Gozo Herbs

05/10/2026

05/10/2026

Why do we sometimes describe a person as “heavy”? 🪨

They take forever to decide. Question every detail. Stop to examine something everyone else has already moved past.

You may find yourself thinking: why does everything have to be so difficult?

Now picture a stone. It is heavy, solid, resistant to change. When it changes, it does so slowly.

In Traditional Mediterranean Medicine, Earth — with its cold, dry qualities — was associated with black bile and the melancholic temperament.

This ancient language connected the natural world with human character. Slowness, caution and resistance could also reveal depth, perseverance and careful attention.

What happens when we look again at the person we find “heavy” — perhaps even ourselves?

🍂 **Autumn & Melancholy**
An online exploration of this fascinating Mediterranean cultural tradition, through temperaments, plants and autumn symbols.

27 October 2026 · 18:30 Malta/Italy time
In English · €20 · PDF guide included

Send me a private message for details or to book your place.

Anima Herbaria — Alessandra Marazzi

30/09/2026

The changing seasons shift our perspective. After the oppressive heat of summer, when we longed for cool food, cool rooms and light clothes, a pleasant freshness begins to arrive. At certain times of day, it even feels a little cold.

We may wake with a scratchy throat, or feel heavy and sleepy after a meal. The thermometer can still reach 28 or 29°C, yet our bodies are already responding to autumn. We may need more sleep, or feel a quiet restlessness without knowing quite why.

In traditional Mediterranean medicine, autumn invites us to think about warmth, digestion and the breath. It is also a time associated with the spleen, black bile and the element of earth.

This is the thinking behind my two seasonal blends:

🍃 **AUTUMN DIGESTION** brings together lemon balm, fennel and rosemary — three plants traditionally associated with digestion, chosen to bring warmth and balance to the blend.

🌿 **AUTUMN BREATH** combines thyme, sage and ribwort plantain — plants with different traditional affinities for the breath and respiratory system.

All six plants come from my garden here in Gozo. I gathered the ribwort plantain in spring, when it was growing abundantly, and prepared a tincture to use in this blend.

Watch the video to meet the plants. If you would like to know more about the two blends, send me a message.

30/09/2026

Ever felt like this? 🍂😉

Someone says hello… but was it a proper hello? You’re still thinking about it three hours later.

You finish a job beautifully, every detail just right. Then someone makes “helpful” corrections that make absolutely no sense. Deep breath.

A friend invites you for a quiet cup of tea… and you arrive to find thirty other people. You were expecting tea, not a village meeting! ☕😂

Sound familiar? Meet the melancholic temperament.

In the ancient humoral tradition, melancholy was associated with earth and the qualities of cold and dry—the same qualities attributed to autumn. This was considered a season when melancholic tendencies could become more pronounced.

Thoughtful, precise and devoted to doing things well… but sometimes caught in a loop of taking things to heart and turning them over again and again.

A little autumn advice?
Let one tiny imperfection pass.
Enjoy some gentle movement and a change of scene.
Have tea with someone who makes you laugh.

And occasionally, take yourself a little less seriously. Even those herb jars can survive being slightly out of line. 🌿😉

Which scene is you: the mysterious hello, the unnecessary corrections, or the unexpectedly crowded tea?

Alessandra Marazzi · Gozo Herbs
Exploring the traditional Mediterranean temperaments with Anima Herbaria.

26/09/2026

While I was in Comino, I managed to photograph a plant growing beside an old stone wall: white henbane, *Hyoscyamus albus*.

It is easy to walk past it. But once you know its story, that little plant opens a door to the ancient Mediterranean.

Pliny the Elder wrote of a kind of henbane with white seeds that grew near the sea. He recorded the name *apollinaris*, which may preserve an old tradition linking the plant to Apollo. He also knew its power to disturb the mind.

Henbane belongs to the Solanaceae family, alongside tomatoes and aubergines, but also mandrake and belladonna. It is poisonous, and its long history runs through medicine and folklore, including stories of witches’ ointments.

Then, some time after Comino, I spotted it again on a pavement in Marsalforn. That is what I love about living here: a plant I had met in an ancient text was growing beside a path I know.

Have you ever noticed henbane growing in Malta or Gozo?

📖 Pliny the Elder, *Natural History*, Book XXV.

17/09/2026

A little discovery from Bali 🌿
While I was wandering among the spices in a market in Denpasar, Bali, I finally came across galangal.
I wasn’t even sure I would find it, so I was genuinely happy to bring this curious rhizome home with me. And since it has already started to sprout, I will definitely try to grow it.
These are only little pieces of knowledge — the kind of things I love to share here. Nothing complicated, just small details that help us look at plants with a little more curiosity.
Galangal was already used by Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century, particularly for a weak heart. Its relative, ginger, has followed a rather different path in our everyday tradition.
So, if one day you happen to find galangal at a market, perhaps you will look at this strange rhizome a little differently.
Sometimes a plant carries a much longer story than we imagine. 🌿
Galangal & Ginger — same family, different stories.

14/09/2026

A Plant with a Memory

Cannabis carries a history far older than the texts that speak about it.

From East to West, it travelled through different cultures, entering ritual, medicine, myth and the world of the gods. And throughout this long journey, one particular quality seems to return again and again: release.

