Wormwood

Falling towers, apocalypse flowers

A loyal subscriber once suggested I wrote shorter posts, as mine were unusually long for Substack (around 3K words). Not because they went on too long, but to lessen the workload. I said they became that length because The Red Tent is ‘constructed’ around nonlinear perception practices, which only make sense in translation when you can layer time and place, in synch with the mycelial imagination of the Earth. As writing is decidedly linear in form, to express that kind of depth and complexity means a Long Read, requiring an unfashionable perseverance. Today’s post is one such piece. In fact, it’s a Very Long Read Indeed (6K). So dear reader, if you become overwhelmed en route, do return later!

This flower story comes from the Speaking Bush section of 52 Flowers That Shook My World. It’s about the bitterest plant in England, breaking silence, breaking the rules, Laurie Lee, Nicholas Culpeper, and what happens when you return to your native land, almost a stranger. But most of all, it is about the key metaphysical move I have made in my life, one of the liberating moves we are all commanded to make, to keep the world from calcifying and being crushed in the ruthless grip of power. This piece contains a ‘mapping’ of that move, as I come back to the East Anglian shore at the start of the ‘third journey’ with Mark.

This morning I swam in the path of the rising sun and stood by the now-flowering wormwood, as we did when the story began twenty years ago, a curlew calling across the marshes, geese flying overhead. It is a beautiful day on the edge of England, on the edge of time, full of summer light and air. If I left the Earth today, I would take this morning with me, and the scent of this mysterious sunflower. And a writer’s happiness of being able finally to publish it here. Thank you.

Mark and the flowering wormwoods, Thorpeness-Aldeburgh dunes, Suffolk, 2012

Powis Castle, Wales 2002

NOBODY KNOWS WHETHER THE STAR in the Book of Revelations is in fact wormwood. But one thing is for sure, the plant itself is apocalyptic. Wormwood, the kingdom’s most bitter plant, has brought the endtimes to unwanted creatures throughout the ages: driven moths and insects from our drawers; putrefaction, worms and jaundice from our bodies; melancholia from our mind. And sometimes wormwood goes just a little further and starts chasing out bigger fish as well.

When we first return to England in those in-between travelling years I notice something strange: my gaze keeps going towards houses, rather than people. As we pass through villages and towns, my attention fixes itself on sash windows, the colour of the paint on the door, the flowering bush by the door; notices whether the roof is made from tile or thatch. Nice house! I find myself saying out loud without thinking.

In the 1990s the houses of England are doing very well indeed. They have smart new conservatories and patios with hanging baskets, and clamber in their thousands all over the once-green fields, with their Georgian-style windows and the Swedish furniture inside. The talk is all about property, second homes and what everyone isbdoing with lofts and new kitchens. The houses stand in the centre of all this attention, proudly tended and cared for. It is hard to say the same for the people who live inside them. In fact, it is hard to know if there are any people living inside them. I walk down the streets of the villages and towns, past all these themed and preserved houses, and sometimes never hear a soul.

On our return from Arizona as the millennium turns I find myself strangely oppressed by these houses and the property conversations, by the clipped foreign bushes in the gardens. We find ourselves fleeing the prosperity of middle England and seeking sanctuary among the frugal green hills of Wales. We spend that winter in a tiny stone artisan’s cottage in a remote valley and ask ourselves where we should go from here.

One day, we go to visit a large and powerful house called Powis Castle. This Big House is famous for two reasons: the first is that it houses the treasures that once belonged to the military leader of the British Empire who was known as Clive of India. The second is a plant, a hybrid of wormwood and tree wormwood known as Artemesia Powis Castle. All down the terraces the vibrant silvery form of this bush can be seen, bringing its moonlight hue to the brightly colouredformal borders, to the clipped apple balustrades and the parklandsof conifer and rhododendron.

Wales differs from England in many ways. The people are strikingly egalitarian. Your gaze looks towards its hills rather than its austere, slate-roofed houses. As we walk about the gardens of the National Trust property, the grandeur of the house appears at odds with the soft and subtle land, the flowers seem garish and oddly contorted.

When we enter the café I notice everyone is moving around silently and very slowly, as if they were dead. My body has started to shake and my mouth clams up. The room feels freezing cold.

‘I don’t think it’s about tea, do you, Charlie?’ says Mark, as we stare at the scones and jam.

