The Almanac
The Gathering In
Late October · The Gathering In
The Season
There is something to be learned from this. The gathering in is not a retreat. It is a form of wisdom.
The Botanical
Hawthorn
Crataegus monogyna
Hawthorn is one of the oldest and most storied plants in the British Isles and across temperate Europe. It has grown in hedgerows and on hillsides for thousands of years, marking boundaries, sheltering livestock, and standing at the threshold between the cultivated world and the wild one.
In late October, the hawthorn is at its most vivid. The leaves have turned — amber, rust, deep red — and the branches are heavy with berries, called haws, that glow like small garnets against the darkening sky. It is one of the few plants that seems to intensify as the year winds down.
Hawthorn has long been associated with thresholds and transitions. In Celtic tradition, it was considered one of the most sacred trees — a guardian of liminal spaces, a marker of the boundary between this world and the other. It was planted at wells, at crossroads, at the edges of fields. To harm a hawthorn was considered deeply unlucky.
The berries, leaves, and flowers have all been used in traditional herbalism for centuries, particularly in connection with the heart — both the physical organ and the emotional one. Modern research has examined hawthorn's cardiovascular properties with genuine interest, though the plant's full complexity remains, as with so many botanicals, only partially understood.
What strikes us most about hawthorn is its patience. It grows slowly, lives for centuries, and asks very little. It is evergreen in spirit if not always in leaf — persistent, quietly extraordinary, and most beautiful precisely at the moment when everything else is letting go.
Hawthorn has a long history of traditional use. As with all botanicals, those with health conditions or taking medications should consult a qualified practitioner before use.
The Steep
A Cup for the First Dark Evenings
The evenings arrive earlier now. By five o'clock the light has gone, and there is a particular quality to the darkness of late October — not the deep cold of winter, but something softer. Anticipatory. The kind of dark that asks you to light something.
This is the hour for tea. Not the bright, bracing warmth of ginger and citrus — that belongs to mornings, to beginnings. What late October calls for is something quieter. Something that holds. A cup that asks nothing of you except to sit with it.
We think about warmth the way a herbalist thinks about it — not as a single quality but as a spectrum. There is the warmth of spice, sharp and immediate. The warmth of sweetness, round and brief. And then there is the warmth that hawthorn carries: slow, deep, and patient. The warmth of something that has been growing quietly for a very long time.
Prepare it simply. Loose leaves in a warmed pot. Water just off the boil. A few minutes of stillness while it steeps. The steam rises and the room fills with something that is difficult to name — earthy, faintly floral, with a depth that seems to belong to the season itself.
Carry it somewhere quiet. The gathering in is not only for root cellars and dried bundles. It is for this, too.
The Almanac returns with the turning of the season.
Late October · 2026
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