Every Season Grows
Its Own Medicine

Our letter was an invitation into the season. This is your invitation to linger longer among the plants.

We have reached that point in the summer when abundant growth gives way to expression.

For months, the garden has been quietly gathering strength. Roots have reached deeper into the soil. Stems have stretched toward the light and thickened. And leaves have unfurled in cascades of green, patiently collecting the sun’s energy.

But now the work is changing.

Flowers open to pollinators. Fruit begins to swell. Seeds quietly form. Everything the plant has patiently received — sunlight, rain, minerals from the earth — is returned to the world in another form.

We can learn a great deal about a season simply by watching the plants. Their growth slows or quickens. Their energy turns inward or outward. They flower, fruit, set seed, and rest in response to changes that ripple through the living world.

Herbalists observe these same changes through the shifting energetics of the plants themselves. As the season changes, so do the qualities each plant expresses. The herbs growing around us are not separate from the season — they are living responses to it, shaped by the same light, warmth, moisture, and length of day that shape us.

Astrology offers another language for observing these same rhythms. Where the gardener notices the garden, and the herbalist notices the changing energetics of the plants, astrology names the qualities those seasonal movements awaken within us.

The practice of healing the body by understanding its correspondences to the sky and to the plants is an ancient art, now known as astroherbology. It reaches back into antiquity, at least as far as Manilius, whose Astronomica, written in the first century, already mapped the signs of the zodiac onto the parts of the body. The practice never lapsed. It passed from Rome through the physicians of the medieval world into their almanacs, where its central diagram, the Zodiac Man, set each sign over the part it was thought to govern and guided when and how to treat. Its most celebrated depiction was painted around 1416 for Jean, Duc de Berry; and there, as in the almanacs before it, the lion sits over — or rules — the heart.

By 1628, studying that same organ, the heart the Zodiac Man assigns to Leo, William Harvey proved that blood moves through the body in a closed circle, driven by the heart’s contraction. The idea of blood flowing in a circle, of circulation, did not arise from the dissecting table alone. Harvey reasoned it through the Hermetic correspondence, the old principle of as above, so below: as the sun draws water up as vapor and returns it as rain, turning water in a perpetual cycle, so the heart sends the blood out and draws it home. He called the heart “the sun of the microcosm,” the body’s own sun, and said the Sun in turn “deserves to be called the heart of the world.”

The ancient art of astroherbology did not simply survive into the modern day; it provided a shape and an architecture for medical discovery. In Harvey’s case, it led him to the idea of circulation itself.

As the Sun rules the macrocosm of the planets, playing the heart’s part in the world, so the human heart rules the microcosm of the body, playing the sun’s part in us: as above, so below. Leo is where the correspondence closes. It is the zodiac sign ruled by the Sun, and it falls at the height of summer, when that light is longest and strongest in the sky. So Leo season is the heart’s own season, when our hearts, like suns, are asked to shine without restriction and to circulate warmth to every part of the body.

The whole art narrows, in the end, to a single task at this time of year: to keep our hearts, our inner fire, our own sun, generous, without burning through our reserves.

A plant never questions what it is becoming. It already knows. What remains is the question of timing. Has enough light been gathered? Have the roots grown deep enough? Is this the moment to flower? To set fruit?

This is the work of late summer, the Season of Leo.

Plants respond to these seasonal changes by transforming light into leaves, flowers into fruit, and summer into seed. In doing so, they become the very medicines of the season, shaped by the same rhythms that shape us, and uniquely prepared to support us through them.

Every season grows its own medicine.

This is both the seasonal moment and the bodily constitution, what we might call the Leo constitution, that I crafted our Leo blend to meet. Each plant is chosen for this sign and this season: to cool the heat of overexertion, quiet the overworked mind, and steady the heart and its circulation.

No single plant tells the whole story of late summer. Together, they reveal that the work of the season is not simply to bloom, but to transform what has been gathered into something that can nourish life beyond ourselves.

Our Leo blend was created in that spirit — not simply as a tea inspired by Leo, but as an invitation to participate more consciously in the work of this season: to receive deeply, transform faithfully, and offer generously. It is the season’s own medicine, made for the season of the heart.

May this cup remind you that perhaps we, too, are meant to return to the world something transformed by the light we have received.

With gratitude,
Andrea