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BY JEMMA FOSTER

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

Jemma Foster is the founder and creative director of Wild Alchemy Lab and Mama Xanadu, and co-founder of Semantica Productions. Her book Sacred Geometry is published by Octopus, (2020) and Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-botanical Remedy Deck, Jemma Foster, will be published next month, June 22 2023 by Laurence King

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BY JEMMA FOSTER

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

No items found.

Jemma Foster is the founder and creative director of Wild Alchemy Lab and Mama Xanadu, and co-founder of Semantica Productions. Her book Sacred Geometry is published by Octopus, (2020) and Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-botanical Remedy Deck, Jemma Foster, will be published next month, June 22 2023 by Laurence King

download filedownload filedownload filedownload filedownload file

BY JEMMA FOSTER

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

No items found.

Jemma Foster is the founder and creative director of Wild Alchemy Lab and Mama Xanadu, and co-founder of Semantica Productions. Her book Sacred Geometry is published by Octopus, (2020) and Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-botanical Remedy Deck, Jemma Foster, will be published next month, June 22 2023 by Laurence King

download filedownload filedownload filedownload filedownload file

BY JEMMA FOSTER

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

Floriography - the Language of Flowers –was a system created and popularised by the Victorians, attributing  symbolic meaning to flowers that could turn a posy into a secret message to a lover. Cherry blossom for spiritual beauty, daisy for innocence and dahlias for devotion.

 

May flowers, decoded:

 

Sweet Pea – Blissful pleasure,Departure

 

Wood Anemone – Forsaken, expectations

 

Magnolia – Dignity

 

Lily of the Valley – Purity

 

Tulip – I declare my love for you, I am worthy of you

 

Peonies – Bashfulness

 

Carnation – Mother’s Eternal Love,Heartache, Disappointment

 

Cornflower – Refinement, Good Fortune

 

Bluebell – Humility, Constancy

 

Dogwood – Our love will overcome adversity

 

Hawthorn – Hope

 

Yarrow – Healing

 

Dog violet – Faithfulness, Modesty

 

Heather – Good Luck

 

Pansy – Thoughtful reflection

 

Field Poppy – Pleasure, Sleep,Imagination

 

 

 

Central to alchemical and indigenous wisdom, symbols hold a frequency that create the vibrational blueprint to communicate with, and influence, the non-physical and physical realms. We see these fractal geometries recreated in indigenous works such as in theAboriginal art style, and in textile and beadwork like the Kené designs of theAmazon. These patterns are thought to hold the vibrational blueprint of animals and plants, creating an energetic signature that makes it possible to communicate with a specific spirit. In this way, it is a sacred visual language of communication between person-plant-animal. In the same way, the Icaros songs of the Amazonian Shipibo are a vocal expression of the sacred Kené designs.This language is part of the psychedelic experience with entheogens such asayahuasca, when it is thought that the spirit of a plant enters into a union with that of a person through a merging of consciousness produced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and communicated through a highly visual world that mimics the geometric language of nature. While indigenous groups talk of plant allies and spirits, alchemists talk of elemental and planetary forces but both share an understanding of this connection as sacred and multi-dimensional.  Communication exists in the liminal space of dreaming, through lucid dreaming and astral projection where the person-plant worlds collide. Healing and insight through dreaming was a central practice in Ancient Egypt and Greece, where patients would sleep in dream temples such as the Askelpion and receive wisdom and guidance from the gods who would heal them directly or offer suggestions of plant preparation to the priests. In HowForests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes the non-linguistic embodied communication between species as inherently semiotic, an instinctual energetic dialogue that flows across species boundaries. We see numerical patterns ingrowth from the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the prime numbers in the reproductive cycles of Cicadas. We see these hidden patterns not just in the algorithms of growth and decay but in beauty and form as a language of attraction or repulsion that communicates messages about the qualities inherent in a plant and can provide clues to their phytochemistry, medicinal properties or toxic potential.  

 

Indigenous shamans and healers often describe a disease as a sound or vibrational interference pattern that is dissonant in the body and use sound, remedied through song, prayer, incantations or musical instruments to diffuse and harmonise these conditions.Symbols might be painted onto the body or amulets placed on an affected part. The alchemists of old would write prescriptions using alchemical symbols or sigils onto pieces of paper and ask a patient to eat them in order to imbibe its energetics. In many cultures there is a concept of there being a resonance between an object and a disease, which is why salves were applied the offending weapons to heal a wound or a diseased part of the body buried under a tree to be transferred and transformed. Paracelsus called this psychic gravity and it is associated with his law of sympathy - that there is a sympathetic resonance between the energetics and constitutions of people, plants and planets. Objects could become enchanted and poppets and voodoo dolls were used to affect a person’s condition at a distance, or the hair of a person might be used in a remedy to foster psychic gravity, which we now know holds their DNA, a holographic matrix acting as a quantum bridge - described in physics as spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement. 

