Written by There is a plant that blooms at the exact moment the sun reaches its highest point in the year, opens its flowers in the same week that the days begin to imperceptibly shorten, and has been gathered by hand at dawn on the summer solstice by healers, witches, and country folk across Europe for as long as anyone has been writing things down. It is small and easy to overlook.
It grows at the edges of paths, on dry banks, in the rough grass of meadows that no one bothers to tend. Its flowers are the precise yellow of old gold, five petals each, clustered at the tips of branching stems, and if you crush one between your fingers it bleeds red – a rust-dark pigment that has, for centuries, been taken as something significant.
Hypericum perforatum. St. John’s Wort.
The plant that catches the sun.
The Names It Carries
The name most people know,