Seven plants of October: folklore, spirits and the green world of the dead

Originally written by Leo S. 🙏🏼 in 2021. Updated 2026

October has always been a month of thresholds.
The light fades earlier, the first mists settle over fields and forests, and nature itself seems to move into a different rhythm.
Across Europe, this period of the year became associated with remembrance, the dead and the idea that, for a brief moment, the distance between the world of the living and the world beyond it might become thinner.
Long before Halloween became a global celebration, European folk traditions had their own plants, trees and herbs associated with death, protection, spirits and the passage between worlds. Some were burned as protective fumigants, some were planted in graveyards, others were treated with almost supernatural respect.
Their powers, of course, belong to folklore rather than science.
But the stories surrounding them are fascinating — and sometimes surprisingly old.

Angelica seems almost destined to belong to the world of protection.
Its name evokes angels, and European herbal traditions have long associated the plant with guarding people and places from harmful forces.
In some traditions it was carried, hung in homes or burned as a protective herb, with its reputation extending to witchcraft, evil spirits and other perceived dangers.
The darker side of its folklore is particularly appropriate for October. Leaves and flowers were reportedly burned in connection with funerary practices and spiritual rituals, where the smoke was believed to protect those present from troubled presences and help the souls of the dead continue their journey.
Angelica therefore occupied an unusual position in traditional belief: a plant associated with both the dead and the protection of the living.
Its botanical appearance may have helped reinforce the symbolism. Tall, imposing and crowned with pale umbrella-shaped flower clusters, it looks less like an ordinary garden herb than something belonging to an older world of medicinal gardens, monasteries and folk magic.

Then there is black hellebore.
Few plants have a darker reputation than it.
Helleborus niger has been associated with madness, medicine, poison and magic since antiquity.
The Greeks were particularly fascinated by hellebore, and the plant became famous in connection with the legendary healer Melampus, who was said to have used it to cure the daughters of King Proetus after they were afflicted by a form of divinely induced madness. Modern historical research confirms how closely hellebore became connected with ancient ideas about treating mental disorders.
Its reputation was not simply symbolic. Hellebore really is a dangerous plant, and ancient and medieval physicians were well aware of the violent effects that excessive doses could produce. The distinction between medicine, poison and magic was far less clear in the ancient world than it is today.
The plant also acquired a reputation for ritual purification. Pliny described black hellebore being used as a fumigant for houses, while elaborate rituals surrounded its gathering, including drawing a circle around the plant and asking divine permission before removing it from the earth.
It is easy to understand how a plant capable of purging the body became, in folklore, a plant capable of purging a house of unwanted supernatural presences.
And there is a final October irony: although Helleborus niger is popularly known today as the Christmas rose, its ancient history is considerably darker than its modern name suggests!

Between autumn and early winter comes the traditional harvesting period for the root of elecampane, or Inula helenium.
Its scientific name already carries a story. One of the oldest legends surrounding the plant says that it sprang from the tears of Helen of Troy — although different versions place those tears in different moments of her story. The association is ancient enough to have influenced the plant’s scientific name and several of its traditional names.
That connection with Helen gives elecampane a particularly poignant place in the folklore of autumn. Helen is one of the great figures of Greek mythology, while the Trojan War is itself a story saturated with death, mourning and the consequences of human conflict.
Later European magical traditions gave the root a darker role. Burning elecampane around All Saints’ or similar autumnal observances was said in some traditions to protect travellers from spirits, especially in lonely places, misty roads and crossroads — all classic liminal spaces in European folklore.
The plant itself is anything but sinister. It produces bright yellow, daisy-like flowers and can become remarkably tall. Yet folklore often seems to enjoy giving luminous plants the darkest stories.

The blue gentian belongs almost instinctively to the mountains.
For centuries, different gentian species have been part of Alpine culture, particularly through the harvesting of their roots and the production of traditional mountain spirits. Gentian remains one of the characteristic botanicals of Alpine herbal traditions, from the Italian Alps to Switzerland, Austria and Germany.
But the mountains themselves have always occupied an ambiguous place in folklore. They were beautiful and sacred, yet also remote, dangerous and unpredictable. Mist could erase paths, storms could arrive without warning and isolated valleys seemed to belong to a world apart from ordinary human life.
That environment generated an enormous body of legends about mountain spirits, wandering souls and supernatural beings. One documented Alpine legend from the Kleinwalsertal, for example, tells of the Dellermännle, a small penitent spirit condemned to wander because of stolen gentian roots.
This is perhaps the most interesting way to understand gentian’s place in October folklore: not as a universally documented “plant of the dead”, but as part of a broader Alpine imagination in which roots, mountains, mist and spirits were deeply intertwined.
And unlike many plants on this list, gentian has maintained a very tangible cultural life. Its roots are still harvested and distilled into traditional Alpine spirits today.

