Lady's Mantle

The little alchemist. Her Latin name is Alchemilla, and she earned it: each pleated leaf gathers the night's dew into a single flawless drop at its center, and the alchemists of old collected that drop as celestial water — the purest of moistures, fallen from heaven and offered up by the plant herself — for use in the Great Work. The medieval world dedicated her to Our Lady, seeing in the folded leaf the cloak of the Virgin, and in the monastery gardens she was kept as the woman's herb above all others. The herbwives and midwives reached for her through the whole of a woman's life: used to steady the monthly cycle and ease its tides, to settle the swings of the body's hormonal seasons, and — in her gentler, emotional office — to mend what sorrow had worn thin and return a quiet confidence. Hermetically she is consecrated to Venus: her signature is care as quiet daily devotion — the folded cloak, the gathered drop. A Venusian elixir bearing the most alchemical name in the whole garden.