knowing subject and known object.

This was the way imagination was conceived of in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and beyond, in esoteric circles.

Our skins are permeable membranes. There is no such thing as a hard separation, as the late Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn articulated in his work on Interbeing.4

Imagination creates everything in human culture, from ways of life, to religious and political institutions, social forms and norms, entertainment, and more, as the work of Cornelius Castoriadis on the imaginary considers in depth.5

In both of these ways, imagination transcends the illusory boundary of the skin, the isolated mind of the monad. Imagination becomes a connective, fluid dimension we can tune into to bring forth creations, and to live our lives in communication with and in connection to the lives of others, including the non-human, i.e. plants and flowers, and animals.

Imagination is a living force. It enables envisioning the future, embodying the present, and illuminating the past on individual and collective levels, and shapes human cultures, worlds, habitats, and spheres of interest and action.

The challenge is to reclaim this deeper current of agency we can all partake of, once we stop giving up our power to imbibe narratives that have been shaped with the precise intent of disconnecting us from the living current of the imagination, and from one another.

In April, I pick wild asparagus. As a child, I learned from my father. Then, I seemingly forgot all about it, when I moved abroad and was fascinated by other cultures, most of all Scottish and Baltic. Then, I moved back to Italy, and a slow process of feeling a sense of belonging to the land where I live began again.

More than through any superimposed, “current” ideology or agenda, my reclamation passes through reweaving my place in the land, and cultivating relationships to its denizens. Most of all, the local plants and flowers. As a teenager, I inherited a treasure trove of herbal remedies instructions from Luigi, a man I met well in his nineties, who was a geologist and biologist expert about plants.

At this time of the year, I walk the edges of fields and woods, alone or in good company, looking for this nutritious sprout, a plant strongly associated to rebirth, and the first warm sun rays of the year.

In my family, we prepare wild asparagus in a number of ways, ranging from omelette to pasta with asparagus sauce. Still, the simplest way to taste these delicious sprouts is to boil and season them with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

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Descriptions and Uses

Asparagus belongs to the Liliaceae family. It is a herbaceous, perennial plant, which can grow up to 1.5 m tall. While it is bushy, its trunk is smooth, supple, and heavily branched. The flowers appear in June and July, are yellowish, almost transparent, pendulous, and bell-shaped. They can be solitary or there can be two on a single stalk. The leaves look more like scales and are clustered in groups of 3-9 (cladodes). The fruits are red berries containing a large, black seed inside.

There are cultivated varieties of asparagus, either for culinary or ornamental reasons, but you can find that wild asparagus thrives in the undergrowth, despite being a solar plant. The edible part is the shoot that emerges from the base of the plant. The roots instead are used for medicinal purposes. The shoots are harvested in Spring, the roots in Fall. If you want to preserve the shoots, you can freeze them, whereas to preserve the roots you need to let them dry in the sun, and store them in small bags or glass jars.

Recipes

Below are a few of the best recipes I learned from my mother.

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Become a paid subscriber, and join in our online monthly writing group, which is happening almost always on the fourth Thursday of the month from 9 to 10 pm Central European Time. Below, you can see the dates for 2026 and the link.

Come as you are: after tuning into what each of us carries into the moment, we are going to do an active meditation with the plant of the month, devote time to responsive and creative writing, voluntary sharing, and close with a short contemplation.

You are invited, and welcome; and if you know anyone who would love this kind of experience, please share this post.

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Dates

March, 26

April, 23

May, 28

June, 25

July, 23

Aug, 27

Sep, 24

Oct, 22

Nov, 26

Dec, 17 (third Thursday of the month)

Behind the paywall, you will find the link.

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In my first post, two weeks ago, I offered you what I know about the wild violet, and a few delicious recipes. Today, I am offering a few out-of-the-box practices, poems and prompts to know with the wild violet.

Since I wrote here, I spotted the wild violets as I walked through the countryside. I was leading a child to her parents, when we stopped by a ruined wall, and in its cracks we saw a bunch of wild violets, with their petals propped up, as if eager to be out at last.

The child was excited, and I encouraged her to make a silent wish, which she did with moving intensity, closing her eyes, and praying to the violets, while holding her vision behind her eyelids. I also thought of my wish, but kept my eyes wide open, as I wanted to take in the violets in as much detail as I could.

Various connection channels to plants and flowers can be activated, but when it comes to wild violets, I am very happy to engage visually. You, of course, may have different preferences. Behind the paywall, you will find suggestions for connecting, questions for meditation, poems and writing prompts.

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March, 1 was the ancient Roman New Year.

On this day, we are starting out our explorations in the green realms with the wild violet, which will be coming out throughout this month in Italy, and beyond, in other areas of Europe and North America.

As a child, at this time of the year, I was always eager to spot the first wild violets while walking with my father in the countryside, for I was told that one of my heart-felt wishes would become true. The delight I felt in spotting them was only matched by the reward of their enticing smell that for some unknown reason has always had a mystical quality in my mind.

Even today, I find the wild violet especially endearing, and I am keen on uncovering some of its various uses, cultural, and mythological associations with you. Accordingly, after describing the plant and its general uses, we are going to delve into some delicious recipes and effective home made remedies. Finally, we are diving into the rich lore surrounding the wild violet.

Description and Uses

The wild violet, or sweet violet, is known as Viola odorosa in Latin, because of its intense scent. It belongs to the Violaceae family, it is an herbaceous plant about 20 cm tall. At its base, the crawling stems develop new roots in the soil, from which new little plants originate. Its leaves are heart-shaped, light green. The flowers give out a very pleasant scent. Each flower has five petals: the upper four are rather circular, while the one at the bottom is bigger. When their three-valve fruit capsules are ripe, they open and release the seeds.

