Getting to know plants by their energy signature is learned just like any language as children. We look at pictures, associate the picture with a word, and we repeat until it’s so ingrained that there’s no thought process; it’s an immediate one-to-one correlation. This can be difficult if you have no background in working with plants, but it’s never impossible. You can start with the spice cabinet. What we’re doing is exploring our minds for memories or experiences that had an impact on who we are, to see how they might shape us as people. We are also creating a scent vocabulary for further exploration of perfume, ritual oils, and other botanical allies.

Spice Cabinet

Take a look inside your kitchen cabinet and you can take a trip around the world. Each spice, herb, and flavor has a rich history of use in medicine, folklore, and witchcraft. No matter where you start, you can’t go wrong. No matter your experience, there’s going to be some history in that cabinet, even if the only things you saw were salt, pepper, and take-out menus.

EXAMPLE

Black pepper has a recorded history that goes back to mummification in 1279 BCE. Think about the contributions to history that a plant has with that length of service. It was used as currency in ancient Rome. It was such 26 Blackthorn’s Book of Sacred Plant Magic a common occurrence that the city of Rome was held hostage in 410 CE and one of the demands was three thousand pounds of black peppercorns. The use of black peppercorns as currency continued to occur until the 18^th century, and the drive to find the spice that bolstered the world economy was one of the driving forces in European colonialism.

WHAT TO DO?

Take a spice jar (in our example, we’re doing black pepper, but you can choose anything in your spice cabinet) and find a comfortable place to sit with a notebook and pen. Close your eyes, and take some cleansing breaths. Open them, and take your spice jar in your nondominant hand (sometimes called the receptive hand) and give a nice long smell. If it’s a strong smell or something potentially irritating, use the waft instead of a direct inhalation. There are a lot of really lovely smells in the spice rack, but we don’t need it lining our sinuses. Notice the aroma itself, as well as any associated shapes, colors, symbols, or memories that come up when you smell it. Repeat the smell inhalation two more times. This gives our nose and brain time to collaborate and make sure they’ve dug up any really important memories from the depths of your mind and experience. Write down anything that comes up after these smells. Feel free to break it up into sights, sounds, colors, shapes, and other things that arise so you can compare it to other scents and spices you try next. Building your scent vocabulary can help strengthen connections in your mind between allies you already know and ones you’re learning as we go through this book together. Mine might look like this:

Black pepper: Smells sweeter than I expected. The spice is there, but it’s warm and round, instead of sharp and hot like other peppers. Reminds me of gray wool sweaters.

First, we established the name, black pepper. Then we experienced the aroma. Bonus points if it’s a spice that you have the essential oil counterpart to for comparison.

Black pepper essential oil: sweet, tangy, warmer than the spice, but still not as sharp as expected. Perfumy.

We’ve connected your present sense of smell to the plant name, and hopefully we’ve connected you with any sense memories that stand out. (Feel free to come back to the journal entry if any memories come back in the next days.)

Dialing in That Connection

Now that you have experienced that plant material in recent memory and have a connection to that plant spirit, I’d like you to try to connect to the spirit of that plant.

We’ve talked about your inner landscape and how to furnish your “mind palace”; now we need to populate it with friends you’ve invited to the party. If you were calling a friend on the phone, you’d dial their number, and that secret code would connect your phone to theirs. Unlike texting, it would require someone to pick up on the other end, instead of waiting in your text inbox for the messages to be picked up. In the spirit realm, your secret code is the name of the plant spirit you’re hoping to establish a connection with. You can use the Latin if that feels more formal, respectful, or clear, but the connection is the important part.

1. Enter your sacred space—with a notebook and pen, whether it be your bedroom, a spare room, a closet where you’ve got some safe feelings, wherever you feel magical. Sit or lie comfortably.
2. Close your eyes—Center yourself in your physical body. Feel the scattered energy lingering in fingers and toes coming into the center of your body. Send any excess energy you’re not using into the earth, where the planet can use it much more efficiently. Bring up small amounts of energy into your being if you’re feeling low energy.

Pro Tip: The earth isn’t the only celestial body. If you’ve practiced grounding/earthing enough to be an advanced practitioner, consider picking a celestial body. Venus and Mars are the next closest celestial bodies after the moon; try one of these three bodies and see how that energy changes how you feel. Make sure to record your findings for later.

3. Start relaxing—By going muscle by muscle we can build in enough repetition to allow you to enter a trance state. Start by relaxing each and every toe individually. Then relax your calves, knees, each muscle in your thighs, all the way to the top of your head. (You’ll be surprised how much tension you carry in your ears alone.)
4. Picture (or feel) yourself in your inner landscape—however you’ve decorated and built your space to be your sanctuary. Whether a castle, a college dorm room, an open meadow, or your local witchy shop, your inner landscape is the virtual start screen for any journeys we undertake to meet the spirits of the plants we will be working with.
5. I always include visualizing a walking meditation—on a set of rainbow stairs to help move my brain from the physical (red) to the spiritual (violet). I reverse this visual when returning to my body after the journey is complete.
6. If you work with a spirit guide in your inner landscape, feel free to invite them to join you—If this isn’t a part of your practice, that’s okay, too. The important part is your feeling of safety and security. If you’d like to work with your spirit guide but haven’t met them yet, feel free to add that into this journey, or build in time at another point to meet them.
7. Speak the name of a plant you are hoping will meet with you—Or ask that a plant spirit who has a message for you to come forward.
8. If no spirit comes forward, go for a walk to explore your inner landscape—Look around to see if there are any plants making an appearance. They should surprise you; you shouldn’t be trying to see anything specific if they didn’t make an appearance when requested. Remember, this is a cooperative relationship. We have no authority to order any spirit to appear in this place and time. That’s a different style of magic. (Not better or worse, just different.)
9. If a spirit comes forward, have some low-energy interview-style questions for them—“How best can I work with you?” “Is there anything you need from me to best work together?” “Is there anything you’d prefer I not do while we work together?” On the first meeting, don’t expect to get all the secrets of the universe; we’re building a relationship on the first meeting. Subsequent meetings will make it easier to ask difficult questions and to be able to receive the answers in your heart. If no spirit comes forward and you go to walk about, make note of the plants that appear (trees, ivy, bushes, and so forth) so that you can figure out their meaning when you’re back in your body (so to speak).