‘Let’s go home!’ I say and walk quickly out of the door.

*

WHEN I FIRST BOUGHT AN ARTEMESIA POWIS CASTLE bush we were living in Oxford, next door to an American anthropologist called Sandy. She had worked among rural Peoples in remote districts of Europe, studying their ways of life. Her favourite informant was an old wise woman who lived in the Basque country. She would often tell us about times she spent among the sheep herders in their mountain village. The Basque people are a fierce people, with a language and a mythology all of their own. One of these myths she learned from the old woman concerned houses.

In the village it was the houses that counted, not the people. Or rather the indarra, the spirit of the house, together with the indarras of the houses on either side. The indarra of the house on your left was about life, and on the right about death. Oh! we said, and went rather quiet (since that made her house our death and our house her life). It was these spirits that conducted everything in the village. Even the pews in the churches were named after them, rather than the families that resided within their stony walls.

That day I shuddered in Powis Castle, I remembered the indarra. The spirit of the house that rules the life and death of its inhabitants and neighbours. I went to look up Clive of India in the local library in Machynlleth. The house is proud of its past association. It did not, however, mention his apocalypse. On his return from Calcutta, where he had set about ruthlessly establishing colonial rule and amassing a great fortune, he died in mysterious circumstances: some say he cut his own throat, or shot himself; others that he was ritually murdered and buried at a crossroads. He was forty-nine years old and an opium addict (his jewel-encrusted opium pipe is one of the house’s most prized possessions). Whatever had taken place was so dreadful his wife did not speak again. She did not utter another word for forty-two years.

IN 2002 THERE WAS A FILM ABOUT A LARGE HOUSE called Gosford Park. It is an upstairs, downstairs tale set in the typical Big House era of the twenties and has all the well-known ingredients – a weekend house party, evening dresses, shooting, maids, butlers, vistas, huge log fires and so on – and it would have been just another big house drama but for one fact. It was directed by Robert Altman, an American director famous for his ability to look behind the scenes and let everyone speak for themselves – the servants and the masters of the hidden worlds of fashion, ballet and party politics – all the shows that govern our strange and hostile histories.

In the centre of the drama, Ivor Novello sits at the piano in the English drawing room and sings about love. It’s a new sound that comes from America. Some people shut their ears to this music, others linger on the stairs and listen. As he sings, the owner of the house is murdered and the truth of the past tumbles out of the mouths of the cook and the housekeeper, two sisters who have not spoken to each other for decades. As these sisters speak of their secret downstairs a balance is rectified. An old order passes. One evening, returning from Wales, we go to see this film with the companions of our Oxford days and afterwards hold a discussion. It is an ordinary evening between five people gathered before a fire in a public house. But for one fact. Three of these people are working cooks, and one holds bitterness in her heart: the bitterness of the creosote bush and the dandelion flower.

What is your position in the house? I ask everyone. I declare I am a radical; down with the ancien regime! Mark stands beside the singer, who brings the sound of a new era that the aristocrats do not want. Miche and Arthur side with the servants. They think it is very important that form is observed, that the knives and forks go around the table in a particular way.

‘Shame on you, citoyen!’ I declare to Miche, who is half-French. ‘Vive la revolution!’

I turn to our youngest companion, who is also half-French.He does not say anything. He is the only one among us who has aristocratic blood.

*

WHAT IS THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE DAY? Is it a container for yourself, or for the spirits of the dead? Do we set the table for ourselves, observe the rules of knife and fork, or do we keep this form for an unseen relation, for a stranger who lived here a hundred years ago? Do you carry the rules of this house within you, even though you sleep in a small, bare room? Does this ancient house still run in your veins and haunt you?

How many dreams of houses have come to me in these travelling years? The houses I have known and those I do not know. The house that holds me in its heraldic grip. The mansion with its gargoyles, its dry fountains and formal hedges, its carved doors behind which strange rites are performed, where the great stairs run with blood; the house that is overgrown with vines, where the servants are still running the kitchen, though the owners have turned into statues long ago?

