A Gift of Yarrow From the Italian Alps

There are days at the shop that look like every other day — the kettles hiss and beep, the main door clicks open and close, regulars come in for their usual tea and a slow chat at the counter. And then there are days that quietly become unforgettable.

Last week was one of those.

A customer named Lucia walked in carrying a small jar of dried flowers. Yarrow, she told us. Achillea millefolium, in the language of botanists. She and her mother had picked them by hand, in the high meadows of the Italian Alps, where Lucia is from. She held the jar out the way you hold a thing that means something — gently, both hands, no fanfare.

We were not expecting a gift. We were certainly not expecting that gift.

Where the yarrow came from

Lucia's family is from Sondrio, a small town in northern Lombardy, tucked up near the Swiss border in the alpine valley of Valtellina.  It is the kind of place that looks, in photographs, like a country someone invented for a fairy tale — a green-blue lakes and waterfalls, thin alpine meadows running up toward bare peaks, and beautiful forests. 

It is also, like so many alpine places, a place where people have gathered herbs for as long as anyone can remember. Yarrow grows wild in those meadows, alongside arnica, gentian, and chamomile. People who grew up there learn the plants the way other people learn the words to a song — without trying, just by being around them.

When Lucia and her mother walk those slopes in summer to pick herbs and mushrooms, they are not foraging in any trendy sense. They are doing something their family has done for generations.

What yarrow tastes like

We brewed a cup of it that afternoon. Yarrow is a quiet plant, but a generous one — bitter at first, then sweet on the back of the tongue, with a soft herbaceous lift that reminded us a little of chamomile, and perhaps fennel seeds? Aromatic in the way meadows are aromatic. Not loud.

In European folk traditions, yarrow has been used for centuries — for staunching wounds (the old English name was "soldier's woundwort," and Greek myth credits Achilles with using it on the battlefield), for fevers, for digestion, for the kind of small, undramatic ailments that most of us would rather just sip our way through than visit a doctor for. 

Sweet, bitter, healing. A cup that tastes like care.

The thing tea does

We talk a lot, in this shop, about what tea is. Leaves, water, time. Soil and weather and skilled hands a long way from here. The cup in front of you is, in a literal sense, a piece of the world someone made it possible for you to drink.

What we don't always talk about — because it's harder to talk about — is what tea does. The way it slows a conversation down. The way it makes a counter into a table. The way a small jar of dried flowers can travel from a meadow in the Alps, across an ocean, to a tea shop in Rochester, New York, and become a moment that people will carry around with them long after the cup is empty.

Lucia teaches Italian at the University of Rochester. Her students are lucky. We are lucky to have her in our community.

We're not naming her here without permission, by the way; she gave it gladly. She wanted you to know about the mountain, and the herb, and her mother. She wanted you to know that this is what her home smells and tastes like. The smell has a name. It is called "erba iva," Lucia says, and those words linger in the air like the taste of the tea. 

A small thanks

So this is, in a small way, a thank-you note. To Lucia, for the yarrow. To her mother, who taught her where to find it. To the meadows of Valtellina, which keep growing it. And to anyone reading who has ever brought a piece of where they're from into our shop and let us share it — through a tea, a story, a recipe scrawled on a napkin — thank you, too. We notice. We remember.

There is a pot of yarrow steeping on our table as we write this. Sweet-bitter, alpine-aromatic, gently healing. A cup that tastes like care, given freely.

That's the kind of tea we got into this for.