Growing Green with the Zodiac: Toward an Ecological Astrology

Libra Season: September 22 to October 22

Readers of my Pecan Springs mysteries know that Ruby Wilcox owns the Crystal Cave, where she teaches astrology and tarot, sells divining tools and books on the occult, and stays in touch with the Universe. For years, she and China Bayles have badgered me about collaborating on a sister newsletter to All About Thyme, linking China’s interests in herbs and gardening, Ruby’s mysticism and her desire to live in more than one dimension, and my decades-long obsession with plants and the way people have used them.

So here is Growing Green with Libra, the second in a series of 12 monthly posts about plants and planets. Supporting subscribers, you’ll also receive the Libra workbook, with tarot, journaling, project suggestions, and (of course!) a recipe. I hope these posts encourage all of us to pay more attention to the green world upon which our lives depend.

Thyme, Place & Story includes several different monthly publications. This one isn’t your cuppa? Go here to select what you receive from me.

Libra, woodcut from a 16th century German book

Libra Season: September 22-October 22, 2024

• Guardian planet: Venus, at home in Libra

• Element: Air. Modality: Mutable. Image: the constellation The Scales or The Balance.

• Libra’s home in the Zodiac: the 7th House, the sector of relationships: personal and business agreements and partnerships. Here, the focus is on creating and maintaining balanced relationships, with concern for fairness and justice—both personal and social—for all. This may include affiliations with causes supporting human rights, social justice, and environmental conservation.

• Libra folk (those born with Sun, Moon, Rising Sign, or a cluster of planets in Libra) value beauty, aesthetic appeal, art, and music. Typically pleasant, agreeable, and charming, Libras seek harmony, balance, and peace in their relationships with others; and are often concerned with issues of fairness and reciprocity. Libra’s shadow side: on the personal level, manipulative, coercive, “thumb-on-the-scale”; on the social level, coercive, exploitative.

• Libra season opens the second half of the zodiac’s cycle, with a shift of emphasis from private to public self. As we enter, we cross the Descendant (the cusp of the 7th House) and the autumn equinox, one of the four astronomical thresholds of the year: the days and nights are equal and the earth is balanced between dark and light. As the image of the scales suggests, the task for Libra Season is to balance, harmonize, and bring into equilibrium. This mutable air sign is about finding our personal balance in our relationships with Significant Others, friends, and colleagues; understanding what we value most; and appreciating its true beauty—what’s below the surface.

  

Libra Season in the Garden

For everyone: Venus-ruled Libra loves beauty and color, and the trees are beginning to put on their seasonal fall show. It’s time to enjoy them, and to find delight (and maybe a little Venus-inspired romance?) in the colors and scents of the autumn garden. How about a Libra visit to one of the many beautiful public gardens in the U.S? Here are just three. Or go here to locate a public garden near you.

A fountain @Longwood. Notice the balanced, symmetrical planting, charming color combo—so Libra!

• Longwood Gardens (Kennett Square, Pennsylvania)
  Longwood is known for its meticulously maintained gardens, conservatories, and fountains (photo). Spanning over 1,000 acres, it features a diverse range of plants, from formal flower beds and topiary gardens to wild meadows and woodlands.

• The New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, New York)
  A National Historic Landmark, the New York Botanical Garden is one of the largest botanical gardens in the U.S. Its 250 acres are home to over a million plants and encompass a variety of themed gardens and collections. This Libra Season, they’re featuring Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!

• Huntington Botanical Gardens (San Marino, California)
  The 130-acre Huntington Gardens are part of a larger cultural and educational institution that includes a library and an art museum. The gardens are divided into themed areas, each offering a unique landscape and plant collection. Don’t miss the Rose Garden. Roses are Venus’ iconic flowers.

Venus is the goddess of love, desire, and beauty, and a beautiful garden can be an invitation to a romantic walk with a Significant Other. Just what you’d expect under Venus’ beneficent eye.

But what would happen if we shift our attention to our relationships with the plants, not just in our gardens but in earth’s gardens?