Since I came to Wales these houses have been disappearing from my dreams. One night I find myself in the dining room of a large house. It is the evening of summer solstice. The table is set with ornate dishes. There are six guests. I am the housekeeper, entering the room with a tray. Is everything all right your side? asks the owner of the house, and says he will come and see me. But we both know he won’t. We both know that on my side everything is not right in the slightest. In the dream, as I move around the dining table with all its silverware, I tell everyone they can serve themselves. The owner of the house has golden hair and looks like our youngest companion.

Keep your children under control. Mark and I stand on the windy ramparts of Harlech Castle and look toward the Atlantic sea. All over the island the flinty buildings of Empire stand dominant on the round ancestral forms, on the old forts and burial mounds. These places are cold: cathedrals, castles, towers, grand houses. We shiveras we stand there, though the day is warm. The land beyond is green and soft, the silvery snakes of the rivers flow into the sea, the flowers shine brightly upon the cliff ledge. The Atlantic breathes in and out as it moves ceaselessly towards us, towards the shore.

*

MAYBE IT IS BECAUSE I WAS BORN ON MIDSUMMER’S EVE, at the zenith of the year, at the time of the greatest light, that I can now write of what it means to take the irrevocable step, the 52 steps along the downward path that lead us back toward the ancestral land, back down toward the sea. Maybe because the golden English oak stands so firmly behind me that I can embrace the dark holm, his brother, and let everything fall as I step through the solstice door, as the mood of the great year shifts, as the key slips irrevocably from major to minor, from sweetness into bitterness, from pleasure into duty.

Or maybe it is because I have loved form so truly and deeply that I can let it go. Maybe because I have known these old houses with their sun-striped lawns and faded walls, played among their borders of perfectly kept flowers with the thrush singing in the high trees, felt the poignancy of time as I have considered those kitchens and writing desks, the fragrance of larders and cupboards and those long afternoons, that I can now walk so fearlessly towards the unknown with these bitter plants in my hands. Or perhaps because I have known too well the shadows of these houses, borne witness to the cold indifference they harbour, the cruelty of their ways and shuddered enough times upon the stair, that when I first came across those books that questioned our privilege, as the night wind blew among the holm oaks, I knew that I should be searching for something else.

As I walked through the world’s drawing rooms the loud boom of the men and the shrieking voices of their wives echoed up the stairs, spilled out into the dark garden. I sometimes leaned against their heavy coats in the hallway, and wondered if there were any other kind of passage open to me. Then one day among the clinking of sherry glasses I heard a man laughing and I knew I had chanced upon it.

The laughing man told me about the time when he was my age, and he had walked out of his parent’s house one midsummer morning with nothing but a violin under his arm. And maybe it was because I heard in his voice a love of nature and the spirit of adventure that my own heart vowed that one day I would follow in his tracks. The laughing man was a writer who had written some of the most lyrical prose ever composed about the English countryside. His name was Laurie Lee.

*

ABSINTHE IS A FASHIONABLE CITY DRINK in 2002. Once banned for its destructive narcotic effect, famously ruining the lives of the demimonde in nineteenth-century Paris, it has made a comeback among the cognoscenti in the modern bars of London. It is a vermouth flavoured with wormwood, the name taken from the Anglo-Saxon Wermut which is sometimes translated as ‘preserver of the mind’. One night we sat on the floor and drank the drink they call the ‘green fairy’. There were three of us: our youngest companion, myself, Mark, in the small empty flat in Notting Hill. We were passing through the city. It was April; the cherries were still in bloom and a comet flew in the sky.

This neighbourhood, in which I had lived the first 35 years of my life, had undergone a shift. It had become very smart indeed. Money had entered the once-bohemian quartier. All the old antique stores had changed hands. One of them now sold obscure liqueurs from Europe, firewaters flavoured with quince and bilberry, rare island whiskies and barrels of small vintage country wine. Walking by, my eyes lit upon the emerald-coloured absinthe. In the glass the drink becomes cloudy with water and tastes like anis. As it flows into our veins, it seems simply to have the inebriating effect any drink will have on three people relaxing at the end of the day.

But for one fact: instead of the nostalgia and bonhomie that usually comes with drinking, comes something else entirely. Mark starts to laugh a terrible laugh. The church tower opposite the flat had just collapsed. Some smart apartments were being built within the old church masonry, and that afternoon the stones of its tower had come tumbling down, revealing in that moment the shaky foundations of the new construction. I roar with laughter too. ‘This sinking city!’ Mark yells gleefully, quoting the evening paper’s headlines. And we both roll around the floor, laughing like a pair of hyenas.

