Herb
Remembrance and hearth-smoke, from a shrub that outlives the gardener who planted it.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Rosemary came north from the limestone coasts of the Mediterranean and made itself unexpectedly at home in cold gardens, where it will sulk through a wet winter and flower anyway. Its older name, ros marinus, means dew of the sea. Early modern Europe used it for nearly everything social: strewn on floors, bound into wedding garlands, carried at funerals and dropped into the grave, and burnt in sickrooms as a fumigant long after the theory of bad air that justified it had been given up.
Practice today keeps the funeral association and turns it kindly. Rosemary is for remembrance — for holding a person, a promise or an intention in mind. It is also the default cleansing herb of English-language craft, bundled and burnt where a room feels stale, and it is usually the first thing offered to someone looking for a plant that is actually theirs to burn.
Whether the scent does anything to memory is genuinely unsettled; the studies are small, mixed and no kind of licence to treat anything at all. What is not in doubt is that a rosemary hedge smells of resin and salt, and that people have been reaching for it at the significant moments for a very long time.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper is unusually brisk about it: "The Sun claims privilege in it, and it is under the celestial Ram." Nearly every solar and Aries attribution repeated in modern craft books traces back through this one line.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Offered as the everyday cleansing smoke, particularly to people who have been told — correctly — that white sage is not theirs to burn. Rosemary is European, cheap, grown in half the gardens in Britain, and belongs to nobody in particular.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.