When I first started studying herbs, one of my first questions was, What is this plant good for? I still ask that question. But lately, I’ve been learning to give myself a little more time with the plant before I look for an answer.
Take ginger. A sip of ginger tea can leave a little heat on your tongue even after the tea has cooled. Peppermint can leave a cool sensation in your mouth even when you drink it warm. I’d noticed both before I had the words to describe them. Studying herbal energetics gave me a reason to pay closer attention.
What Do Herbalists Mean By Energetics?
In herbalism, energetics is a way of describing the qualities of a plant and how those qualities might relate to what a person is experiencing. You’ll often hear words like warming, cooling, drying, and moistening. These are traditional herbal terms. Taste, aroma, and texture can give us clues, and different herbal traditions may describe the same plant in different ways.
Warming and cooling can be easier to picture because we already know the bite of ginger and the cool finish of peppermint. Drying and moistening took me a little longer to understand. Think about the puckery feeling a strong cup of black tea can leave in your mouth. Then imagine the slippery texture of a marshmallow root infusion. One leaves your mouth feeling dry; the other feels like it coats your tongue. Those sensations give us a place to begin learning what herbalists mean by drying and moistening.
A sensation is one clue. It doesn’t tell us everything an herb does or whether it’s the right choice for someone. The preparation matters, too. Smelling a leaf, tasting a tea, and working with an infused oil each give us a different way to get to know the same plant.
Where Earth, Air, Fire, and Water Come In
For this series, I’m using the four elements as a way to explore what I notice. Earth makes me think of roots and the soil they grow in. Air draws my attention to aroma and breath. Fire helps me think about warmth, like the heat that lingers after a sip of ginger. Water brings me to moisture and texture, and to what happens when we let a plant sit in water.
These are connections I’m using to guide my study. They leave room for a plant to bring more than one element to mind. Peppermint, for example, makes me think of Air because its scent is often the first thing I notice. When I take a sip, I notice its coolness. Both observations tell me something about my experience with the plant.
Start With What You Notice
The next time you sit down with a cup of tea you already enjoy, take a moment before the first sip. What do you smell? What do you notice as you taste it? Once the sip is gone, what lingers: a little heat, a cool sensation, a dry feeling, or a soft coating on your tongue?
Write down what you notice in your own words before looking up how an herbalist describes the plant. I like this practice because it gives me something to bring to my reading. I can compare what I experienced with what others have observed and ask better questions about both.
Next, we’ll begin with Earth and spend some time with burdock root. I want to start with a simple question: What can we learn about a root when we look at where it grows, how people prepare it, and the place it has at the table?
