Gorge Gentian
A blue-flowered plant of the high meadows and gorges whose intensely bitter root breaks fevers; the Ironspine holds brew their bitters from it.
Overview
Gorge gentian grows high, above the last terraces of the Headwater Marches and on the flanks of the Ironspine, and its root is the bitterest thing the mountains grow. Healers on both sides of the gates use it for fever and for a stomach that will not take food; the holds brew it into the dark bitters that every Dwarven table keeps.
Appearance
There are two forms, and the gorges hold both. The tall gentian stands waist-high on a stout stem with broad, ribbed, pale-green leaves in opposite pairs, and in midsummer carries whorls of deep blue, bell-shaped flowers in the leaf joints, each the length of a thumb, darker inside and streaked with green. The low gentian is a mat-forming alpine of the high meadows, a hand high, with small pointed leaves and a single upturned trumpet of startling blue on each stem, so bright against the grass that it seems lit. Both have a thick, yellow-brown, twisted taproot, wrinkled outside and pale yellow within, that smells of earth and tastes bitter for an hour.
Habitat and Range
It needs cold, open, well-watered ground: high meadows, the sides of the gorges where spray keeps the soil wet, stream banks above the valleys, and the grass ledges of the mountain flank. It does not grow below the foothill woods. Root-diggers go up for it in late summer.
Behaviour and Temperament
The tall gentian grows slowly and takes many years to flower; the root thickens every year. A dug stand comes back slowly, so families of root-diggers keep their own slopes and take only part of each.
Life Cycle
The tall gentian takes ten years or more from seed to first flower and can live for half a century. The low gentian flowers within a few years and spreads into mats.
Uses and Dangers
The root is dug, washed, split, and dried, then steeped in water, ale, or spirit. A cup of the bitter is the mountain answer to fever and to the winter cough, given at the sickbed until the sweat breaks; small doses before a meal wake a failing appetite, and the holds give it to the old and the convalescent. Dwarven brewers steep it in strong spirit with other roots to make the hold bitters, a dark, nearly black drink taken in a small cup after meals and before a long climb. Headwater farmers sell the root uphill with their grain. It is not harmful; too much brings only sickness and a sour mouth.
Lore and Belief
Dwarves say the bitter is the taste of the mountain, and that one who cannot drink it has not earned the climb; a fosterling going up behind a gate is given a cup on arrival. Headwater folk hold that gentian dug in the dark of the moon is strongest. Some believe the blue flowers close before storms; they close in cloud and cold, which comes to the same thing on a mountain.
Root-diggers who work the gorge ledges for the hold healers fall every year, and the Headwater song of the digger who hung from her rope all night above the river with a sack of roots she would not drop is sung to every child who asks to go up.
Where It Appears
- Overview: Plants and Fungi