Category: Plant Stories
You are a Flower Essence for this World
For those with sensitive hearts, the problems of this world can often feel too big. And with every challenge on earth amplified this past year, it’s enough to wonder: how can one small, sensitive person make a difference in such a big world? But when we look to flower essences— and the ancient wisdom…
Your Christmas Tree Is Medicine
When I was a kid, every year my family and I would go to a local farm to cut down our Christmas tree. It was always one of the most exciting days of the year. Living in Eastern Pennsylvania, by December it was truly cold in our neck of the woods. Bundled in woolens…
How Invasives Help Us to Love Ourselves
It’s become a green wonderland here in the mountains. The basil is bunching out in the garden, weeding is now a daily activity, and last year’s daylilies are starting to bloom. But for all the plants that are welcomed, prized, and cultivated, there are an equal amount of herbs in that dreaded category of…
The Plants are Holding You
We are in the full tilt of summer here and the trees around my house have filled in the cove surrounding me, turning my stilted home into a kind of bassinet in the grove. In the winds of a thunderstorm my house rocks, ever-so-slightly, and when the wind moves through the leaves it is…
Flower Essences for Boundaries
In a world of overstimulation and endless possibilities for connection, opportunity, and demands on our time, the concept of setting boundaries has become a hot cultural topic. That said, I have to admit that for years whenever I hear someone talk about setting boundaries, my eyes would glaze over a bit. As an empath who…
Onion Grass the Plant Spirit Ally
I remember, very clearly, the day I first realized I could eat grass. Another neighborhood kid let me in on the secret. Apparently, there was a kind of grass that tasted like onions, and you could eat it (!) All you had to do was find the tall tufts, the ones that felt round when…
Reishi: A Psychedelic of the Unseen
Joining the Unseen Though we pride ourselves in this country on what we can capture, quantify and see, it’s a simple fact that the vast (and I mean vast) majority of our world is made up of the unseen. As human beings we are only privy to a very small window of experience. Meanwhile…
The Multitudinous Tulsi
Summer is the domain of the manifold. In spring, I find I can delight in every flower, the succession of blooms feels manageable, comfortable, familiar. But by midsummer in Appalachia, the flowering is so fierce, so frequent and so diverse, I simply have to throw up my hands. I will never be able to…