Samhain, The Night When Plants Speak To The Dead

Mugwort, mistletoe, rosemary, rowan, and hawthorn: a herbarium between the final harvests and the memory of those who are gone.

When the Veil Tears Open

In the traditional Irish calendar, Samhain marks the beginning of winter on November 1, with celebrations starting the evening before. Traditions preserved by the National Museum of Ireland describe a night when the souls of the dead were expected to return to their family homes. Fruit and nuts accompanied the festivities; the world of the living prepared to welcome visitors who could no longer be seen. [1]

Autumn gives this expectation its language. A branch sheds its leaves, a harvest enters the home, a bouquet dries above a table. What disappears from the garden has not yet disappeared from our lives. The leaf becomes a reserve, the fruit becomes nourishment, the plant becomes remembrance.

Samhain may be read within this interval: the end of a presence is not necessarily the end of what it passes on.

Plants of the Threshold

The five plants gathered here belong to traditions from different periods and regions. Brought together, they form a symbolic herbarium of Samhain, rather than a reconstruction of a single ancient ritual.

Mugwort: Words Entrusted to the Leaf

In the Nine Herbs Charm, an Anglo-Saxon medical text, the speaker addresses mugwort directly, asking it to remember its power and invoking it against poisons and harmful forces. The plant is given a memory, almost a voice. [2]

Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) also belongs to the history of digestive and gynecological care, particularly in European traditions. These uses are documented, although clinical evidence remains insufficient to confirm its effectiveness. [3]

Between remedy and incantation, one leaf thus carries two legacies: what hands once prepared and what voices passed down. Those who spoke the charm are gone; the plant and the words survive them. In our herbarium, mugwort opens the first passage: the one through which knowledge crosses absence without entirely losing the voice that carried it.

Mistletoe: Life Suspended

In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder describes the ceremonial gathering of mistletoe among the druids of Gaul: an officiant dressed in white cuts it with a golden sickle while a white cloth receives it. His account does not place this ceremony at Samhain. [4]

Mistletoe (Viscum album) retains its foliage and grows on the branches of a host tree, from which it draws part of its resources. Its greenery therefore remains visible while the surrounding branches grow bare. [5]

Suspended between earth and sky, it offers an image of continuity that does not rest upon itself. Its persistence depends on a bond. We may read in it an answer to autumn's stripping away: to endure does not mean to remain untouched, nor to remain alone. Something carries us, even when we can no longer see what connects us.

Rosemary: Giving Memory a Body

In Hamlet, Ophelia explicitly associates rosemary with remembrance as she distributes the plants. A sprig becomes the vessel of words addressed to another: remember. [6]

Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) also has a practical place in digestive herbalism. The European Medicines Agency recognizes the traditional use of its leaves to relieve difficult digestion and mild spasmodic disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. [7]

Yet in this nocturnal herbarium, it is the gesture of crushing the leaf that holds our attention. The sprig remains in the hand; its fragrance escapes it. The visible and the invisible are no longer separate realms: they become two ways for the same plant to be present.

Rosemary thus gives memory a material form. It does not hold back the one who has gone; it offers the living a place from which to answer them.

Rowan: The Seal of the Home

The Pitt Rivers Museum preserves rowan amulets, including loops of wood used against witchcraft in nineteenth-century Yorkshire. Its records also mention branches placed above doors in Ireland on May Eve to protect people and animals from fairies. This custom therefore belongs to a different point in the calendar. [8]

In our Samhain composition, rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) represents the boundary necessary for every encounter. Welcoming the absent does not require surrendering the home to the shadows.

A branch bent into a circle gives form to this distinction: within, what we watch over; without, what we do not allow to overwhelm everything. The threshold makes welcome possible because it preserves a place in which to welcome. Without it, the house would no longer be a home, but a passage without rest.

Hawthorn: The Thorn and Rest

In a story preserved by the Irish Dúchas archives, workers refuse to uproot a hawthorn standing in the path of a road. They regard it as a fairy tree and fear misfortune if they disturb it. [9]

Hawthorn (Crataegus) also belongs to herbalism: its leaves and flowers are used in preparations whose traditional use is recognized by the European Medicines Agency for mild symptoms of stress and as an aid to sleep. [10]

Around it emerges a correspondence between restraint in action and the possibility of rest. The tree that is spared keeps its place; the being we cease to summon may find theirs again. Hawthorn closes our herbarium with this measure: not everything that offers a remedy must be surrendered entirely to our hands. Part of the living world remains sovereign.

Autumn Preparations: What the Plant Passes On

The fruit and nuts found in Irish Samhain traditions bring the night of spirits back to a nourishing reality: the gathered harvest, shared food, and an inhabited home. [1]

Herbalism continues this attentiveness through its own transformations. Dried rosemary leaves, for instance, may be used in herbal tea preparations. The plant leaves its fresh form without becoming matter devoid of purpose. [7]

In the cup, the water receives part of what the leaf preserved. The fragrance rises; the plant matter remains. We may contemplate in it a miniature of passage: something is transmitted without everything disappearing, something changes form without becoming unrecognizable.

What Plants Say to the Absent

Mugwort carries words. Mistletoe sustains a bond. Rosemary gives remembrance a form. Rowan protects the home, and hawthorn teaches restraint.

At Samhain, we may arrange this herbarium as one gathers the fragments of an interrupted conversation. Plants do not erase separation; they give us gestures through which transmission may continue.

What has been entrusted to us remains alive only if it becomes, in turn, something we entrust to others.