Lightness. Euphoria. A temporary loosening of ordinary consciousness.

In Indian traditions, cannabis has at times been associated with the sacred world of Soma and, later, closely connected with Shiva. Among the Scythians, Herodotus describes h**p used after funerary rites: enclosed beneath felt coverings, they inhaled its vapour and responded with cries of joy.

This gives cannabis a very different character from plants such as datura or mandrake, whose imagery so often belongs to a darker, more unsettling world.

Cannabis carries another kind of memory: one of relief, conviviality, altered perception and moments of joy.

But these moments were not without context.

They belonged to a ritual, a gathering, a transition, a particular moment in human life.

Perhaps this is one of the most interesting things its long history still has to tell us.

Sources & further reading: Herodotus, Histories, Book IV, 73–75; Giorgio Samorini, studies on the historical and ritual uses of cannabis and psychoactive plants.

03/09/2026

MANDRAGORA — BEFORE THE WITCHES 🌿

We know her as the plant of witches.
The poisonous root. The psychoactive plant surrounded by stories of magic, madness and death.

But long before the medieval legends, Mandragora was telling a very different story.

In the ancient Mediterranean world she belonged also to love, desire and fertility. Aphrodite herself was known as Mandragoritis — “Aphrodite of the Mandragora.”

In Genesis 30:14–16, Rachel asks Leah for the mandrakes found by her son Reuben. The plants become part of an extraordinary exchange involving sexuality and the hope of fertility.

And then there is the root.

Human-like. Male and female. A plant that seemed to carry the shape of a body beneath the earth.

Some traditions went even further, imagining primordial human beings as enormous Mandragoras emerging from the soil.

And here the story echoes something much older.

In the Sumerian Song of the Hoe, from the tradition of Nippur, Enlil prepares the earth for humankind to grow from it. Humanity emerges from the ground almost as vegetation emerges from the soil.

Different cultures. Different stories. No claim that one derives from the other.

And yet the same extraordinary image returns:

the human being as something that germinates from the Earth.

Perhaps, long before the witches, Mandragora was already asking a much older question:

Where do we come from?

SOURCES
G. Samorini, Mitologia delle piante inebrianti
Genesis 30:14–16
The Song of the Hoe — Nippur/Enlil (ETCSL)

27/08/2026

PLANTS OF THE GODS — Episode II 🌿
From the potato to Datura

From the common potato to Datura: surprisingly, they belong to the same botanical family — the Solanaceae.

But with Datura we enter a very different world.

Some of the most powerful psychoactive plants known since ancient times are deeply connected, in myths and traditional narratives, with gods, spirits and sacred powers. They are born from gods, offered to gods, used to communicate with the divine, and their knowledge is often entrusted to shamans, healers and sacred figures.

In Hindu tradition, Datura is sacred to Shiva. One ancient story connects its birth to the cosmic poison swallowed by Shiva to save the world.

Across the ocean, among the Wixárika (Huichol) people of Mexico, Datura appears again in a complex universe of visions, magic, sorcery and encounters with the spirit world.

Following the fascinating path traced by ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini, we are exploring some of the myths and legends surrounding psychoactive plants known since ancient times.

Our journey is historical, ethnobotanical and folkloric: we follow the stories themselves, asking how traditional cultures understood these plants and why their extraordinary powers were so often placed in the hands of gods and sacred figures.

What did our ancestors know about these plants — and how much of that knowledge survives inside the myths they left us?

Next time, we return closer to home to meet Datura’s legendary Mediterranean relatives.

And yes… Mandragora is waiting. 🌿

Further reading:
Giorgio Samorini — Mitologia delle piante inebrianti
Carl Lumholtz — Symbolism of the Huichol Indians (1900)

23/08/2026

PLANTS OF THE GODS — EPISODE II

THE SOLANACEAE: A BORDERLINE FAMILY

Tomato. Aubergine. Pepper. Potato.

They are ordinary foods, familiar presences on our tables. They are not psychoactive plants.

And yet, they belong to one of the most fascinating and controversial botanical families: the Solanaceae — the same family that includes mandrake, belladonna, henbane and datura, plants historically associated with medicine, poison, altered states of consciousness and magic.

But there is another connection, less obvious and particularly interesting from the perspective of Traditional Mediterranean Medicine.

Many Solanaceae were understood through qualities associated with coldness and black bile — melancholia. Even the edible members of the family could be considered foods capable of increasing or weighing down the melancholic humour, especially when consumed in excess or by someone already predisposed to it.

And for ancient physicians, melancholia was not simply sadness.

Black bile occupied a complex territory between body and mind. When excessive or altered, it could affect perception, behaviour and mental balance. It was perhaps the most mysterious of the four humours: the one most closely associated with the darker and more unstable territories of human experience.

This is where our apparently harmless vegetables begin to reveal their more intriguing ancestry.

They do not produce the effects of mandrake, belladonna or henbane. But viewed through the lens of ancient medicine, they still carry an echo of the melancholic nature traditionally associated with this extraordinary botanical family.

From the tomato on our plate to the plants of poison, medicine and magic.

Food, medicine, poison.
The Solanaceae have always lived close to the border.

🌿 Plants of the Gods — Episode II