Jules Of The Earth

Mugwort — Artemisia vulgaris, is doing its last good work right now. By October it's gone leggy and silver-backed, seeding along verges and field edges before the frost takes it down, and this is the window for cutting it if you're going to.

Herbalists have reached for it for centuries as a bitter, used in small culinary amounts to help digestion along, and it's long been burned or dried as a smoking herb for its reputed effect on dreaming, whether that's chemistry or ceremony depends who you ask. Named for Artemis, which tells you most of what you need to know about its character: sharp, a bit wild, not interested in being tamed into a tidy border plant.

It's cut in dry weather, tied in loose bunches, hung somewhere dark and left alone for a couple of weeks. Rush the drying and it moulds. Leave it too long on the stem and the leaves go brittle and lose their silver.

I haven't formulated with mugwort myself at Jules Of The Earth, my East Yorkshire apothecary for handmade botanical skincare, scent and witchcraft-rooted stock, but Artemisia earns its reputation honestly, bitter, defiant, genuinely useful.

If you've landed here with no idea who I am — fair. Short version: I'm Jules, and Jules Of The Earth is an East Yorkshire apothecary and perfumery. I make handmade botanical skincare and scent, and I don't pretend the witchcraft side is a marketing flourish on top of it.

There's no pastel talk here. No lecture about fixing your skin, correcting your age, or becoming a better version of yourself. The day cream and night cream I make are built to just bloody work, nothing more performative than that.

The scent side goes further than a candle with a nice name. I'm building proper perfumes with a story behind them, ones meant to walk you through something, not just sit pretty on a shelf. That's still taking shape, so more on that another time.

I'm not new at this either. 15 years in, a genuine herbal medicine degree behind the apothecary bit, and a customer base that includes people who've bought the same cream from me for over a decade. I didn't build this to look spiritual. I built it because it's actually how I think.

If you're the sort who wants your skincare and your scent to mean something, rather than just smell nice and say nothing, you're probably in the right place.

Three of my long-running wholesale clients sell creams I formulate and produce for them under their own name. Not tweaked labels — proper briefs, costed and batch-tracked, repeat orders running for years. Most people only know me for the perfumes and the creams with my name on them. This is the bit I've gone quiet about for too long.

If you sell skincare under your own brand and want it formulated properly rather than picked off a catalogue shelf — or you're a herbalist who used to buy bulk creams and lost that supplier — that's exactly the conversation I want to have.

Full story's on the blog. https://www.julesoftheearth.uk/blog/bespoke-wholesale-production-jules-of-the-earth

Here's a number nobody puts on the shelf: cost per month, not cost per jar.

A well-known high-street cream, the kind that calls itself hypoallergenic, can run you two jars a month if it's not actually calming anything down. Reapplying because you still feel uncomfortable isn't a skincare routine. It's a cream that isn't finishing the job.

My Nourishing Day and Night Cream are £19.99 each. Used as a pair, most people get 6 to 8 weeks out of them. Work that out monthly and it undercuts the "premium" option by a long way — because when something actually works, you need less of it, not more.

Not skin-supporting. Not anti-bullsh*t either, just honest. A cream that does what it says, so you stop needing so much of it.

https://stillroomhq.co.uk/l/5WEQqus.

Sedna did not descend by choice.

In the old Inuit story, she is betrayed at sea, clings to the side of the boat, and loses everything she thought would hold. She falls into the deep and becomes its keeper: not rescued, not restored to who she was, but changed into someone with a whole cold kingdom beneath her hands.

Jules Of The Earth is an East Yorkshire apothecary and perfumery for handmade botanical skincare, scent, and witchcraft with a sharp edge.

There are seasons like that. A marriage ending. A body behaving differently. A job that no longer fits the person who walks into it each morning.

The surface world likes a neat return. Sedna offers something less tidy: the deep is still a place. What was lost may not come back in its old shape.

Sometimes the quiet revolution is simply admitting you are down there, and the water has not taken you.

Hops are ready when they smell like late summer got held hostage in a paper bag.

Humulus lupulus is climbing, scratchy, and currently hanging heavy with pale green cones. If you grow it, harvest when the cones feel light and papery, spring back after a gentle squeeze, and leave a yellow dust on your fingers. That dust is lupulin: the bitter, aromatic stuff brewers care about.

Hops are best known for b**r, obviously, but they have a longer folk history than the pint glass. The dried cones have been tucked into pillows for their sleepy reputation, used to scent linen, and valued for that unmistakable bitter-green aroma. Not delicate. More hedge, resin and the last warm day of September.

Cut the cones on a dry day and dry them somewhere airy, out of direct sun. Do not pile them in a damp bowl and hope for the best. That is how good intentions become compost.

No hops in a Jules Of The Earth product just now, but I do have a soft spot for any plant that arrives with a climbing frame and a bad attitude.

Demeter is often remembered for the winter.

For the fields stripped bare. For the mother who would not smile whilst her daughter was gone.

But there is another part of her story: she left Olympus, put on the clothes of an old woman, and sat beside a well in a town where nobody knew her name.

A goddess reduced to grief. A mother without the role she knew how to inhabit. Powerful, and still unable to make the world return to what it had been.

There are seasons when the old title falls away: wife, colleague, caretaker, the one who kept everything moving. The ground looks empty because it is empty.

Demeter sat by the well anyway.

Not fixed. Not transformed. Just there, in borrowed clothes, waiting for the earth to answer.

Borage — *Borago officinalis* — is the sort of plant that looks as though it has wandered in from somewhere more glamorous and then got on with growing in the veg patch.

Its blue, star-shaped flowers are still about in early autumn, especially where it has happily self-seeded. Bees are extremely fond of it. The leaves are rough enough to make you reconsider bare-handed harvesting, and the whole plant has a long folk association with courage and gladness. Older herbals called it a comforter of the heart, which is a nicer phrase than most modern packaging manages.

Borage seed oil is valued in skincare for its naturally occurring gamma-linolenic acid, and it has long been used in preparations intended to support dry, weathered skin. The young flowers are edible too: mild, cucumber-like, and best picked fresh rather than left hanging about in the kitchen looking decorative.

Grow it from seed in ordinary soil, give it room, and let a few plants go to seed if you want it back next year. It rarely needs encouragement.

Borage oil is one of the ingredients in our Nourishing Day Cream. It has earned its place.

Psyche was told not to look.

She had been carried into a life she could feel but not see: a husband who came only in darkness, a future kept deliberately vague. For a while, she lived inside the instruction.

Then came the lamp.

Not rebellion for the sake of it. Not a neat little lesson about bravery. Just the unbearable human need to know what is sharing your bed, shaping your life, asking for your trust.

The light changed everything. It cost her the world she thought she had.

But some thresholds only appear once the room is lit. The marriage. The job. The old name. The version of yourself that survived by not looking too closely.

Psyche raised the lamp. That was the beginning.

Hestia never left the hearth. No dramatic descent, no crossroads, no thread through a labyrinth — she's the goddess who stayed exactly where she was while the rest of Olympus went to war, fell in love, changed shape and chased mortals across the sky.

There's a version of change that isn't leaving. It's staying, and becoming someone else entirely inside the same four walls — the same kitchen, the same job, the same body that's shifting under you without permission. Nobody throws you a party for that kind of transition. There's no story for the woman who didn't run anywhere and still isn't who she was last year.

Hestia kept a flame lit that every household in Greece measured itself against. She never had to move to matter. The fire did the work. It always does, quietly, whether anyone's watching it or not.