The Lost Language of Plants

"Plants have long been primary teachers for those who travel deep into the heart of the world, for those who seek the soul teaching that only the wild can bring." 
~Stephen Harrod Buhner

Regrettably Youtube for whatever reason won't allow embedding of the video I wanted to show you in blogger, you can see it at: http://youtu.be/xFaZE4bzJXM  In this video, environmentalist Lierre Keith of the radical environmental group Deep Green Resistance talks about her own coming into awareness of the intelligence of plants and about the book "The Lost Language of Plants" by author, teacher, lecturer, and herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner. You may also want to check out this interview with Stephen starting at http://youtu.be/asw0_DaA85Y

I had a dream just before waking this morning in which my brother Adam and my cat Mango were teaching me how to travel to other places through the roots of trees. I don't think this dream was merely the sort of busy monkey business that your brain gets up to when dreaming, but that the dream was talking to me about something. This something was plant communication, which takes place through the roots and the air surrounding plants by way of chemicals, among other possible means. The chemical communication of plants with each other is nothing fanciful, it's scientific fact. Plants warn each other about nearby herbivores that might be munching on them by producing chemical signals, and the other plants respond by producing naturally repellant chemicals and by stiffening up their tissues. So whenever you walk through vegetation and brush up against it, the plants are in fact having all sorts of conversations with each other about what you are doing. Pioneer species like alder trees that reclaim damaged lands send communications to other plants when the land is ready to support them.The idea that plants are unaware is not backed up by the evidence. 

Judging from the number of times the idea appears in folklore and mythology, humans communicating with plants is not an idea that our ancient ancestors were unfamiliar with. My favorite example is the legend of how peyote was discovered, which was that a peyote cactus talked a starving Native man into eating it. Which, if you were really eating it because you are hungry, one bite would convince you to look elsewhere, so personally I find that to be a perfectly credible story. One of the things that Buhner talks about is how virtually all of our medicines come from plants or were inspired by plant chemicals, and how this medicine became estranged from the actual plants themselves and became the province of institutionalized medicine. How did native peoples for instance find out about the medical properties of plants? If you ask me, the plants told them. A deeper communication with the plants themselves would be very helpful in getting in touch with this medicine and potentially finding new medicinal uses for plants, but of course for the overwhelmingly vast majority of people today this is a completely lost language.

Not altogether lost though. As you will probably know from my previous posts, I talk with plants. In most cases, these conversations are pretty simple and are the equivalent of "Hi, how are you?" In some cases, particularly with trees, they can be very deep and strange. I used to think that trees were so ready to talk to me because I was sort of the equivalent of the postman or the internet, trees being immobile. I think my dream was trying to tell me the opposite: I am not a communications network to them, they are a communications network to me. An extremely different sort of communications system from the kinds that humans have, full of whispers from the Dreaming with which they may have a deeper connection. The trees were inviting me in the dream to flow along the network of roots through the world in which they are imbedded. They are a way of contacting a very very very different understanding of reality, and the differentness and non-human nature of this network of leaf and root may be one reason why humans tended to lose contact with it.

Of course, as some of us try to re-establish this relationship with plants, plant ecosystems are disappearing like never before. In the process, we may lose access to deeper understandings and to plant medicines that we cannot replicate ourselves nor ever replace.