Working with New Allies

Linden—Linden is a loving plant ally to signal to the universe that you are ready for a new loving relationship. Working with the spirit of Linden encourages respect, both for you to show, and for respect to be shown to you. Linden inspires calm and allows us to recognize our needs, especially the ones we have neglected in favor of others. As a loving ally, linden helps find lovers who are faithful and have relationship longevity in mind, and is also a plant associated with protection magic, so it can help find a relationship that is safe for your heart and body. This working can work to bring both new platonic and romantic relationships, because both are important for happy, healthy humans.

The Spell

Supplies:

• Choose a candle (white, pink, or red depending on intended outcome, or all three!)
• Candleholder
• Ballpoint
• Enough jojoba oil to anoint the candle
• Linden flowers, leaves (dried linden from a bulk herb website is also okay)
• 1 handful salt

The white candle signifies purifying those past behaviors that you’d like to overcome, as well as feelings of loss, fear, depression, and the like that you already overcame. The pink candle represents the ability of the Witch (you) to understand and embrace the love they have for themselves. Move lastly to the red for blossoming love and understanding with a new potential partner, whether romantic or platonic.

A flat surface like a plate or serving platter is ideal to place your candleholders on to keep the spell contained for easy cleanup. Carve the word “linden” into the candle surface that you choose with a ballpoint pen. Anoint the candle with jojoba oil for removing blockages to your desired goal.

Place the candle in the center of the space in the candleholder. Next, mix one handful of salt (purification) with one handful of linden flowers and leaves. You can do this in a bowl or with a mortar and pestle. We want to incorporate the two as best we can. Once they are mixed well, sprinkle the mixture in a line to form a small circle an inch or two away from the candle.

Add more linden to the salt mixture and do a second ring.

Add more linden and make a third ring.

The center ring will have the most salt, the outside ring, the least. Th ink of it as a multistage water purifier. We are taking the energy that the candle is putting out and forcing it through filters of love, protection, and respect.

When it is time to light the candle, picture the emotions you have overcome to make room for a new person in your loving relationships. Remember, there are so many types of love—love for family and siblings, love of your teammates, love for your home; each is different.

We are growing and moving through our lives as loving adults. You may have heard some (toxic) adages about not being able to love anyone if you don’t love yourself. Please understand that this couldn’t be further from the truth: we all deserve love. Sometimes we didn’t receive the love we were meant to in our homes as children, so it can be hard to know what loving relationships look like until someone shows you how to love appropriately. It has nothing to do with your ability to recognize feelings directed at yourself. You’re an incredible person, and I can’t wait to see what you do with this life.

Connecting with Plants outside the Physical

Working with plants as spirit beings means that we can work with and develop relationships with plants that we might not otherwise have access to, due to time, distance, cost, scarcity, and a number of other factors. In this case, it can be important to interact with that plant as a spirit being using your inner landscape rather than interacting with the plant itself.

One such example would be to interact with the spirit of a plant that you’re allergic to. It isn’t safe to handle plants that you’re allergic to, but it can be a fulfilling experience to meet that plant ally on the spirit plane to ask what you’re supposed to learn about that plant through your allergy. Th ere could be a message in it. Th ere could not be. But you don’t know until you ask.

1. Enter your sacred space.
2. Relax your body.
3. Count down from ten to one to settle your mind further.
4. Feel yourself enter your inner landscape.
5. Invite a plant you are allergic to, to meet with you in sacred space. Ask them what you can both learn from each other through this allergy. For example, if you’re allergic to plantain, a common weed found in grass, you might learn that you avoid healing parts of yourself that you see as not being too bad or not bad enough to warrant treatment. Where does this understanding come from? Plantain (both broadleaf and narrow leaf plantain) is an anti-inflammatory, a vulnerary (wound-healer), and astringent (draws out poison, venom, and irritants like bee venom, spider venom, and the like).
6. To discern the meaning in any botanical associations, you can check field guides, herbal books like The Modern Herbal Dispensatory: A Medicine-Making Guide and magical herbals like Blackthorn’s Botanical Magic and Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs.

Quick note: folklore is a vast and varied subject, but some Beings (with a capital B) can get offended if you thank them. If you feel strongly about showing your appreciation, ask them how they feel about the words “thank you” and if there’s anything they might ask of you in return for helping you. Debts are a funny thing. Make sure it’s something you can 100 percent do, as breaking your word to spirits can have disastrous consequences.

7. Once you have the information you need, exit your inner landscape, and write down everything you can remember. You may have more vivid than usual dreams, and parts of your journey may come back to your memory hours or days after a journey. That’s completely natural, just write it down when you can, as you remembered it for a reason.

Just make sure to get a nice grounding meal afterwards and plenty of rest that evening.

—Amy Blackthorn, Chapter 3, Building Botanical Relationships, Copyright © 2024