Delicate, white and star-like, Parnassia palustris — commonly known as grass-of-Parnassus — looks almost otherworldly when it grows among wet meadows, marshes and misty ground.
Its habitat may explain much of its folklore. Wetlands, marshes and fog-covered landscapes have traditionally been regarded as liminal places: neither entirely land nor water, neither familiar nor entirely accessible.
Modern folklore collections associate the plant with protective and spiritual traditions in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, although many of the more specific claims surrounding its supposed relationship with the dead are difficult to trace to strong historical sources.
That uncertainty is worth preserving. Folklore is not a single, fixed body of knowledge. Stories change from village to village, names move between plants and later writers sometimes turn local beliefs into apparently universal traditions.
Still, the image is irresistible: white flowers appearing in damp autumn landscapes, imagined as souls returning briefly to the world of the living before winter closes in.
It is exactly the kind of story that could only have grown from a landscape where mist, silence and flowers make the boundary between the visible and invisible seem unusually thin.

Few European plants have accumulated as much folklore as the elder.
Across northern and central Europe, traditions tell of a female guardian spirit living in or around the elder tree. In Scandinavia she appears under names such as Hyldemoer or Hyllemor; elsewhere related figures are described as an “Old Lady” or a protective spirit of the shrub. One recurring custom was particularly striking: anyone wishing to cut the elder was expected to ask permission first.
Older folklore collections similarly describe the elder as a plant inhabited by supernatural beings and warn that cutting it without permission could bring misfortune.
The popular identification of this spirit with Frau Holle or Holda is more complicated than folklore websites sometimes suggest. The traditions overlap, but the direct linguistic and mythological equation is disputed. What is much more securely documented is the broader European belief that a guardian female presence inhabited the elder and that the plant should not be treated casually.
That idea gives the elder a remarkable position in European folklore. It was not simply a plant used against spirits: it was itself believed to have a spirit.

And then there is the yew.
If European folklore had to choose a single tree to represent the relationship between life and death, Taxus baccata would be difficult to ignore.
Yews have long been associated with cemeteries and churchyards, and their extraordinary longevity — some specimens can survive for many centuries, potentially more than a thousand years — helped transform them into symbols of immortality, death and resurrection. Their evergreen foliage made them particularly powerful symbols of life continuing through winter.
But the yew has an unmistakably poisonous side.
The red fleshy part surrounding the seed — the aril — is not itself toxic, but the seed is poisonous, as are essentially all other parts of the tree. This combination of beauty and danger undoubtedly contributed to its supernatural reputation.
One of the most extraordinary beliefs connected with the yew was that its roots could grow towards the mouths, eyes or other parts of the bodies of the dead, binding them to the earth or drawing away their souls. Versions of this legend were recorded in different parts of Europe. In one Greek tradition, the roots were said to enter the mouths of the dead and remove their souls.
The tree’s association with burial grounds has a more practical side too. Yews were evergreen, extraordinarily long-lived and well suited to cemetery environments; their toxicity also meant that keeping them inside enclosed churchyards protected grazing animals from them.
Yet folklore gave those practical facts a much darker interpretation.
The yew became the tree of the dead — but also, paradoxically, the tree of immortality.
Perhaps that is why it remains such a powerful symbol for October. It does not represent death alone. It represents the strange idea that death and renewal may belong to the same cycle.

October’s plants tell a story that is much older than Halloween.
They speak of people who looked at a white flower emerging from mist, a blue flower growing high in the mountains, a poisonous herb, a tree standing beside graves or a shrub that seemed almost inhabited — and tried to explain what they saw through stories.
Some of those stories were about protection. Others were about madness, mourning, ghosts or the journey of the soul. Some were eventually absorbed into religious traditions; others survived as fragments of local folklore.
And perhaps that is what makes these plants so fascinating today.
They remind us that, for much of human history, nature was not simply something to be observed. It was something to be interpreted. A forest could have a guardian. A root could remember the dead. A flower could be a tear. A tree could stand between a grave and eternity.

As October begins, the old stories are still there — quietly growing among the autumn leaves.