The earliest modern english writings specifically about plant spirits were done by clairvoyants who did not attempt to communicate with them but simply observed them and wrote about what they saw. (eg: Geoffrey Hodson: Fairies at Work and Play, 1925) Their accounts correlate remarkably well with illustrations of plant fairies in children’s books of fairy tales and folk lore.

I want to honour the works of the early herbalists, here, as well. While they did not make direct statements about the spirits of plants, they obviously took it for granted that plants are intelligent sentient beings with strong personalities, that healed mental and emotional ills as well as those of the physical body. Gerrard, whose Historie of Plants was first published in1597 and Nicholas Culpeper, with The English Physician or Herbal that came out in 1653, talk about the invigorating effect that working with plants had on them.

Maude Grieve, whose A Modern Herbal was published in 1931 quotes these two men frequently, adding her own research to their knowlege. I love the story she tells about stinging nettle.

According to Maude Grieve, during the first world war, there was a shortage of fabric in Germany because enemy armies interrupted supply transports from the cotton producing countries. Germans figured out that they could make fabric from the plentifully growing stinging nettles in their own country. They sent civilians and prisoners into the ditches to harvest the nettles. The resulting fabric was of excellent quality, wonderfully durable. Well, then, after the war, the people running the factories making this fabric decided this was a good business and they would grow nettles as a crop on fields so that they could be more easily harvested.

Nettle would not grow on the fields.

End of story in the herbal book. Mrs. Grieve does not offer an explanation for this.

When I realized that I could understand what plants were saying to me, I had a conversation with nettle one day, just sitting beside it and asking questions. When I asked why nettle would not grow on the fields, the answer I got is that it did not like being used to aid the purposes of war and therefore refused to cooperate with subsequent human efforts to cultivate it.

The implications of this are revealing. Those plants that grow on our cultivated fields and in our gardens do so because they are willingly choosing to do so. I’m assuming that the farmers involved in the nettle growing effort duplicated soil and moisture conditions favourable to nettles, so choosing not to grow for them involved will and fairly sophisticated thinking, somesort of moral or ethical bias, in other words, not insignificant intelligence and independent spirit.

A woman named Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her work with the chromasones and genes of corn plants. This award was given to her about 40 years after her first ground breaking studies came out. At that early time, when she was asked where she got her ideas, she told the press that the corn plants had told her. Because of this declaration, scientific journals ostracized her writing for several decades until another science lab duplicated her early results, after which she was given credit for her work, reinstated in acceptance by the scienticic community and awarded the Nobel Prize, for „what the corn plants told her“.

The man who informed us that peanuts and sweet potatoes are highly nutritious edible plants, George Washington Carver, got this information from the plants in response to asking what would eleviate food shortages during WW1. In fact, he developed many products from plants including dyes, cosmetics, axle grease, printer’s ink and previously unknown foods all at the suggestions of the plants themselves. When asked how he got his ideas, he answered:

"All flowers talk to me and so do hundreds of little living things in the woods. I learn what I know by watching and loving everything.“

The most famous collaberation between plant and human efforts happened in Scotland in the 1960’s. From the barren sandy soil of the Findhorn Bay Caravan park grew huge plants, herbs and flowers of dozens of kinds, most famously the now legendary 40 pound cabbages. Word spread, horticultural experts came and were stunned and the garden at Findhorn became famous. The creators of that garden made every effort to emphacize the fact that this was a collaberation between human and deva kingdoms, deva being the name they gave to the nature spirits they worked with.

The woman who communicated with the plant consciousness in that situation was Dorthy Maclean, who is wonderfully articulate about what she does. In a recent speech at Findhorn, that has become a spiritual community, education center and ecovillage during the ensuing 50 years, she said:

"The bottom line of my life is unshakeable knowing that each and everyone of us can have a personal and direct relationship with the Divine, and through that relationship we can also have a co-creative relationship with the soul essence of Nature. My definition of God, by the way, is as the lifeforce in everything.“

The autobiography by Dorothy Maclean was published in 2009. Autobiography of an Ordinary Mystic is a fascinating account of her life and the many communications she received from spirit worlds. She stresses over and over again that nature and plant spirits are eager and ready to work with us in an equal partnership of mutual respect and recognition. We are not to control and manipulate, but neither to set nature on somesort of sentimentally romantic pedestal.

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