Our companion looks at us, alarmed. He does not laugh. As our eyes meet across the room, I realise that however it appears, things are not right his side either, and that no matter what position we adopt within the ancien regime, each of us has a house that holds us hostage, rooms and corridors where terror grips us by the throat. Nostalgia houses, interior houses, dream houses, party houses, inherited houses, houses where an indarra rules instead of the person with a heart and soul. Some of our houses are large and some are small; some go back thousands of years. But all of them have a dark legacy in them, a conquistador, an unsolved murder and a woman who cannot speak, as all of them have a bush outside in the garden with a bitter scent, whose silvery form brings death to the worm and the melancholy mind, and life to those who live on the right hand side.

When you come back to England with the wild places inside you, with bitterness in your heart, you are not the same person you were. You have lived in a straw bale house, a round house built of adobe, in a hut thatched with banana leaves. You have lived up a mountain, in the desert, in a hard cot, on rice and beans. You no longer care for palaces or restaurants. The taste for excess has left your veins. When the tower falls down in the city you laugh. The Empire is falling. You hold to nothing. The taste of wormwood is now on your tongue. You have returned from a country of the future, of space, to a country of the past indentured to time – whose unspoken secrets exert an influence more powerful over its subjects than any show of history. You see this secret invisible force, this indarra, wherever you look in the kingdom, in the houses, in the streets, in the people. It is a consequence of working with the desert plants, with the rattlesnake of Arizona. You can see this twisted force appearing before you like a dragon trapped upon a wheel. The power of the old forms holding sway.

The indarra dwells in the church tower, as it rings its unmelodious sounds, out of tune, out of synch, in the twilight hour. The indarra sits in the public house and toasts the hours of victory as the wars come and go, as her puppet shows and ancient dances are enacted outside on the green. The indarra sits at the head of the table and hitsa hammer; the people appear and disappear before her pitiless gaze, leaving only their names behind, inscribed on the board in gold leaf, engraved in the silver cups, on the dull stones of the graveyard. The show goes on, repeating the indarra’s mantras and rituals, in the halls and chambers and cloisters. The vanished linger in their thousands around the houses, stare down from their portraits, waiting for the sweetness of justice, sucking the warmth of the living as they pass them by. If you are wise, you shudder. You walk out of the door one midsummer’s day.

Who is in charge? The indarra is in charge. The people are following the form without question. Inside themselves they dream of changing the world, long for warmth and reciprocity, outwardly they repeat the sacred rituals of house and council chamber, keep the rules and regulations, do not move from their inferior and superior position. That’s the way to do it! In their speech they talk of justice, freedom, power for all! and yet keep one other in chains. The indarra holds the world in her claws and reigns invincible, until those who have no taste for sweetness enter her court. The ones impervious to flattery, who no longer keep the form. Serve yourself! Those whose terrible unexpected laughter shakes the edifice of institutions.

You can laugh because you have left the sweetness of the pleasuredome behind. Because the youngest and fairest of your companions left this morning and will not come again. You have long ago ceased to trust the cold and heartless rhetoric of Empire. You have lived through the worst and the best of times. Your account is empty, Your suitcases are stacked against the wall. It’s the beginning of the third journey, the journey of the nostoi, those who return to their homelands and set straight what appears before their eyes. Who will break the chains that everywhere bind us? Not those whoseek the houses and the treasures of the world. Too many shadows run rampant in their veins. Release comes when you are devoid of ambition, when you no longer desire the glittering pleasures that bind us to fortune’s wheel. When you gain in the desert years a taste for the great things the dark holm brings – creative work, spirit’s duty, kinship with the earth. For liberation.

Below the window the Empire comes and goes in its shiny cars, its gorgeous dresses, in the coffee shops where the people are all on show. I watch them all go by. Sometimes I meet my former colleagues in the doorways of the galleries and boutiques. Sometimes they pass me by, stare through me, as if I do not exist. The parade looks one way, but it feels another. But you would have to know absinthe for that.