What would happen if all of us began to think of plants as Significant Others, in a co-evolving relationship with humans—with us?

Because when we get down to basics, we know that our lives depend on plants. Our food and clothing, our housing, our fossil fuels, even the air we breathe—all of it comes from plants. But it is easy to ignore them or relegate to the realm of the decorative, as Richard Mabey says in The Cabaret of Plants: “They have come to be seen as the furniture of the planet, necessary, useful, attractive, but ‘just there’, passively vegetating.”

With its focus on relationship, Libra Season invites us to recognize and honor our many often hidden and unacknowledged partnerships with plants.

Truly, growing green with the Zodiac.

Gardening by the Sun in Libra

If you’re a gardener, you know it’s a year-round occupation. This growing year may seem to be winding down, but there’s always plenty to do. Here’s a handy Libra checklist for your northern-hemisphere garden.

• On the deck or beside the door, play with colorful containers of fall bloomers: mums, salvia, dahlias, pansies, ornamental cabbages.

• Harvest fall vegetables (pumpkins, winter squash, cabbage), root vegetables (carrots, beets), and fruits (apples, pears). These will be in the farmers’ markets, too.

• Plant several Venus-ruled perennials for next year’s blossoms. Fragrant choices: roses, peonies, violets. Yes, you can start violets from seed, if you can’t find plants.

• Before the ground freezes, plant Venus-ruled spring-blooming tulips, as well as daffodils (Sun-ruled), and crocuses (Mercury).

• Divide and transplant perennials to give them time to settle in before winter. Cover any that need protection.

• Continue to add to your compost (next year’s soil!). Consider covering (leaves, straw, old rug, bubble wrap) to retain heat. Larger piles retain more heat, smaller may be more likely to freeze.

• Indoor gardeners, treat yourself to an elegant orchid, a perfect representation of Venus’ delight in beautiful life. Here are some helpful suggestions for orchid care. (When in doubt, add an ice cube.)

Between those hands-on garden tasks—

• Read Michael Pollan’s enlightening The Botany of Desire and think about how our Venus-inspired love of, fascination with, and desire for certain plants has changed the course of history. Consider Pollan’s upside-down thesis: While we’ve been cultivating these plants, they have been cultivating us, seducing us into partnership with them and inducing us to introduce their genetic material to new environments. Pollan definitely has a way of rebalancing and realigning traditional points of view. This is a Venus-in-Libra book if there ever was one.

• Obtain your birth chart free, at this site (my preference) or this one. You’ll need the date, time, and place of your birth.
  

Gardening by the Moon in Libra

The ancient cross-cultural practice of lunar gardening is based on the belief that the Moon affects the movement of moisture in plants and soils as well as the more-perceptible ocean tides, and that moonlight can affect a plant’s growth.

Last-century science scorned these traditional ideas, but recent research suggests that there is a universe of plant behavior that we know little or nothing about. I’m keeping an open mind.

Lunar gardening includes two different biodynamic strategies: gardening by the Moon’s phases and gardening by the Moon’s signs. Some gardeners choose one or the other, some practice both.

Gardening by the Moon’s phases. The increasing light of a waxing moon is said to boost leaf growth while its increasing gravitational strength raises the level of soil moisture and encourages sap production. The decreasing light and strength of a waning moon encourages root growth. Each phase lasts about a week. For this Libra Season Moon, here are the phases and their traditional practices:

• Last Quarter (Sep 24): Plant cool-season root crops, also perennials, biennials, and bulbs.

• Waning Crescent (Sep 25) to New Moon (Oct 2): Harvest and store crops, fertilize, weed, mow lawns.

  • On the New Moon, put work aside, meditate. (It is also an annular solar eclipse.) New Moons are the time to set intentions—a good time to consider our intentions regarding our relationships with people. And with plants.

• Waxing Crescent (Oct 3) to First Quarter (Oct 10): Plant above ground annuals (especially leaf plants), grains, herbs. To increase growth: mow grass, graft, prune.