 

In the time leading up to and throughout the Victorian period, the understanding of the sentience of plants was lost during the objectification of plants. During the 1600s Tulipmania occurred – the commoditisation of tulips to such extremes that at the market's peak, the rarest tulips bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary and only surpassed by the Orchid Hunters of at the turnof the 1800s. Between 1837 and 1914 it was Pteridomania, or Fern Fever, that had taken hold of everyone. Floriography turned plants into messengers. More recently, science is reclaiming a deeper understanding of plants as sentient beings, that without a central nervous system or the sensory organs of a human, plants are able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch along with additional senses such as gravity and electromagnetic detection. Plants make their food from light, so they need to be able to detect light in order to survive. We now know they do this using phototropins – light receptors in the membranes of cells in the plant’s tip. Phototropins are sensitive to blue light, so this helps them move towards the ultraviolet rays of the sun during the day. Plants see infrared light using receptors in their leaves called phytochromes. These act as a switch, to turn the plant ‘off’ at night and back on again when the sun comes up. Plants can smell other plants and predators and produce scents made up of pheromones to communicate to one another. Plants also use smell to trick potential predators or in the case of parasitic or carnivorous plants, lure prey. Plants use this technique to communicate information from one part of its body to another by releasing a hormone called ethylene. This signals an action to the rest of the plant, from one leaf to another. The sweet smell of a ripe banana is ethylene. It signals to all the other fruits on the tree to ripen.Nearby trees and pollinating insects are able to pick up on this, if a plant produces a scent under attack, nearby neighbours can prepare their defences. 

 

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has a background in animal science, leading her to take the Pavlovian approach to pea plants, finding them capable of associating the presence of a fan with light, just as Pavlov’s dogs did with a bell and food. Learning and memory were again evident in her experiment with Mimosa pudica. Highly sensitive to touch, it recoils its leaves when sensing a disturbance in its environment by regulating the water content in its leaves which pumps the leaves up or down. Galiano dropped the plants, which were caught safely in nets. At first, they closed their leaves but after being dropped a few times they stopped responding to the false threat. Even after a month had passed, they behaved the same way, displaying memory recall. Some Brassicas, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, release mustard oil when they are being munched on by caterpillars. A study by theUniversity of Missouri-Columbia, found that even the sound of caterpillars eating being played to the plants was enough to trigger this reaction. Gagliano’s experiments have also shown that plants can hear water through their roots and can process external sounds as well as emit their own. Even slime mould is capable of solving complex problems that many large-brained humans would struggle with.  In a 2009 study into physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism, Japanese scientists showed that it could tackle a maze with ease and redesign the Tokyo subway to maximise efficiency. 

 

Stefano Mancuso, founder of the field of plant neurobiology, argues that it is our history of human arrogance and cultural prejudice that has led us to grossly underestimate plants. In his bookBrilliant Green, he presents a sophisticated consciousness capable of recognition, memory and problem solving. “Plants eat without a mouth, breathe without lungs, see, taste, feel, communicate, move, despite lacking sensory organs like the ones we have.” Mancuso writes. “So why doubt that they can think?”It is with awe and wonder that the modern alchemist enters into the wild. We are looking for these patterns and rhythms that will give us information about the qualities and personalities of plants and planets and how they might relate to each other and to ourselves through their actions and elemental matrix. Our early ancestors had no pharmacopeia or herbal repertory, instead they had intuition and observation through direct perception and experience. This is how we can get a sense for a remedy, the right plant for the right formula, matching the resonance or dissonance between a person, plant or planet. 

 

We can get a sense of the personality of a plant through meditation and direct perception, where we can witness sensations and thoughts arise through this communication, often spoken symbolically through dreams. This is a practice that is instinctive but that we have become disconnected from and just requires a little practice and recalibration to restore. A highly attentive, intuitive and sensitive person will be able to walk into a room of people and get a sense of the emotional state of the group individually and as a collective. Sat next to one other person, a feeling of what that person is like, their personality and potential clearly emerges. The same is possible in the forest and the ability to perceive comes from the simple act of turning up and paying attention, sitting in stillness with a plant, allowing oneself to be drawn towards this plant or that, to open up fully to the moment to allow for our electromagnetic field to merge with that of the plant and invite this dialogue at a cellular level. 

 

In Goethe’s Metamorphosis, he recognised plants not as objects but as life in a process of growth and becoming - a constant state of doing. He experienced the plants dynamically, seeing them as an elemental dance in conversation with their environment and the cosmos. He also talked, in a way that echoes indigenous wisdom, of an archetypal plant as the energetic template or bio-spiritual reference point from which the plant grows into physical form. 

 

 

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Jemma Foster is the founder and creative director of Wild Alchemy Lab and Mama Xanadu, and co-founder of Semantica Productions. Her book Sacred Geometry is published by Octopus, (2020) and Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-botanical Remedy Deck, Jemma Foster, will be published next month, June 22 2023 by Laurence King

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