Absinthe colours the world green. The Impressionists of Paris painted their fellow absinthe drinkers staring ahead of them into empty space, as their café-dwelling lives collapsed all around them. Even their canvasses took on a greenish tinge, like the pallor of death. The medicinal herb within the spirit acts as narcotic, stimulant, aphrodisiac, convulsant and hallucinogen. The light seen under its influence brings an immediate shift of attention. It was a shift that shaped the Montparnasse of Toulouse-Lautrec and Baudelaire and defined the bohemianism of all cities thereafter. But for all its looseness and apparent gaiety, the world absinthe inspired was bound by a strict and martial edge: first popularised by French soldiers fighting in Algeria who used it as an anti-malarial, it was banned by martial law for spoiling the élan vital of the trenches during the First World War. It brings finality, whatever way you cut it.

The ingredient that was held accountable for its demoralising effect was the psychoactive wormwood. When it was removed from the litany of herbs that flavoured the aperitif that included hyssop, lemon balm, fennel and anise (and sometimes also sweet flag, coriander, angelica, mint, chamomile and juniper) it become Pernod 51 and lost all its lore and reputation. After the war, the highballs and martinis of New York replaced the absinthe of the boulevards and the artists left the district to the haute bourgeoisie – a pattern that would be followed equally in all cities thereafter. Although hyssop and alcohol were later found to be far more dangerous ingredients, only the bitter wormwood brought the green fairy to the door.

Oscar Wilde, who knew about the perils of artifice as much as anyone, once wrote about the visions conjured up by this green spirit. After the first glass, he said, you saw what you wanted to see – your grand illusions; after the second you saw things that were not – all your demons; after the third you saw what was really there, ‘and that was the most horrible of all’.

This is the third journey. Which, depending on your ability to deal with bitterness, is either the worst or the best of all journeys. Because you see, with a perfected clarity of mind, what is really there.

Bitterness comes from experience, the horrible crash with reality, the sobering moment, the shaking of your youthful idealism and illusion, the revelation of the parade. You can identify with these experiences, let them rankle in your breast, become a bitter-mouthed fool who weeps over their misfortune. Or you can find the wisdom in them all and become a moth-destroyer, a worm chaser, a dispeller of the dead. Someone who can look the indarra in the eye. You hope in these bitter years, in these shifting times, as you move around your former native land looking for a home, that you have the strength of mind, the staying power, to disentangle from the clutches of your ego and become the latter.

*

WORMWOOD FALLS WITHIN a section of the vast pantheon of composite flowers known as artemisias. All have a formidable purgative quality, a bitter taste and a silvery form. The most common artemesia, mugwort, grows everywhere in the world’s wastegrounds and field margins and is recognised by the Chinese as the plant most configured like a human being. It is used to clear the meridians in the form of moxa, an archaic practice which burns the leaves to liberate the energy body of trapping blocks (moksha means liberation). In native America bundles of the desert artemisia, sagebrush, are burned to purify the space of sweat lodges and healing circles before a ceremony. The smoke cleanses the air of pestilence and the spirits of the dead. Modern smudge sticks, sometimes mixed with sweetgrass, are similarly used to clear negative influences from houses. In the law courts of England the Mediterranean artemisia, southernwood, was once placed in the dock to clear away the prisoners’ stench and the threat of contamination by gaol fever.

In 1917 the poet Edward Thomas wrote a prophetic poem about southernwood as he stood by the garden door watching his daughter shred its leaves and smell them, just before he returned to the trenches. He did not like the plant and yet he loved it. For, like all artemesias, it bears dreams and visions in its wake:

No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush

Of Lad’s Love, or Old Man, no child beside,

Neither father, nor mother, nor any playmate;

Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

All artemisias are named after Artemis, the fierce hunting bear goddess of the moon. Even though wormwood is a sunflower and is cleansing and bitter in the manner of all solar plants, the territory it deals with falls under the aegis of the moon. Sister plant to St John’s wort, artemisia hunts out all parasites that lurk beneath appearances and brings them to light: our unmentioned history, the underbelly of the world’s glamour, everything our inflated rhetoric denies, keeps hidden in the shadows: the dark invisible forces we feel and yet do not wish to see. The souls who shuffle in the corridor. The prisoner who stands at the dock. The woman who does not speak in the house. The poet who will never return to his garden behind the tall damson hedge, and the small girl who stands by the door.

