The Mediterranean cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) — also known as the pencil cypress, true cypress, or mourning cypress — is an evergreen tree in the cypress family. Under favourable conditions it shows remarkable height growth, reaching four to six metres within ten years; it is considered a pioneer species, highly adaptable and drought-resistant, growing on chalk, marl, and clay soils as much as on dry, poor ground. Its original range spans Greece, the Aegean islands, Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Cilicia, and Lebanon through to southwestern Iran; it was introduced to Italy in antiquity, and later to France and Spain. Cypress is not native to Germany.

Its pleasantly scented, easily worked wood is hard, dense-grained, and highly durable. In antiquity it was used for posts, roof beams, wine presses, tables, and musical instruments, and was so valuable that a cypress plantation was considered a fitting dowry for a daughter. In Assyria it was prized for statues, temple doors, and sarcophagi, as well as wands used in necromancy. Its oil and wood, valued for their antibacterial properties, were also used to combat epidemics. In Ottoman culture, cypress is regarded as the tree of life, and its form still adorns Turkish fountains, gravestones, and prayer rugs.

For the ancient Greeks, it was simultaneously a symbol of grief and of metamorphosis — a meeting point of life and death, of memory and forgetting. According to Orphic tradition, two rivers spring up in the underworld at the foot of a white cypress: to the right, Mnemosyne, the spring of memory; to the left, Lethe, the river of forgetting. A further literary source for this mythologem is the story of Cyparissus, son of the Arcadian hero Telephus and beloved of Apollo, who in youthful hunting passion accidentally killed his own tame stag and, inconsolable over his mistake, was transformed by Apollo into a cypress tree: "When now his blood was wholly spent through ceaseless weeping, his body began to turn to green; the hair that had hung upon his snow-white brow became shaggy foliage, and, stiffened, gazed up at the stars with a narrowing crown. The god sighed with sorrow and said: 'You shall forever be mourned by us, and, near to the grieving, shall mourn others too.'" (Ovid, Metamorphoses; German translation R. Suchier)

The cypress burned this evening was picked in the immediate vicinity of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The still-visible ruins, with six re-erected Doric columns, are the remains of the temple completed in 320 BC, seat of the famous Oracle of Delphi, where the Pythia sat in the adyton over a gas-emitting fissure in the earth, falling into trance to pronounce the god's utterances — likely accompanied by the burning of Cupressus sempervirens. The physician Oreibasios is said to have visited the oracle in 362 AD on the orders of Emperor Julian; the Pythia prophesied one final time, announcing the oracle's permanent silence: "Tell the emperor, the ornate hall has fallen to the ground, Phoebus no longer has his house. Nor the prophetic laurel, nor the murmuring spring; the murmuring water too has fallen silent." Delphi, one of the greatest Panhellenic sanctuaries since the 8th century BC, gradually lost its central religious significance, until Emperor Theodosius I banned the Delphic Games as a pagan event in 394 AD.

Burned as incense, cypress releases a clear, resinous-woody scent with a cool, almost balsamic freshness. Even in Christian times it remained an evergreen symbol of longevity and the immortality of the soul, and it remains associated today with comfort, inner calm, and the processing of loss.

Common wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.) is native to the temperate regions of Eurasia and North Africa. It has been cultivated in monastery gardens as a medicinal herb for centuries, though its rather unremarkable appearance means it is often overlooked by hikers. Wormwood typically grows as an herbaceous plant reaching some 40 to 60 centimetres in height, arising from a horizontally growing rhizome from which upright, densely leaved shoots emerge, sometimes woody at the base.

The plant produces highly concentrated bitter compounds, chief among them absinthin; its essential oils contain thujone — familiar from the percentage figures on absinthe bottles, and largely responsible for the drink's both healing and harmful effects. Following the medieval instructions for burning it as incense, as laid out in the Speyer Herbal or by Hildegard of Bingen, avoids the overlaying side effects of alcohol entirely.

In antiquity, wormwood was used medicinally for an extremely wide range of conditions — menstrual complaints, liver and kidney ailments, jaundice, digestive troubles, and much more. The Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (c. 1600 BC), one of humanity's oldest surviving written documents, names wormwood repeatedly as a medico-magical plant ("somi" or "saam"). Greek authors frequently note its Egyptian and Asia Minor-Greek cultural spread: Dioscorides describes its ritual function among the Egyptians, while Theophrastus tells of sheep near the Pontus that lost their gallbladders from grazing on Artemisia. In Greece, wormwood was likely the most important of the Artemisia species dedicated to Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the forest. Artemis, twin sister of Apollo and daughter of Leto, was among the twelve original Olympian deities; as a virginal, nymph-like yet also fertility-bringing figure, she is especially associated with wormwood's use in the medico-mythological realms of menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Yet in her role as protector of young girls, she also takes on ill-omened qualities: she punished the hunter Actaeon by turning him into a stag after he surprised her bathing, whereupon he was torn apart by his own hounds, no longer recognizing him in animal form — linking Artemisia, since antiquity, with spells and curses as well.

Galen of Pergamon, the most important conduit of Greco-Roman herbal knowledge into post-antique Islamic and Christian medicine, ascribed to wormwood the humoral quality of "warm and dry," with bitterness as a secondary quality — an assessment later adopted in the Middle Ages by Hildegard of Bingen, Konrad of Megenberg, and the herbalist Pierre Andrea Mattioli, among others. In Hildegard of Bingen's herbal medicine, wormwood occupies a central place, functioning almost as a classical universal remedy; she and the Speyer Herbal give instructions for wormwood potions, salves, plasters, poultices, and incense, and she further recommends it as an effective remedy against witches and demons. Wormwood became world-famous above all as the principal ingredient of absinthe, the legendary "green fairy" of 19th-century Parisian bohemia. When its use in distilling was restricted in Greece too, early in the last century, it gave a major boost to ouzo — "absinthe without the wormwood" — much as it did for pastis in France.

Burned as incense, wormwood releases a sharp, bitter-herbaceous, faintly camphorous scent. It is traditionally associated with banishing negative energy, protection, and mental clarity.