It’s a new month of celebration! 😀 At the end of August, Strong in Love (the second novella in the Pomegranate Café Romance series) comes out. In honor of that, today’s post is all about an important part of the story in Strong: divination with meadowsweet.
Let’s start with the basics. Meadowsweet is a wildflower, a sweet-smelling spray of small white flowers often found in–surprise!–meadows. It’s also known as Bride of the Meadow, Meadowwort, or my personal favorite, Queen of the Meadow. In folklore, it’s been associated with love, happiness, and divination.
Divination can come in many forms, from tarot to pendulums to even very mundane things like watching clouds or birds in the sky. It’s basically just looking for answers in unlikely places. Different traditions can be extremely specific, and meadowsweet is a great example. Here’s what Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs has to say about its use:
If gathered on Midsummer, meadowsweet will give you information regarding thieves; if you have been robbed, place meadowsweet on water. If it sinks, the thief is a man. If it floats, a woman.
Cunningham, p. 172
. . . I guess maybe if you want to find out what the man or woman looks like or how to find them, you’ll have to throw a new method of divination into the mix. Or maybe you already knew that part. 😉 In Strong in Love, I took the liberty of creating a new divination with meadowsweet: Sakura, owner of the Pomegranate, is more interested in love than thievery, after all. (I did consider making a joke about “stolen hearts,” but I never got quite that far!) For the cafe’s Midsummer celebration, the characters gather meadowsweet and burn it, looking into the flames for images of their true love. It’s a witch’s idea of a fun party game, and to be honest, it’s probably been done before! After all, not every tradition gets written down. 🙂
Selected Sources
Basic botanical and conservation information about meadowsweet can be found here, at wildlifetrusts.org. And as always, the Encyclopedia citation:
Cunningham, Scott. Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs. Second edition. Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2020.
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