Who will set us free ? The laughing men, the ones speaking about heart and soul, bringing the new sound back from America. Who will set us free? The sisters who open their mouths and speak to one another in the kitchen. All our attention has gone to the leaders and generals of Empire, but it is the silent women of the house who keep the secret, who hold the nightmare. The indarra does not care, so long as the form is observed. All eyes are on her treasure, so she does not hear in the stranger’s ancestral apocalyptic laugh that now is the time of the dog’s throw. She does not notice the girl in her bearcoat, in her dress of smoke and moonshine, as she turns and walks toward the door.

You hesitate as you stand before the door, as the sound of the midsummer beckons you. To proceed means to lose the house which has sheltered you for aeons. To go forward means to lose your innocence, all your aspirations and hopes, all the illusions of the outer world, and walk toward the wild lands, into the unknown territory of spirit. It’s the moment you break from Empire.

‘Once you go there is no re-admission,’ said the black doorman at the Café de Paris. ‘I know,’ I said gaily as I went, though in truth I did not. I was 35 and carefree and about to leave for Mexico.

I stand before the city I left that midsummer day in 1991 and consider my options; the empty bottle of absinthe sits on the window, the long stones of a Welsh beach beside it. A sun falls between the tower blocks and bathes all the windows with fire. Behind me the suitcases lean against one wall, small sheepskins from Wales serving as beds in the empty apartment.

Where shall we go to on this third journey? What does my presence now signify in this place I used to know? The parade goes by along the sidewalks, and then disappears at either end. I gaze upon the neighbourhood I once knew as home, and the houses appear in the same places. But the bohemians have gone from the district and I am no longer the person I once was. I have slept in the Empire’s prison, held my own among the canyons. I am looking at my old world in another light. The place appears neither resplendent with former glory nor terrible with unexorcised demons, but exactly as it is: a pleasure dome that sucks the earth of all its joy and sweetness.

In the body, wormwood purges the excess of pleasure and expunges malignancy with a volatile oil known as thujone, which is also found in white cedar, tansy and sage. Its purgative effect in the invisible worlds is something only the inner eye can see and only the bitter heart can administer. The Empire crushes natural life in its demand for eternal pleasure and makes its subjects pay the price. Wormwood is its reckoner. Absinthe is called after its botanical name Artemisia absinthium, derived from the Greek word apsinthos which means ‘against sweetness’. In the last testament the star apsinthos brings the end of the sugary world of Mammon and makes the waters of the Earth bitter. With the clarity of mind conjured by the green fairy comes an awareness of an inevitable decline.

The tower collapses whether we hesitate at the door or not. After the zenith comes the fall. If we cannot wrench ourselves out of the hold of the indarra, the memory fails, the body collapses, the barbarians enter the city gates. And whether we understand this as an inner event, an individual destiny or karma, or outwardly as a revelation, an earth change or evolutionary shift, the severity of all our apocalypses will play out in direct proportion to our willingness to relinquish our own artificial and illusory worlds.

NICHOLAS CULPEPER, RADICAL APOTHECARY of Spitalfields, is pithy and precise about most of the 360 plants he writes of in his famous herbal of 1653, but with wormwood he is lengthy. It contains the key to his astrological world-view of plants and his own significant place in history. His translation of the physician’s pharmacopoeia has revealed all the secrets of the profession and secured a loyal readership among the people and the antipathy of the ancien regime. Unlike his contemporary, the royal physician William Harvey – and the scientist Isaac Newton who was to follow him – Culpeper did not see the human body as an organism made of mechanical systems. He understood it within the context of a living intelligent cosmos in which all conflicting forces were kept in a balance. Man was a fluid being influenced by invisible planetary energies, rather than a concrete machine which needed fixing when it ‘failed’. Disease was caused by lack of balance and the righting of that balance fell under the auspices of a planet, whose energies were embodied in the native plants of England. The plants kept the natural complexity of life in order and the work of the herbalist was as much to encourage human nature and spirit as it was to cure the physical agues, inflammations and tumours that arose from their repression.

Many times I find my patients disturbed by trouble of conscience and sorrow and I have to act the Divine before I can be a physician. In fact our greatest skill lies in the infusion of hopes, to induce confidence and peace of mind.

