This is a rather long essay, part of my upcoming book about our Million Year Love Story with Flowers. Settle in with a cuppa, and I hope you enjoy this forage through deep time! “Once all knowledge was the knowledge of a flower.” OLS 3.16.19 Each Spring We Bloom Again It never grows old, this …
Their Ancient Song On a late July hike in the Appalachian Mountains, I was suddenly surrounded by an explosion of white blossoms on 15-foot-high bushes, and the air around me became so quiet and SOFT. I felt myself transported and floating; lifted by thousands of cotton ball-like hands, each made up of 20 or more …
Every time I think about how plants eat sunlight, I am transported out of my animal-body understanding of the world; and become more aware of the plants’ completely different way of living on this planet we share. Comprehending that flowers are created out of the fire-food of the sun only truly happens in my heart, …
A six-part story honoring the Sunflower’s journey through birth, death, and rebirth. Part One: Glory in the Garden Watching the blue jays stuff their throat pouch with the seeds from the weighty bowed heads of the Sunflowers, I wonder how many will be dropped and become seed or food for others, or will he be …
As a small child, I thought everyone laid on the grass with their dad in the yard to watch the clouds. I can remember feeling so special laying side by side with him, our heads touching, sharing the magic of the rivers of clouds floating in the deep blue water of the sky. We played …
Early one morning as I stepped outside on a recent visit to a friend’s farm, I was swaddled in the soft hug of a morning fog, feeling like I was stepping through a veil into another world. As the sun began to creep over the hill, its pale luminescence began to brighten the blanket of …
The Flowers Are Speaking oracle card decks and guidebook are going to production in early OCTOBER! Order now to be sure to receive your deck. The Flowers Are Speaking Oracle Deck & Guidebook are going into production for a LIMITED print run in three weeks! It has been almost a year since I heard "Lift …
On a recent hike in the woods, the smell of honeysuckle pulled me into old childhood memories so quickly it was as if I had stepped through a door. Coming upon a clearing—likely an old homestead site—the sweet scent of the Honeysuckle in bloom wafted like an invisible cloud over the entire glade. Their vines …
The niggling feeling in my body was so strong. Vibrant wildflowers were dancing around me as I walked, filling me with glee and delight, and yet I had a sense they held something much older and wilder as well. They had a story to tell. Generations of stories, I was to learn, pulled up from …
Continue reading Wildflower Medicine for the Land – a Story of the Once-Was Town of Douglas, WV
Note: This post was published on Facebook July 7th, and I am adding it to my blog belatedly. The references to Our Lady of Woodstock are one of a myriad of names for Our Great Earth Mother, by any name you like to call Her. “Once, all knowledge was the knowledge of a flower.” -Our …
Waking to the morning sun, her petals thoroughly sprinkled with pollen, Bee Balm radiates satisfaction like she has spent a night with a mythic lover. Opening her blossoms to the day with their spicy, heady aroma, the bees and butterflies have their way with her, diving deep into her tubular nectar-rich flowers, and dancing all …
What does it mean when you find a dead 11-point buck deer in your backyard 7 days before the winter solstice? It took me a few days to even begin to pull on the threads of its significance. At first, we just blessed him, and pulled him into the edge of the woods. This was …
The audacity of the red seeds stopped me, and I couldn’t take another step. How could a seed be THAT red? Solid, bright fire engine red. Pure unadulterated red if there is such a thing. Few plants have both an incredible flower and an overwhelmingly amazing seed pod and seeds. But our magnolia does. These …
On a recent visit to my favorite forest and stream, just past the autumn equinox, the feeling was one of satisfaction, of waiting, of being balanced. An in-between time, quiet. Even the sun felt still. No leaves were falling, they were just waiting, happy to be basking in the early autumn sunlight. The air, no …
The late summer wildflowers - wild being the key word - they tug at my soul. They are not the carefully tended beauties in my garden, and they are not the vibrant, low-to-the-ground delights of the spring forest wildflowers that burst forth with the return of the spring sun before there are leaves on the …
The giant sunflowers are the matriarchs of my garden for sure. And I daresay, they are an archetype of a flower’s journey for the entire flowering world because they are so very BIG. Bigger than life, so strong and bold and prolific, bringing joy and beauty and food, to us, to the birds, insects, and …
