Excerpt from my book

From THE SIMPLICITY OF HERBAL HEALTH

Plants and I have been best friends for a long time. As a small child I would climb a tree when I felt sad or lonely and looked out over the lake where we lived. I never felt that I was hanging on to the tree but that the tree was holding me. It was a comforting feeling. I also went up there when I was in trouble at home but Mom always knew where I was.

We had a small woods next door and to crawl under the bottom branches of a pine tree was a sacred place. It still is. I loved to make trails or harvesting “Summer Homes.” (Bird nests and I collect them even today.)

When I was reading Machaelle Small Wright’s biography, Behaving As If The God In All Life Matters, I got to the part where she started to hear the plants talking to her. She says that she was talking to the “Plant Deva.” When she talked to the plants and they responded to her, I got all excited. So this is when I started to communicate with them.

My first introduction with this way of thinking came from a book called The Magic of Findhorn by Peter Cady about his creation in Scotland. He and two women worked with Nature and were able to grow huge vegetables in sand using the instructions given by Nature.

One fall day, I was lying on the grass, watching the clouds tease the top of my double oak tree. The squirrels were running around collecting nuts. All the neighbors were raking leaves into piles. My husband was washing storm windows. All of this activity made me feel very lazy so I said to the Oak tree of Oakwell, “I bet you know the secret of life?” And I heard, “The secret of life is to make a place of peace and comfort for those around you.” Time out…I just heard from a tree. And yes, isn’t that what every tree does?

Then one day I had a “feeling” that I needed to enlarge the small garden around our two apple trees. So I dug up more lawn around the garden that I now call the Apple Garden. (This garden was first created so my husband wouldn’t have to mow close to these trees) It was early spring and the temperature was in the 40s but I was dressed for it and warm as I pulled the angleworms out of the sod and shook the dirt out. I threw these clumps, along with the stones that I found, onto the lawn. When I had it just the right size, I mixed in some peat moss and some composted manure. It was like mixing biscuit dough. I was so proud of this little garden, so I backed up to look at all of it and in doing so, I saw energy waves rising from the whole area. It looked like it was about to lift off and float into space. I ran into the garage and brought back a cement slab. Then I went around the little garden, picking up all the walnut-sized rocks, putting them on the slab. Then standing back once more, I saw that the energy waves were gone. The area had been grounded. It felt good.

Many years later, our Oak tree became infested with Gypsy Moths. I did a lot of research and called on people from the State Parks Service to help me but because we do not allow sprays on our property, they couldn’t help. My first line of defense was to put molasses in a 4-inch band around the trunk of the oak tree. (Our tree took two jars of the molasses) This slowed the caterpillars down, then we picked them off.

The next thing that I did was to import predators. I found a very small wasp (Trichogramma) that eats these egg masses and lays their eggs inside of the caterpillars. So I imported a lot of them. The tiny wasps came by the 5,000 in a small container where one might put mustard. They looked like pepper when they arrived and I was told to put them by plants that have multiple-tiny flower heads. The front yard Yarrow was just right.

I just finished reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The spraying didn’t stop the Elm problem or the Gypsy Moths on the East Coast in the ‘50s, but did “control” duck and bird populations along with many other small animals in the area. It seems that aerial spraying has never really done the job but it is continued to this day.

My husband wanted to spray the following year and I was torn between saving this huge oak tree and the spraying. I called the Perelandra Nature Research Center and told them about our “War” with the Gypsy Moths. The first thing that they told me was “STOP WARRING.” I was told to find out from the moths what they would need to stay healthy and not over-run the tree and what the tree would need to stay healthy and handle this invasion.

Listening to plants can be fun and informative. When they have communicated, at first I thought I was talking to myself but I was getting information about things of which I had no knowledge. One of the most important and prevalent things that they would tell me was “we are one.” Always the “We are one” and I have tried to incorporate this into my way of thinking. It is not you and I, it is we. Plants and animals (people included in this) are the beings on this planet. We are all one.

I also found out that they like our energy. They like to be given time to assimilate information. If a tree is to be cut down, a three-day notice is required for the spirit of that plant to leave. I know that most of you will find this strange but we need to treat these being as our brothers, remembering that without them, we cannot breath. It is time that we start to respect all living things. We have not been doing that for a very long time but then most people that I know even take their close family relationships lightly.

Recently, we have been having long periods of drought in our area. Not to the point of losing plants but where a lot of things like Wild Ginger and my mints are drooping. In Penny Kelly’s book, ROBES…she said, “Trees and vegetation are other critical elements in moderating and controlling electromagnetic fields, and therefore the wind. Trees are themselves producers of magnetic fields, and their fields interact with the magnetically charged pockets of air and land in two main ways.

One is that they keep air moving through sheer intelligence. Trees are intelligent beings capable of shifting the electromagnetic signature of the E-M fields they produce. Thus, they are capable of attracting air pockets containing moisture when they are dry and want something to drink.”

After reading this, I told my large trees, Oak, Maple, and Locust, that they were not doing their job. They are supposed to bring in rain for the other beings around them. I gave them quite a tongue-lashing and to my surprise, within 24 hours, we got water. First, it was a sprinkle, followed by an all-day easy rain. Boy, did I feel foolish. Then I had to go out and apologize to them. It didn’t make any difference what the weatherman had to say about the situation, as they had been promising rain for a week but the trees really did it.

It is my belief that we were not given dominion over, but were put here to co-create with nature. We have not been doing that for a very long time. Maybe some of the good books need to be rewritten?