Wormwood and the Bitterness That Became a Drink

Wormwood announces itself before it is touched: a low, silvery shrub whose finely cut leaves seem dusted with frost even in midsummer heat, native to the dry ground of North Africa and temperate Eurasia and now settled in as far as Canada and the Kashmir Valley. The silver comes from a coat of fine hairs and oil glands that give the plant its bitterness and its smell at once — sharp, herbal, faintly medicinal, the scent of something you'd expect to be good for you.

That bitterness gave the plant its long career. Its German name, Wermut, passed more or less intact into English as vermouth, the fortified wine it still flavors; the same plant, distilled rather than steeped, became the principal bittering agent in absinthe. English brewers used it in place of hops through parts of the eighteenth century, and herbalists across centuries turned to it as a remedy against intestinal worms — the origin of its English common name.

Its bitterness reached further than the apothecary. Revelation names Wormwood as a falling star that turns a third of the world's rivers undrinkable; Shakespeare has a nurse rub it on her breast to wean an infant in Romeo and Juliet. Long before either, Lucretius reached for it as an image of medicine that must be sweetened to be taken at all — bitter wormwood, stirred into honeyed wine so a child would not refuse the cup.

Burned rather than drunk, the same bitterness turns into something else: a sharp, clean, herbal smoke, closer to sage or tarragon than to anything sweet. It is the kind of scent that seems to clear a room rather than fill it — an odd, fitting inheritance for a plant so often used, in one form or another, to drive something out.