You can find the wild violet in shady places, usually in the woods and near hedges, but also in meadows, if the soil is humid enough. Wild violets reproduce by division of the plant.

When approaching any plant, it is good practice to mentally ask for permission to gather them, and proceed only if you receive an affirmative sensation, being careful not to harm the plant and collect a few parts.

You can use the root, the flowers, and the leaves: wild violets are edible plants and have also cosmetic and medicinal uses. The root is collected in Spring, and the flowers and leaves throughout the flowering period. The root is to be used fresh. Flowers and leaves can be left to dry in a shady place, and need to be turned often. Once dry, you can store them in little bags of cloth or paper.

In the kitchen, wild violets can be used to make jam, salads, or liquors, or be crystallized to decorate cakes and pies.

Recipes

There are a few dainty recipes featuring wild violet. Here are my favourite two, bringing the colours and the sweetness of Spring to the table.

Herbs and Wild Violet Salad

Ingredients: 300 gr. of edible herbs, such as baby spinach, basil, dandelion, borage, endive, parsley, baby lettuce, watercress, etc. 100 gr. wild violet flowers, 1 garlic clove, 3 small sweet onions, 2 vinegar tablespoons, 5 olive oil tablespoons, salt and pepper.

Clean and wash the herbs and the wild violets. Dry them carefully. Blend the onions, the garlic, and some watercress, with the olive oil, the vinegar, salt and pepper, until creamy. Use to season the mixed salad. Enjoy!

Wild Violet Jam

Ingredients: 150 gr. wild violets, 800 gr. sugar, 600 gr. apples.

Let the sugar simmer with half a glass water in a pan for 2 or 3 minutes, until completely diluted and elastic, but not brown. Add the shredded violets and the grated, peeled apples. Let the jam boil for half an hour. Pour in sterile glass jars. Store the jam in a dark and cool place. Wait for about two months before tasting this delight! It’s great for tarts and sweet pies.

Remedies

Wild violets are known for their aromatic, anti-inflammatory, emollient, diuretic, expectorant properties.

While the ancient Romans believed that wild violets head garlands would cure the effects of excessive alcohol drinking, Dioscorides prescribed them to treat sore eyes. In the Middle Age, wild violets were used to alleviate melancholia. Arabian doctors from the XII century discovered their properties for treating constipation, lung infections, and increasing bile secretion. In 1727, Berhaave also discovered the expectorant properties of the violet.

Here are a few home made remedies.

To treat burns and wounds, you can boil wild violet leaves, and once they have cooled down, apply them directly on the skin.

To make a good cough syrup preparation, add 100 gr. wild violets in 1 l boiled water. Filter the water after 12 hours, gently squeeze the flowers, and add 8 gr. sugar. Filter again after a few days. Take one tablespoon syrup every two hours.

You can also prepare a wild violet decoction with 5 gr. roots in 300 ml water. Once the liquid has shrunk to 1/3, drink it immediately.

To brew wild violet tea, infuse 20 gr. fresh violets in 1 l boiled water for half an hour. Filter and consume throughout the day in small cups, given the anti-constipation effects of the violet.

In aromatherapy, the gentle scent of the wild violet is used for its uplifting and mood enhancing effect.

Precautions: while the wild violet is considered safe, avoid using it in case of allergies, during breastfeeding, and pregnancy. Stop using it at least two weeks before surgery, and do not assume if you take anticoagulant medication.

Lore

When it comes to the cultural and mythological lore associated to the wild violet, there is a wealth of material: from the many versions of the myth of Zeus, who fell in love with the beautiful river nymph Io, and turned her into a white heifer —which only ate wild violets— to save her from the jealousy of Hera, to the myth telling of the tragic love of Attis and Atta, whose blood made violets grow, to Persephone collecting wild flowers before being kidnapped by Pluto, to Vulcan winning a kiss from Venus with the aid of wild violet fragrance.

Since ancient times, down to the Victorians, and beyond, wild violets have represented modesty, honesty, and shy beauty. In magic, the wild violet is considered a feminine plant connected to the goddess and planet Venus, and the Water element. It is used for protection, love, and luck spells.

Historically, Napoleon Bonaparte was enthusiastic towards wild violets. All the women he loved were somehow connected to violets. Joséphine Beauharnais wore wild violets and gave them to him as a gift during their first encounter. His lover Maria Walewska also was to wear wild violets, whereas Maria Luisa, Duchess of Parma, introduced a particularly scented variety in Parma that is still used in the production of perfumes and cosmetics.

The flower also became Napoleon’s symbol, in contrast to the Bourbons’ lily.

Given its mysterious allure and mixture of beauty and unobtrusiveness, it is not surprising that such a small, wild flower has exerted so much fascination on ancients and moderns alike. Take time, this month, to spot wild violets and express your gratitude for this beautiful, fragrant flower. On March 15, we are delving deeper still, into poetry, personal connection with the wild violet, and responsive writing. Until then, keep well. Thank you for reading!

Hello dear Reader-Wanderer who happen to stop by and linger on this page.

As I set out to write this new publication, there is something close to my heart that you need to know, and ponder.

Writing with Plants and Flowers springs from a desire for (re)connection with the land, and with you, fellow lover of the Earth; a longing for that clean, poignant surprise that comes upon us, when we discover new crocuses, primroses, or snowdrops… and look at them with attention, and even affection.

As such, Writing with Plants and Flowers is not going to be a scientific or specialized publication, but a breathing space for observing and reconnecting with common plants and flowers, in various ways, and with one another, if you so choose.

The first post, about the wild violet, is coming in two days.

In the meanwhile, sweet, awake dreams with the Earth, still offering us beauty, despite the grief She carries.

Thank you for being here.

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