Fig. 1  ·  The Grain Maiden at the sieve. Collage by Andrea Lawse, Artemis Tea & Botanical.

Harvest as an Act
of Discernment

If I had to describe its personality, I would say September is a Type A maximalist. Just when I’m feeling ready to take my foot off the garden pedal a bit, the season demands I keep my head down and work diligently. There’s no letting up right now, not if I want any of what I put in the ground this year to come to anything.

Every stage of growth is happening at once. Summer’s early plants have blossomed, blown, and turned to seed, while late bloomers like goldenrod, chrysanthemum, and aster read the diminishing daylight as their signal to finally let loose and bloom. The bees, butterflies, moths, and wasps are in a revel over them, and I have not heard the garden this loud all summer.

Yesterday, near dusk, we watched more than thirty large dragonflies swoop and dive in impressive aerial formations across it, eating the gnats massing over the flowers.

And the fruit is splitting.

After a dry stretch the rain finally falls, making the fruit swell faster than its skin can stretch, which causes the skin to give way.

It is all ripening perfectly, and splitting because of it.

I feel a true sense of urgency in the garden, and in the landscape at large—plants rushing to ripen, flower, or set seed between increasingly rare rains. The weather is getting less predictable, swinging between long bouts of hot and dry weather, to bursts of cool dampness. All of this forces the plants to make consequential decisions: which stems and leaves to let dry, which fruits to release, when to set seed, and when to draw their energy back into their roots as water and sustained heat become less reliable and daylight shortens.

Gardeners and herbalists must be equally discerning. What is ready to harvest? What needs time yet? What is complete for the season? What might still respond to coaxing? What is ready to dry or tincture?

This is Virgo season in its essence: harvest as an act of discernment. It asks us to move through the plants one by one, meeting each precisely where it is in its growth cycle. Is it worth continuing to pinch back the holy basil and the spearmint? How much longer should the tomatoes remain on the vine? How much passionflower can I harvest with each pass while leaving enough blossoms for the bees—and enough for another round of gathering? The echinacea seed could be scattered across the soil now or left to wait, though waiting is a gamble: the birds may take everything left in the dried cones.

This is the quieter work of sorting that follows the first real flush of abundance: the work of choosing, separating, drying, storing, and releasing.

Fig. 2  ·  The garden’s harvest carried into another form: bundled and hung to dry, then sorted and ground for the apothecary.

Modern astrology often reduces Virgo to the perfectionist, a thin version of a much older vocation—and one that rests upon a shift in the word itself. The Latin perficere is to carry through, to finish. Perfectus means completed.

The root of perfect is not flawless.
The root of perfect is finished.

Fig. 3  ·  Virgo, The Maiden: the sheaf in one arm, the gathered herbs bundled at her feet.

In the Babylonian star lists, part of the region we now call Virgo was known as the Furrow: the cut in the earth that receives the seed. The goddess associated with it, Shala, held an ear of grain, and that grain imagery endured. It endured so completely that Virgo’s brightest star is still called Spica, Latin for ear of grain.

Spica kept its meaning through time, while perfect did not. Today, Virgo is commonly remembered as the Grain Maiden, and her “perfection” lies in recognizing which grain, or plant, has completed its growth and is ready for harvest (rather than a pop-culture-rendering as perfectionistic). She does not merely possess the harvest, she performs it—with her hands, her body, a sieve, and gravity.

Astrologically speaking, Virgo is a mutable Earth sign ruled by Mercury. The earth element belongs to the material world: the body, food, plants, labor, and whatever can be made useful. Mercury governs language, perception, classification, exchange, and the movement of information. It also governs the intestines. In Virgo, Mercury’s quick intelligence becomes methodical and practical: it names, compares, analyzes, and determines where each thing belongs. Virgo is also mutable, the mode associated with the end of a season, when one thing is turning into another, and the work becomes adaptation and reorganization.

Together, these qualities place Virgo at the meeting place of garden and apothecary. The methodological care of plants and the late summer harvest are only the beginning. What is gathered then be carried into another form: fruit cooked and sealed; seeds dried and stored; herb bundled, hung, tinctured, or made into medicine. Within this astrological system and logic, Earth provides the materials, while Mercury supplies the knowledge to identify each plant, judge the right moment to harvest it, and choose the preparation it requires. Virgo’s mutable Earth carries the season’s abundance forward for future use.

This may be why Virgo has come to be regarded as the healer and herbalist of the zodiac. Its healing is practical and precise, rooted in the skilled work of turning what the earth provides into something a particular body can receive. The harvest becomes medicine through knowing what to gather, how to prepare it, and when the work is complete. This same pattern of receiving, discerning, and transforming appears in Virgo’s traditional place within the body.

Medieval physicians and astrologers represented the relationship between the zodiac and the human body in images known as the “Zodiac Man.” In these images, Virgo is placed at the belly and intestines—the region where what we take in is broken down, what can be used is absorbed, and the remainder is carried onward to be released.

This historical placement becomes especially fascinating in light of what modern anatomy has revealed about the intestines. In 2014, Furness et al. estimated that the human enteric nervous system contains between 200 and 600 million neurons. Within the small intestine and colon, these neurons form local reflex circuits that sense conditions and coordinate much of the movement, secretion, and absorption required for digestion. Every meal sets this work in motion: breaking down, absorbing, moving, and releasing.

Digestion is discernment.

At the same time, the garden is producing more than we can eat or keep up with. We may feel like those tomatoes, absorbing such an influx we feel liable to split; it’s more than we may feel comfortably able to sort and preserve. And though we feel compelled to persist, the wisdom this month is actually to discern when we’ve done enough.

Traditional Chinese medicine arrives at this same seasonal moment from a different direction, yet lands in the same place. In five-element theory, late summer is the season of Earth, and Earth’s organs are the Stomach and the Spleen, the center of digestion. Two systems that developed independently of one another both place the sorting of what we take in, absorb, and release at this same turn of the year.

The Stomach receives what we take in; the Spleen transforms and transports nourishment; and the Small Intestine performs the more particular work of separating the clear from the turbid. The Spleen houses the Yi, the faculty of thought, concentration, and applied attention. Yet Chinese medicine teaches that chronic over-thinking and prolonged mental labor can injure the Spleen, interfering with its work of transformation and our ability to derive nourishment from what we eat. Late summer is also the damp season in this system, and damp is what the Spleen tolerates least. Cold and raw foods are said to add to it, which is much of how we have been eating all summer. So late summer is when nature begins withholding exactly what the Spleen and our digestion require to thrive: sustained warmth, dryness, and a reasonable end to the constant mental labor of sorting and discernment.

This same understanding of digestion—as receiving, transforming, sorting, and knowing when the work is complete—shaped our Virgo tea blend.

This careful synergy of tea and botanical carries Virgo’s work of discernment towards its ultimate purpose: nourishment received with pleasure. The blend also invites us to practice recognizing when enough has been done.

Fig. 5  ·  Virgo, loose in the bowl: twisted oolong leaf, dried fruit, and blossom, sorted and gathered into one cup.

Outside, September will continue beyond what our hands can gather or preserve: some fruit will split, the birds may take the echinacea seeds, and the asters and chrysanthemums will bloom to distraction while other work remains. Virgo asks us to recognize what is ripe and what is ours to tend, and then to allow the rest to go on without us.

This is perfection in its older sense: the work carried through, the sieve set down, and the harvest received.

The sorting ends in this cup. Drink it with pleasure, then go enjoy the asters—just as they are.

With gratitude,
Andrea