It’s spring and the garden beckons. An article I wrote in Species Link Journalover thirty years ago illustrates how gardening can deepen our interspecies telepathic connection.
Gardening is a soulful process of renewal for me. I love digging in the soil, hauling earth, compost and manure, and designing and tending the garden in communion with all the nature spirits around. The more I feel creative joy in the garden as chief laborer/caretaker, the more the bees, birds, plants, soil organisms, other wildlife, and nature spirits hum with approval and contribute their vitality to help everything grow. I relish the messages I get from spirits in the garden about the garden itself, the world of which it is a part, and my role in it all.
Sometimes while working at my desk, the energy rises in my body to the extent that I will vibrate nervously unless I heed the call to go outside and create and renew. I spend much meditative time with the plants and animals of our land.
I have not always been a gardener. My father loved his lawn and nurtured it carefully along with border irises and roses. My mother had some houseplants. I always loved trees and considered them my confidants and protectors.
I've planted flowers and herbs at some places I've rented over the years and created ponds out of plastic swimming pools, so I could take them with me when I left. I seldom had houseplants unless someone gave them to me as a gift. My attitude about plants was that they belonged outdoors in the earth where they could live naturally among all the elements. When we bought our own home in 1988, I went into gardening with great abandon, removing the ubiquitous ivy and planting native and compatible climate plants, herbs, fruit trees, and vegetables.
I read dozens of gardening books but mainly took the advice of plant spirits as to where they should be planted and what they needed. Experienced gardener friends would come over and tell me that I couldn’t transplant that plant that way or in that season (for some important reason), or the plants will die. I would reply that I had asked the plants, and after I had explained what I wanted to do, they told me that they would flourish there and how I should take care of them. To other people's amazement, the apparent violation of gardening rules did not deter the plants from growing abundantly. Often, after I got messages from plants about where they wanted to be planted and next to what other plants, I would read gardening books and find that the plants had directed me to the microclimate and conditions that they indeed were found to have needed by expert gardeners.
I take an eclectic approach to gardening, as I do with many things in life. I listen to the plants and all the accompanying delightful spirits in the garden, and I listen to my creative impulses as a caretaker, artist, and sister spirit. Our garden is lush like a tropical jungle now, and it's hard to get me to leave once I'm knee-deep in digging, weeding, planting, trimming, and enjoying. As I pull weeds, I let them know they will be heartily enjoyed as food for the chickens or even find their way into our salads. They are all appreciative of the love and the communion we share.
I listen to the garden spirits, but I don't feel like a slave to them. I let myself play freely among all the elements and am constantly sparked by things to do to make the garden better. We have a nurturing co-existence, and I find a deep communion with spirit in the garden that gives me courage, inspiration, thoughts, and love to share with people (of all species) in my work and travels.
While puttering through our local library, I came across a book called Gardening From The Heart—Why Gardeners Garden by Carol Olwell (Berkeley, CA: Antelope Island Press, 1990). How delighted I was to read ideas that echoed my feelings about the joys and mystical connection to all of life to be found in gardening. Rephrasing and re-experiencing truths seems necessary or at least very helpful for us in human form to stay connected and surrounded by our spiritual nature.
This book does not focus directly on communicating with nature spirits to create a garden. Yet almost every person interviewed touched on their spiritual connection to the plants and the earth and their sense of kinship or oneness found in the garden. I like the reference to plant people as being generous and community-oriented and that tending plants and animals changes human nature, softening edges and increasing compassion and understanding. I'll share some of the gardeners' insights on telepathic communication with other species.
From a highway landscaper: ...when I first started to prune, I was very tentative and wondered, should I take this branch off or shouldn't I? Now I approach a tree with a lot more confidence. But on the occasions when I do get stuck, I just ask the tree. I literally ask, "Should I be taking this?" And I always feel very right about taking the limb or feel that I should leave it. It's always a very definite, strong feeling. It's nothing particularly emotional, I just know what to do.
From a plant geneticist: I would walk down to the fields before sunrise and empty myself of any knowledge of the plants that I had. That took some doing. Then I'd walk into a field of five thousand segregated populations of sesame and say, `I need to know which ones of you have the highest oil, and which ones will yield the best, and which ones will the farmer really want,' and so on. And wherever I was stopped in the field by the sesame itself, I would just collect seed. It worked beautifully for rice, beans, sorghum, and potatoes as well…
I wasn't talking to the plants, I was communicating with them. Plants don't have brains, but they do have minds, so it was mind-to-mind communication. From a master horticulturist, paleo-ecologist and tree trimmer: If you've spent a few million hours watering plants, either you don't ever want to see another one in your lifetime, or you can't stand for one to be suffering. Any time you're responsible for the well-being of another creature, a really wonderful thing happens: you increase your ability to respond. You can feel what is going on with plants, too, if you pay attention, just like with people or anything else. And one joy of going back to the same plants year after year is the opportunity to learn from them. Plants continually surprise me.
Trees certainly respond to the way they are pruned, not just what is done to them but how it is done to them. Some of the people who have worked alongside me have had a horrible attitude. Some of them should just be kept away from sharp instruments because their emotional state is very tough on the plants. Those plants didn't grow very much after that. They don't want to be punished again. Anyone could see the difference within the next season. ...Well, there have been times when my body has been hungry and tired and I thought I would quit, when the tree goes, `There's a bunch of dead twigs left you haven't gotten yet.' If I see what it was trying to tell me and start making the effort to do it, I'll get a burst of energy from the tree, a big thank-you washing back from it.
...We're part of the creative spirit underlying everything. We can dance with it or against it or contribute to the flow of it. When we dance with it, when it's from the heart, doors open within doors and things unfold.
...I don't think gardening is important; I'd say it's crucial. I think the more people we have gardening, whether it's to grow their own tomatoes or kiwis or just to have a pink and blue border, the more incalculable will be the return. We beautify ourselves in the process of beautifying the world; maybe that's one of the nicest spinoffs. I've noticed a real softening in myself as I've opened up to the soft strength of plants. They do their utmost at any opportunity, and it's difficult not to be affected by that.
