Love in the time of Flowers

This week was a week to fall in love with flowers....and I couldn't help myself but to preserve the flowering bounty in the form of luscious, sweet elixirs. Wild roses and cultivated pink and red roses each in turn became sweetest of heart medicines in pink tinted fragrant rose elixir. In all my years of living in Arizona, I seemed to have a lack of roses in my realm...which was very sad for me. So I'm making up for it now and putting up quart after quart of rose apothecary items - rose elixir, rose vinegar, next up is rose infused oil, and rosehip syrup with the kids at Great Hollow! And another plant ally, that I really did like, but didn't have growing around me in the Arizona climate, was the nutritive and powerful Red Clover. I've been dreaming of red clover infusions all spring, and though I have plans to make a harvest next week in enough quantity for infusions, I've started off with a jar of red clover flower elixir. Her sweet flowers are nutritious, and a gentle remedy for the respiratory tract, lymphatic system and especially helpful for women's fertility. Red Clover is like a triple goddess tonic for women- who need to restore their juiciness and reproductive vitality. She is for the inner goddess of every woman to be nourished deeply with sweetness.

Even sweeter yet, the perfumed air of honeysuckle blossoms beckoned to me at my dear friends home, and I spent the twilight hours picking the amazingly scented blossoms of honeysuckle, for a cooling elixir for overheated systems.

It isn't a plant I've worked with medicinally before, and look forward to exploring its properties and uses, but just the taste and smell of the elixir promise to be delightful in any case. I am grateful for flowers...and the green abundance of this eastern landscape, everywhere I go!