My friends the plants

This is my personal take on plant-human relationships.

I think having a relationship with plants is crucially important to help each of us navigate through challenging times.

In our broccoli-hating culture, I’m speaking up for the plants.

Everything from green salad to a huge, 1500 year old kauri tree.

That doesn’t mean I’m a great gardener or a skilled botanist or a professional herbalist. Or even particularly good at communicating with plants. 

I don’t love all plants.

But I care about them and respect them and appreciate them.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, says: “In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us’.”

Five important things that plants do for us humans

1. They feed us.

Plants take the energy of the sun and turn it into nutrients that we can use. All of us are eating a diet that’s plant based, even the meat we eat is plant-fed.

 

2. They delight our senses

Flowers make it particularly easy for us to notice this. For example, the beautiful colour, scent and texture of a rose.

But there are many other plant-based sensory pleasures, from the delicious flavours and textures and aromas of a well-composed plant-based meal, to the aromas of tree resins and leaves.

 

3. Plants support human nervous systems

Plants help us ground and regulate our nervous systems.

Spending time in nature, alongside plants (including trees) is great for co-regulating human nervous systems and helping us experience connection to the earth.

This isn’t necessarily about getting calmer, it’s also about capacity building, helping our nervous system become steady, wider, deeper.

 

4. Plants help expand human consciousness

This is important and under-estimated. Plants can help us access spiritual experience.

A few plants have strong psychedelic properties. Their mind-expanding abilities are well known.

But, many herbalists say that all plants have this ability. It’s just that most plants are more subtle about it.

There’s more about this further on.

 

5. Plants help us cope with climate change.

Following on from the first four points, I think having a personal, lived connection with plants can help us humans live with the grief and fear of climate change.

It is painful and confusing and disempowering to care about the environment. And Plants have plenty of support to offer.

So, what do I mean by “personal, lived relationship with plants”?

I’ll start by introducing some of my plant friends.

Here are some plants that I am particularly fond of.

In herbalism and animism, a term for this is “plant allies”.

Parsley

Apple

Rosemary

Silverbeet (also called Chard), Beta vulgaris var cicla

European stinging nettle

Manuka, Leptospermum scoparium – this is a New Zealand native bush with aromatic resin and white-pink flowers. Bees produce superb honey from the nectar of the flowers.

New Zealand flax, harakeke, Phormium tenax

The New Zealand “cabbage tree”, Cordyline australis, Ti kouka.

I also have an affinity for many of the sacred and magical trees of my Celtic ancestors. Birch, willow, elder, oak, hawthorn, etc. The Ogham rune alphabet is based on these trees.

Being interested in plants is just how I’m wired, I think.

Soon after I learned to talk, I was given some alyssum seeds, Sweet Alice.

There was no picture on the packet. I planted the seeds, but I had no idea what kind of plant would come up.

I asked my mother, and she said “Oh, I think it’s some kind of daisy.”

I got the impression that my parents weren’t interested, so I stopped asking questions.

Tane Mahuta and friends

In Aotearoa-NZ, where I live, there are particular trees which demand to be seen as beings. It’s hard not to take them seriously.

These are the giant kauri trees in the forests of the far North. People visit them to behold them with respect and reverence. They are living examples of Tolkien’s Ents. (Although they don’t walk around.)

Some of these trees have personal names. Tane Mahuta, the “old man of the forest”, is 1500 years old.

Two hundred years ago, the land was covered with forests filled with these giant beings. The English colonists spent 150 years chopping them down as fast as possible.

This was going on right up to the 1970s. Environmental activists managed to save some scraps of ancient forest.

But the pressure to log the remaining pockets of native forest continues in the 21^st century. 

Plant blindness and beyond

Plants are greatly under-rated in western culture. “Plant blindness” is a kind of cognitive bias, where people ignore the plants in their everyday life. It’s pretty common.

Plant blindness also refers to not recognizing the role of plants on earth. And having an attitude that plants are somehow inferior to animals.

It also means seeing plants as existing only for the benefit of human beings. And also, something that doesn’t have any intelligence or personhood of its own.

Herbalist Kami McBride says part of the problem is hierarchical thinking.

“We think we’re top of the food chain, and that means we don’t have to pay attention to living organisms further down the chain.

“If we reorganize our thinking into seeing ourselves as part of a huge ecological web of relationships, that makes it easier to adjust our thinking.”

No clear line between plants and animals

Philosopher Henri Bergson says it’s impossible to draw a clear line between plants and animals.

In Creative Evolution he writes:

“no definite characteristic distinguishes the plant from the animal.
Attempts to define the two kingdoms strictly have always come to
naught. There is not a single property of vegetable life that is not
found, in some degree, in certain animals; not a single characteristic
feature of the animal that has not been seen in certain species or at
certain moments in the vegetable world.”

Plants and colonial migration

It took precisely one generation for my ancestors to lose the practical, lived experience of connection with the plants of their homelands.

My parents were both first-generation migrants to New Zealand, a country far from the land of their birth.

