Reading room — Hildegard & Jutta

Viriditas — the greening, the moisture in a living thing. Scivias, c. 1151

What viriditas actually means

It gets translated as “greenness”, which makes it sound like a colour. Hildegard used it for something closer to sap — the wetness in a stem that means it is still alive, still able to heal. A plant with viriditas bends. A dry one snaps.

She applied it to people too. Someone who had gone brittle, who had stopped being able to recover from things, had lost their viriditas. I put the word on the labels because it is the only word I have found for what a good cup of tea does on a bad day.

Nine chapters on plants; two hundred and thirty entries. Physica, c. 1150

Reading Physica without believing all of it

Physica is a plain list. This herb is warm, this one cold, here is what it does. Some of it holds up — the sage entry is roughly what a modern herbalist would tell you. Some of it is very much of its century, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I take from it is the organising instinct: that every plant has a temperature and a direction, and blending is a matter of balancing those against each other rather than stacking flavours. That idea survives even when the medicine doesn’t.

Monday to the Moon, Tuesday to Mars, and down the week. The seven-tea kit

Why the week has seven teas

The planetary week wasn’t mysticism to a monastic gardener — it was a filing system. Each day carried a planet, each planet a temperament, and the herbs got sorted underneath. Chamomile under the Moon. Nettle and mustard under Mars.

I built the Week of Intentions on that arrangement because it forces variety. Left alone I would drink the same thing every night. Seven vials in a box mean Tuesday tastes like something other than Sunday, which turns out to be the whole point.