On a one-mile hike out to Lindy Point in Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia in late July I was suddenly surrounded by an explosion of pink tinted white blossoms. This was completely unexpected, as they normally bloom in late June and early July. The bushes were ten to fifteen feet tall all around …
In my experience, wonder is so intricately tied to the magic of miracles. A dictionary definition of wonder is: “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable”. Isn’t this also the essence of a miracle? Of magic? These daily gifts of wonder (aka calling cards) that come to …
My very favorite bird on the Florida coast is the Black Skimmer. They are strikingly black on top, white on the bottom, and have a large wingspan and a very large orange and black beak that looks too heavy for its head to even hold up. The bottom beak is longer and bigger than its …
It is quite magical to come upon a blooming rose bush in the middle of the forest with a shaft of sunlight shining on her sweetly scented flowers through a break in the tree canopy. While her flowers are dainty and small, there is no mistaking the rose family scent wafting through the sunbeam. Previously …
The magnolia flower is OLD. I mean really OLD. She is thought to be one of the “most primitive” of the flowering plant families, with fossilized specimens around 95 MILLION years old, and origins likely 140 million to 250 million years ago. These flowers lived with the dinosaurs, but having no bones they left only …
The creative process is a funny thing. The most intriguing thing for me is that it allows my intuitive self to step in and suggest things that my logical mind would not, and thereby I hear a voice larger than myself, which I long for so very deeply. And I think everyone does in one …
What’s in a name? Sometimes everything! Wort is an old-fashioned word used in many plant names like lungwort, bladderwort, spiderwort, and it is from the Old English word wyrt, which simply meant plant. More precisely, a name given to a beneficial plant, as in the opposite of a weed, like milkweed, knotweed, ragweed. So, motherwort …
Some herbs have been cultivated and used for so long by their human companions, that they are part of the human family, so to speak, rather the way dogs and cats are, and common garden sage or salvia officinalis is one of the best. It has become quite comfortable in the kitchen garden, willingly giving …
I like my garden best when it gets rather wild, with the plants spilling over each other, finding their own space, going to seed, rabbits burrowing under the comfrey, the berry brambles so thick you can’t see through them, the cucumbers and sunflowers and beans all intertwined, tomatoes spilling over the ground because the suckers …
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all.” How many of us have heard this over and over growing up? Perhaps it was a southern thing, perhaps it was a generational thing, but I heard it over and over. Recently when I asked my 92-year-old aunt what she remembered her grandmother …
When I came upon the sea of mottled green and purple leaves with a chorus of delicate yellow flowers bowing their heads, my jaw dropped open and I felt such deep awe and wonder that I couldn’t speak. The sheer number of these flowers astounded me. With sunlight in the early spring air coming through …
As I drive to our city park that has forest trails in its valleys, my mind is paying attention to the road, checking off mental notes on my never ending to do list, arranging priorities. I always think if I can just get one more thing done, THEN I will feel spacious and free to …
One minute I was Mr. McGregor. The next minute I was Peter Rabbit… I have a garden that is fenced to keep out the deer, and one day recently I left the gate open all night, and a rabbit got in. We have lots of rabbits in our yard, and they sniff around the edges …
The term “bleeding heart” has become quite a derogatory term in our culture and refers to one who feels “too much”. Dictionary.com says it means “a person who makes an ostentatious or excessive display of pity or concern for others”, and it has even become a political term. Most people want to be known to …
What is it about that white fluffy puffy sticky pillow of sweetness that we call a marshmallow? I have lots of childhood memories, squishing marshmallows between my fingers, seeing how many I could stuff in my mouth, making smores around a campfire at girl scout camp. Today’s marshmallows are far from a health food, being …
When we were kids, we would play several car games on the way to Myrtle Beach each summer. A favorite was who could be the first to spy the big old trees with the Spanish moss. I fell in love with the live oak trees then, although at the time I didn’t know they were …
Have you ever wanted to go on a pilgrimage? Following in other pilgrims’ and ancestors’ footsteps sounds so romantic, noble, sacred, ancient even; with the idea that at the end you will be changed or have learned something or have deepened your devotion. My husband and I visited Santiago de Compostela during a cruise around …
