Incense Recipes
These were sent to me well over two years ago by a Gothic Gardening reader whose name, alas, I do not know! (and the email was life596…) Thanks, whoever you are!
Spicy Kitchen Incense
* 3 tsp. red sandlewood powder(Pterocar pus santalinus)
* 4 tsp. ground cloves(Eugenia aromatica)
* 2 tsp. ground ginger(Zingiber officinale)
* 1/4 tragacanth dissoled in [...]

The Secret Names of Plants
Eye of Newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing
While this famous recipe from Shakespeare’s Macbeth sounds like a grisly combination of animal parts, almost all the references are probably to herbs. It has been a longstanding tradition in magic [...]

Garden Necromancy: Summoning Spirits
Many, many plants have historically been associated with the dead and the spirit world; often these were grave goods (offerings buried with the dead), or plants traditionally grown in cemeteries. The plant traditionally associated with raising the dead is the yew, but there are many other plants which are associated with the [...]

Floromancy
Like plants, most men have hidden properties that chance alone reveals.
—Maxims La Rochefoucauld
For ages, man has looked to plants for help in making decisions or using them to attempt to tell the future, especially in love. Nowadays, it’s mostly children who use flowers or plants this way–for instance, the game of picking petals of a [...]

The Bloud of Hearbes
This was so weird, I just had to put it on a page. I found this recipe in A Garden of Herbs, by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, who in turn found it Delights for Ladies by Sir Hugh Platt, which was published in 1594. (This is reproduced exactly as I found it in [...]

People Die So That Plants May Live
Note: I am NOT advocating human sacrifice as a method to increase garden yield. I just wanted to make that clear.
In times past, in many different cultures all around the world, human beings were sacrificed in the hope that their blood would ensure the harvest would be successful…….
In Ecuador, [...]

The Mint Pool
This is an idea that probably properly belongs in the Botanic Cathedral, but I thought the idea was so lovely that I’d give it a page of its own. The mint pool was a part of the garden before the ninth century, often part of the cloister garden. Helen Noyes Webster, in her [...]

Pomanders
Here’s a easy little craft item that is both *gothy* and *herbal*. Pomanders have a long and glorious history. They were once carried by the populace because physicians considered them protection against disease. The well-to-do carried intricately designed hollow metal balls filled with scented herbs (these expensive notions were favorite gifts to give on New [...]

So You Want to Make a Zombi…
Almost everyone has heard of zombies. Most people have even heard that zombies really do exist, even if they bear little resemblance to their shambling, brain-eating fictional portrayal in Night of the Living Dead. The creation of these real zombies is the result of administering a “zombi poison”, carefully [...]

The Garden in Gothic Revival
Gothic Revival, an architectural movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, began with temples and porticos in English landscape gardens. These gardens were often used as laboratories for architectural innovation, since the expense involved in constructing small structures in the garden was far less than that required to construct an entire [...]