Culpeper wrote at a time when the world of the apothecaries was clashing with the world of the physicians and was about to lose. An élite medical establishment was poised to take over from the midwife and the apothecary and put the human body at the disposal of the Empire. But in spite of its subsequent domination Culpeper, in the way of all creators, has the last word. His Complete Herbal has remained in print ever since it was first published. There is not one book about plants that does not refer to him at least once. I discover everything about wormwood from this herbal: in the botanical gardens in Oxford, I seek out the subtle difference between these artemisias, the feathery southernwood, the sea wormwood of the marsh, the bush-like common wormwood. I collect sagebrush in the deserts of Utah and New Mexico and purify my own house, though I have yet to find these wild artemisias in my native land. What I remember most about the plant is that it is governed by Mars, the planet of war, and ‘remediesthe evils choler can inflict upon the body of man’.

Choler, temper, anger, scorpion bites, bruises caused by beating, throat pox, he gives you no affliction but he gives you the cure. The eternal God when he made Mars, made him for public good, and the sons of men shall know it in the latter end of the world.

Wormwood is the penultimate plant of The Complete Herbal. It contains the essence of Culpeper’s work, a passionate exposition of the planetary influences within man and nature whose balance keeps us sane and sound. The herb cures the fears and furies of the mind, ends all the hostilities of Empire with its straight blade. When the body suffers from a surfeit of pleasure, Mars comes and rights it by antipathy with his sword. When antagonism rules the world, the Leveller comes and cures it by sympathy. Afflicted himself as a soldier in the Civil War by a wound that will end his life at the age of 38, Culpeper embodies the clear-cut and fiery qualities of Mars, attacking the ignorance of contemporary physicians and warmly urging his readers to attend to their own and their neighbours’ good health. He is writing against time, against the time of his own life which is running out, and that of his ancient profession. And yet while the triumphant doctors of reason come and go, the dwellers of great houses and empires fade into obscurity and die strange deaths, Nicholas Culpeper remains in print, his heart beating among the flowers. In among the dry botanical facts of every guidebook, every dull treatise on herbs, he appears, flower soldier, with his sword of artemisia.

THE BUSHY COMMON WORMWOOD IS SUBTLE, not so much a medicine person’s plant as a plant of poets and seers. A warrior, bear-dreamers plant. One that brings a new light to old surroundings and sets the record straight. Under its influence Culpeper becomes visionary. Under its influence I see how to proceed. It speaks not of presence and space in the manner of the desert bushes, but of time, of what must pass and what will come to be.

The day we decide to live on the Suffolk coast is the day I find wild wormwood on the beach. Walking from the town of Aldeburgh I come across great roadside stands soaring into the sky. When I sit down beside their tall silvery leaved forms, I know I have arrived at my destination. We have been roaming westwards, but here on the eastern shore is where we will stay and make ourselves at home. I rub the scented leaves and small button flowers between my fingers and inhale their sharp camphory smell in the hot July day. The sky is pure blue above us, the glittering sea lapping beyond the dunes, the temple dome of the power station hovers like a mirage in the distance. The scent of wormwood lingers in the air.

The music did not just lead us out of the door; it was leading us to somewhere in all these travelling shifting years, beyond the falling tower, beyond the murder mystery and the exigencies of Empire. It was leading us towards this beach and the wild sea, back to a place where we once belonged and could begin again. I sat among the dry grasses on the warm ancestral stones and felt my journey turn. This is a sea place I used to come to in my former years. Now my gaze is no longer directed at the houses on the skyline, but at the sea holly dancing with blue butterflies, the bright pink of the rosebay willowherb, the sand martins flying over the stalks of fennel and artemisia.

In the town the people sit in the public house in their positions, talking-talking in their heads. They are the people who work in rooms without windows. The normal people with houses and jobs. They are eating fish when there are no fish left in the ocean, they are building houses over the land when the rivers have nowhere to run, they are advocating the culling of wild deer, chopping down the old trees, keeping the children under control. Bang! Slap! Wallop! goes the indarra’s hammer. That’s the way to do it!

Outside lies a new territory, another England, the countryside ofLaurie Lee. The larks are singing in the blue sky and the sea stretches outward towards the horizon. A gnarly apple tree thrusts its way upward through the pebbles. There is a sense of space and sky and light I have not felt since we came from America. From here I can return to my old country, neither prodigal nor victorious, but someone unexpected, without history, without illusion, appearing beside a silvery bush whose bitterness frees the spirits of this haunted earth and colours everything green.

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