Photograph by Lazaregagnidze, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

I began growing kumquat trees after my German hairdresser—who fixes BMWs and fills his salon with large, flapping plants—pulled a pale fruit off one of his containers’ branches and told me to keep it in my pocket for three days to ripen. I wrapped the kumquat, the size of my thumb pad, into a Kleenex to be transported in my winter coat. It was a new year. I drove back to a house built in the 1700s—owned by a woman in her nineties who worked full-time and kept a fridge filled with Celsius energy drinks—where I was living in the attic. The pocket kumquat, forgotten until I unpacked from the holidays, tasted like a flower.

A year later, no longer attic-bound, I bought three varieties from a nursery recommended for its eclectic catalogue, which includes honeyberries, yerba maté, oyster leaf (which tastes like oysters), and a sweeter, stronger blackberry developed by the University of Arkansas that has the “potential to change the blackberry market.” The happiest plant of my life was an unspecified citrus tree that I rescued from a greenhouse sale at age eleven. The citrus and I grew equal in height until I went off to college and it surpassed me, and though it never bore fruit, its leaves were glossy and in wintertime it towered at the end of my childhood bed, which was also in an attic.

Citrus trees have always stalked me, with a meaning similar to what can be read in Saint John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent: “The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear.” In humility and trials, fruit can emerge. In the time between when my German hairdresser gave me a kumquat to put in my pocket and when I received three varieties of kumquat trees in the mail, my childhood home, with its citrus tree and attic, burned down, and was rebuilt.

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For Hildegard of Bingen, the famous twelfth-century Benedictine abbess and mystic, the earth produces goods commensurate with every need of the human body. This conviction was rooted in her broader theological framework of viriditas, or “greening power,” a divine life force that animates all creation and expresses itself in various ways, including in the healing properties of plants. In her encyclopedic book Physica, she sought to codify the natural world—plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals—according to each component’s effects on the four temperaments. Citrus trees (more “hot than cold”), signify chastity. When boiled in wine and consumed daily, their leaves alleviate daily fevers. Radishes cleanse the brain. Horseradish makes a lean person strong. Chamomile is calming to the intestines, and mullein is good for those who are sad. Wild lettuce, whose milky sap would later be studied in the nineteenth century for its mild sedative quality, extinguishes “uncontrollable lust.” It can be made into a kind of lettuce soup, the liquid of which is to be poured upon hot stones in a sauna while placing the cooked leaves on one’s belly.

The four temperaments, originally defined by the Greeks but interpreted by Hildegard in a more spiritually inflected way, are no longer reasonable medical categories, though I would be considered melancholic—the “iceberg temperament.” If not careful, I might be brought down by poisoned daydreaming. In the arduous process of rebuilding the house, we discovered that it had already burned down years before we moved in. My father recalled finding what may have been an arm bone when he dug around the side yard. The year of rebuilding was a task of inventorying and replication; insurance requires that the new house be the same, more or less, as the house that has been demolished. Read More