So I’m a spirit worker, and though I’ve only been practicing a little bit over a year, I’ve worked with many different spirits with most of them being plants. This just comes from my own personal experience, so you don’t have to take this as law.
General:
Different kinds of plants have different personalities (obviously). And as each plant has their own unique personality, generally they tend to be similar to other plants of the same type: cacti, succulents, vines, herbs, flowers, even going down to specific types such as lavender, pine trees, orchids, etc. And then, how they react to communication depends on what stage they are in: seedling, middle, adult, etc.
Communication:
In general, plants tend to be fairly slow with communication. And they generally don’t use words. The plants i have worked with preferred sending general feelings and images of what they were trying to communicate. So be patient with yourself while working towards that communication. Whenever you try communication, start by giving a small offering. It can be elaborate, it can be watering it, spreading fertilizer (eggshells are good, a bit of sugar, stuff like that) around it, weeding around the roots, and small stuff like that. Introduce yourself, and just start talking. Explain what your day was like and what you did. You can sing to the plant, they tend to love that. Seedlings are more likely to talk very quickly to you, while old plants tend to take longer. The time frame can be from a couple of hours to a couple weeks depending on the spirit. If you want to create a relationship with the spirit, you’re going to have to communicate with the spirit regularly. This process will take a while as it would trying to improve any friendship.
Now what?:
After you’ve introduced yourself to the spirit, it’s time to create a friendship! Giving them small gifts/offerings is a great step. Spending time with them will also help with that. It doesn’t all have to be communication, you can read books aloud to them, watch movies with them, or anything else of that sort. Find out their name! Each spirit will have their own name, much like we do. Some of them are really hard to spell and/or pronounce so I won’t be giving any examples here. After building that friendship, you can do most anything you want! You can have them assist you with spells, amplify your energy, and other such things. Keep in mind that the amount of energy that the spirit will have depends on their vessel, the plant. The larger the life force, the larger the amount of energy that you can borrow is.
Dealing with death:
Now, most of the plants I have worked with have been seedlings, and because I’m not perfect in the slightest many of them have died. For me, dealing with the dead plant is a ritual to honor the spirit as it passes into a place where I haven’t been able to communicate with it yet. I give it back to the earth (bury it if I can, or just leave it in a place where it can give back to the earth. It gets a small funeral service, stating what they did for me, what I loved about them, that they will be missed, etc. Before you leave them there give them a small offering to help it’s passage, water, fertilizer, eggshell, etc. This isn’t necessary, but it is respectful and a good way for the spirit not to be mad.
I like to use my hair as a way to bond with my plants.
That’s right, my hair.
As something that grows slowly and (In my practice) holds my essence, my hair and my plant have a few things in common (disregarding the obvious differences of course).
As a way to leave a part of me behind with my plant, I like to take a couple strands of my hair and tie it gently (don’t be rude to your buddy now) around a stem. As I do this I like to chant
“With this hair, I invite you
To create a bond, between us two”
This is just one thing I say, I like to change it up on the spot for different plants.
To me, the important part is slipping in the part that it is the plants OPTION to bond with me. I INVITE it to bond with me, it can refuse, sometimes over something as simple as indifference towards me.
The purpose of this practice (for me) is to leave a token of myself behind, something I feel holds a good amount of my personal energy. For me that means my hair (you’d agree if you saw how I care for my hair like it’s a sprit of it’s own).
This allows for a few things to happen (upg)
-if the plant is uncertain about me: it can sit with my energy for a while in a way that does not disrupt the plant in any way
– If the plant finds my presence comforting: it leaves behind a nice energy while I’m gone for my plants to feel. You can leave hair behind for plants you’ve already bonded with as a way to leave them something with your energy (great for when you leave for a long trip!)
this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014.
the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):
this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up.
but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop.
they remembered that no harm was coming from this actionand decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop.
she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.
they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered.
it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!
how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this???
well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen.
so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????
plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???)
national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!
Planters are in the shop! I went ahead and put this forest planter up along with the patina one I posted earlier. Only one of each are available at emilysculpts.com
teakepp 