My father, Ralph, was steeped in the natural history of the British Isles, via his father, Kenneth. Ralph’s particular interest was birds.

And his research passion and his life’s work took him to the New Guinea highlands, where he was mentored by men with deep, lived experience of the natural world.

Ralph’s colleague and co-author, the late Ian Saem Majnep, is famous for his contribution to indigenous science. Here’s a blog I wrote about Ralph: My father the giant

Ralph and Saem co-wrote two books about the natural world of Saem’s homeland: Birds of My Kalam Country and Animals the Ancestors Hunted.

The book they never finished was about plants, its working title was Kalam Plant Lore.

But in New Zealand, where I was born, my father behaved like a very reluctant exile.

I think he had a lot of unprocessed grief for his homeland.

My mother, Sue, was even more dislocated from anything like an ancestral homeland.

Sue was from three successive generations of migrants: from the far north of Sweden, to the northeastern United States, to Southern California. And then to New Zealand.

Also, she was an archaeologist. Sue could get pretty excited about plants people had used 50,000 years in the past.

Not so much about the present! Here’s a blog I wrote about Sue. 

Hero plants and enemy plants

New Zealand, as a mostly settler country, plus the indigenous Maori people, has complicated relationships with plants.

Plant crops that can be grown for commercial profit are valued. There’s been a series of “hero” crops touted as the latest route to economic prosperity. Kiwifruit, Pinus radiata and others.

Native plants are seen by some as cultural and ecological treasures, and by others as unproductive land use. Native forests are alternately revered and neglected/ exploited/ cleared to make space for profitable crops.

Weeds – meaning, any non-native plant that’s not grown on purpose  – are regarded as enemies, to be dealt with by herbicide sprays. 

Radiata pines – both heroes and enemies 

My brief career as a teenage scientist featured the New Zealand hero plant of the 1970s: Pinus radiata.

In my first year of high school, my friend Penny and I entered the local high school science fair. Our project topic was Pinus radiata.

Our timing was perfect. We won.

The Minister of Education in Norman Kirk’s Third Labour Government, Phil Amos, gave out the prizes.

The radiata pine is an American tree that grows much faster in New Zealand than in its native land.

Pinus radiata seemed such a great idea at the time. It provided regional jobs for timber workers that didn’t involve logging the last remnants of native forests.

Fifty years later, pine trees are still being planted, but the fallout from the pine industry is causing many kinds of havoc in New Zealand’s ecology and economy.

I could say a lot more about this, but I’m trying to stay on my topic.

Paying attention to plants

Plant communication is actually not difficult, but it’s easier said than done.

You just have to slow down and get out of your head.

Herbalists have a lot to say about the rewards of paying attention to plants, and how to start doing it.

Kami McBride says listening to plants is a piece of our human heritage, that’s been dormant in our current culture.

In an interview on the podcast For the Wild, herbalist Rosemary Gladstar said that plants thrive on human attention – and not just because we’ll water or fertilise them.

Many plants put a lot of effort into attracting our attention.

Some obvious ways plants communicate to humans is through our senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and other body responses.

Many flowers make it easy for us.

My stinging nettle plants also make less comfortable, but equally obvious, efforts to connect. They “ping” me. Literally.

But plants are also reaching across to our consciousness.

If you think a plant is calling out to you, that’s because it probably is.

Some plants have strong, unmissable psychedelic properties. Jimson weed, datura, various cacti, etc.

But many herbalists say that all plants have this ability. It’s just that most are more subtle.

The first person I heard say this was the late Stephen Harrod Buhner.

He was a US-based herbalist and the author of one of my favourite herbal books, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. (It’s a delicious and entertaining combination of herbalism and recipes.)

Strongly psychedelic plants are notorious for causing unpleasant physical symptoms in humans. As well as their mind-expanding properties, that get across to even the most plant-blind human, given half a chance.

But other plants can expand our consciousness and help us access spiritual experience in much gentler and enjoyable ways.

I know which I prefer.  

Living at different speeds

Plants have plenty of intelligence. It’s just not like human intelligence.

They exist at different speeds, different states of consciousness to humans.

Humans can only experience plants by slowing down and listening with more than our ears.

We won’t hear plants if we run through a park with headphones on, listening to a podcast.

Or if we’re intent on a conversation with a friend while we’re walking.

Another way to listen to plants is to ingest them. This could mean eating or drinking.

Or putting plants on our skin, in the form of infused herbal oils.

Or via our sense of smell, through essential oils.

When we take a plant into our body, or put it on our body, the plants help us know ourselves, says herbalist Robin Rose Bennett.

Mindful gardening is another opportunity to experience plants. 

Playing with plants

You can see from my list of plant friends that eating plants is a big priority for me.

But I’ve been collecting other playful and interesting ways to interact with plants.

The fascinating and diverse field of herbalism has many enjoyable ways to connect with plants.

My next post is about DIY approaches to herbalism.

If you’ve read this far, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy that one too. 

Here it is: Fun and fizzy ways into herbalism

More reading…

The worms are turning

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