I am standing in the dense fog, at the edge of the ocean, as the wind is blowing the wetness into every part of me, seeping into my skin, clothing, hair. The edges between the ground, the sea, and the air are blurred. As I stand in this fog, time stands still and I am …
I love watching their arms reaching down for the rich brown, wet, primordial muck at the edge of the bay, their fingers outstretched with dark brown tips almost like nipples, yearning to be sucked into the wet earth. They are longer every time I visit, visibly showing their increasing fervor for the brackish back bay …
In the Victorian era of the language of flowers, the black or burgundy color Dahlia flower symbolizes betrayal. Black Dahlia’s symbolism is extremely strong and has been present for centuries. It is not every day that you come across a picture of your great-great grandfather in a newspaper article written in 2017, with a picture …
When I was a young girl, we always went to my grandmother’s house for Christmas eve. She had a lot of magical old-fashioned decorations and we would gather in the formal living room and drink eggnog made with real whipping cream and sing Christmas carols. Over the mantle of the fireplace, a very large portrait …
Another chemical explosion in our valley greeted me the morning of December 9th, 2020. Another wake-up call. In the past I have been lulled into thinking we no longer have pollution issues in our valley, that the chemical plants have been cleaned up, that most of them have moved to Houston, and that our water …
I can’t carry a tune. Or so I have been told, ever since my voice cracked in the Christmas Chorus performance at church when I was young. And since I somehow volunteered to sing Jingle Bells in a zoom caroling party, I also started thinking about how in December of 2012, I took a hymnal …
I think my earliest memory of huge jungle woven vines is from a Tarzan movie. Traditionally spiderwebs are more closely associated with weaving, but for me it is the wild vines in the woods that wind their way around trees and each other, and go from one tree to another, connecting them. The sheer life …
Have you ever woven potholders on those little square metal looms with the stretchy colorful loops? When I decided I needed potholders a few years ago I ordered a kit to make them with my granddaughter, which was fun, but I’m the one who became obsessed with it, ordering more loops and becoming enraptured by …
We have had a flowering bush called Clethra for years that flowers with these rather unremarkable white flower spikes made up of lots of smaller flowers. But the fragrance of these flowers completely undoes me. I swoon. I want to spend my afternoon right beside them with their elixir wafting over me. I close my …
After a discussion on dolls in Perdita Finn’s Take Back the Magic class recently, I remembered a doll I have of my mothers. A lovely Effanbee doll about 18” tall from the 1930’s that she got as a child and was very devoted to. Someone had even sewed a hand-made red velvet cape for her. …
Usually, magic drops in quite unexpectedly. I had just finished spreading out a white row cover over a bed of kale in my garden, when a red-tailed dragonfly dropped onto the cover and just sat there, mesmerizing me with his radiant red tail and lacey wings, each with one spot. I had never seen a …
It has been a long time since I have run across a turtle here in our backyard forest - an adorable ordinary box turtle of medium size, with those amazing patterns on her back. She just looked at me, as if to say, “Slow down there, watch where you are going!” She wasn’t afraid, and …
Do you remember the first time you heard the ocean in a seashell? When I was a young girl, I remember visiting my grandmother who had these large shells, that later I learned were whelks and conchs. She told me she picked them up on the beach herself in a faraway place called Florida. I …
A lush jasmine-like fragrance wafts onto the evening breeze as soon as her petals open, and I am transported to another world like Alice in Wonderland where the flowers talk with me. Memories float through my mind’s eye: swaying in the tops of huge pines at dusk; the sound of rain in the dark hitting …
Fourteen days to feast day and night on your favorite food? Party time! Your only food, the food your mother lived her whole life to find for you, laying her seed right where you would find it when you were born so you would be able to dig in. Chomp, chomp, chomp all day and …
Stillness and serenity. A welcome balm, yet how often do we allow ourselves to fully relax into them? Recently, I stumbled upon a wide still stream, having little idea of the depth of the treasure I would find there when I first found a new path to explore. There is a city park in …
August 15, 2020 Mary Kerns Have you ever had a day – I’m sure you have – where you realized the way you looked at a little part of your daily world has completely changed? Usually at first it is just a small noticing, but sometimes if you stay with it, you realize that a …