Wort Issue 3: Summer '25

Jahia LaSangoma – Poem: The Forager

Poem: Survival, seasons change, release and transformation among the herbs of northern Spain.

Lorna Mauney-Brodek – Project Focus: Herbalista 

Pour a cup of tea and join us as we build community through herbalism! Let’s do some herbwork together… 

Matilde Wyrdlea with Martin Baxter – Plant Medicine and the Tarot: High Priestexx-Viola

The third in a series looking at Tarot and Plant Medicine as allies to psycho-emotional health and exploring tarot through a trauma-aware lens. 

llewyn máire – viriditas calling 

A poem and accompanying glossary exploring the nature of boundaries in relation to a trauma-informed personal history. This piece is also an invocation of the author’s deepening relationship with the land, language and plant kin of Ireland. 

Harul Vinay – The Flowering, The Offering and the Sting of the Divine 

Formative to Western Himalayan society and culture is the ancient interplay between the forest and the village, the plant and human realms. This article explores this relationship in its mundane and sacred dimensions through the folklore and traditions of three traditional herbs: the Buraans, the Paaja and the Bichu Booti. 

Philippa Swann – A Fairy Tale 

An errant forage into the mysterious world of Gaelic plant names, lost herbal knowledge and Highland folk tales, precipitated by a chance encounter with the irresistibly named Fairy Flax. The story of this tiny wildflower invites a timely remembering of the close relationship the people of the Scottish Highlands once had with this landscape and flora. 

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson – Four Poems Carrying Ways to Remember 

These four poems tap into the wellspring of wisdom found in the cataclysmic ruptures of ancestral heart-break ::: Poems that journeyed me through personal and collective stories of deep love, grief, connection and belonging with the land ::: Here, I honour the power of breath as anchor, as accomplice, as portal ::: I honour my mother and her child-relationship to plant life growing up in Xaymaca (Jamaica) ::: I honour what it means to be ‘well’ in this lifetime ::: fi wi

Garden Loops – The Ruderal Garden 

The Ruderal Garden is an experimental garden, started in late spring 2024 by the art and architecture collective Garden Loops (Alexandra Papademetriou, Poppy Bell, Natalie Blom and Mercè Torres) in collaboration with Färgfabriken Konsthall. Garden Loops is one gardener and shares this role with the birds, insects, animals and plants already here in Lövholmen, Stockholm.