• Waxing Crescent (Oct 11) to Full Moon (Oct 17): Plant above ground annuals (especially fruit plants), grains, flowers. To increase growth: mow grass, graft and prune.

  • On the Full Moon, pick medicinal herbs and plants, meditate, and celebrate all you’ve brought to fruition since Virgo’s Full Moon.

• Waning Gibbous (Oct 18 to Last Quarter (Oct 23): Plant below ground/root plants, perennials, trees, shrubs. Harvest crops, fertilize, transplant

Gardening by the Moon’s signs. As the Moon changes phases, it also moves from one zodiac sign to another. Traditionally, each sign is suited to a different set of tasks, suggested by the planet that rules the sign. You can see these displayed for this current Libra Season on this useful Astro-seek calendar and chart. Before you tackle the calendar, scroll down to study the chart, where the phases are displayed in the wide center column and the signs are shown to the left. Leaf/fruit/root/flower terms are explained in detail at the bottom.

I’ve set the Astro-seek link for the beginning of Libra in September; you can re-set it (at the top of the page) as Libra moves into October.

Libra’s Medicinal Herbs

As above, so below, the saying went, and for millennia, the planets were believed to govern all things on earth, including the human body. Yale University has a stunning online exhibit that illustrates the concepts of medical astrology in the 15th-17th centuries. This is one of their images:

17th-century Zodiac Man

In pre-modern medical practice, Venus-ruled Libra (represented by the Scales in the drawing above) was understood to be related to the harmonies between important body systems: the endocrine system, the urinary system and the kidneys; as well as the skin and the region of the lower back. Medicinal herbs associated with Venus and Libra were seen to assist in balancing these physical systems.

Thyme (Thymus vulgaris). Thymol is the chemical compound that gives thyme its antiseptic punch. You’ll find it in many modern mouthwashes, toothpastes and dozens of everyday products. A tea may relieve menstrual cramps and help relax the muscles of the gastrointestinal tract, and the leaves have been used as a poultice for wounds. During World War I, thyme was the primary battlefield-hospital antiseptic. (The supply of thyme was interrupted by the war, so herbalist Maud Grieve turned her plant nursery into an herb farm to produce it.) If you want a few plants for your indoor or outdoor garden, buy a bundle of supermarket thyme and root sprigs in water.

Photo by Meg MacDonald on Unsplash

Rose hips (Rosa canina L). Roses have long been associated with Venus and the plant’s fruit has been used by various cultures for its medicinal properties. The primary use has been in maintaining skin health: recent clinical studies on rose hip oil have demonstrated its effectiveness in improving skin hydration, treating acne, and healing scars and burns. But due to their high vitamin C and flavonoid content, rose hips are also used to boost the immune system and maintain urinary health. Use capsules, brew as tea, or prepare in syrups, jams, and jellies. And look for rose hips in just about every cosmetic on the shelf!

Here are two North American plants not known to Old World herbalists but used by Indigenous Peoples to treat similar medical issues.

Cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon). Studies show that cranberry prevents bacteria from attaching to the walls of the urinary tract. Researchers who have studied its chemical compounds have given it the tongue-twister name of xyloglucan oligosaccharides. Whatever they’re called, they’re a helpful preventative for urinary tract infections. (Helpful for dogs, too—as our Molly would tell you, if she could talk.) The berries have a high level of Vitamin C. Cranberry fruit is high in antioxidants that give the berries their rich red color.

Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) is particularly useful in toning the glandular system, as well as being a general tonic for inflamed mucous membranes of the vagina, uterus, mouth, throat, and digestive system. It contains a compound called berberine that controls many types of bacteria, fungi (such as candida), and intestinal parasites. It was a go-to healing herb for many Native American tribal healers. In fact, the plant has been almost loved to death: it has been classified as endangered since 1997. It is now grown successfully on commercial farms.

Thanks for reading, everyone! You’ll hear from me again on Monday, October 7, with the October edition of All About Thyme.

Supporting subscribers, you’ll shortly receive the Libra Workbook, your invitation to explore some of the magic, myth, and mystery of this season. Thank you for your generous support!