Do Plants Speak to Humans?

A year and a half ago, I moved to Arizona on an intuitive whim. I packed all my belongings on a moving truck with the exception of my one beloved houseplant, a small fig tree, which I gave to my mom. 

Recently, I returned to spend the summer with my family and relocate back to the Pacific Northwest. Upon seeing the fig tree in corner of my parents’ living room, I touched the leaves and admired how strong and healthy it looked.

Then I heard, “It’s YOU! I’m happy to see you!” The words were silent and clearly formed, arising within my body yet coming from the plant.

Tingles shot through my body, like the bright cascade of light from a sparkler. I recognized the sensation not as my own, but as an emotion or expression shared with me from the plant.

Did I find this experience strange, unbelievable or unprecedented? Nope. And while it certainly felt magical, I knew it was too common an experience to be my imagination.

THE FLOWER SONGS

I’m a plant intuitive, which means I sense and feel the energetic healing properties that plants have to offer. 

This typically happens when I’m alone in nature and I feel drawn towards a flowering bush or plant. As I approach it, a silent music fills my body, like an ecstatic swell of violins or warm, luscious chords on a harp. 

Sometimes, I see a vision of the healing it offers, or hear clear words. The words are silent but distinct, something I hear from within my body rather than through my ears.

When I first started to hear flowers, I didn’t know that in ancient cultures, shamans and tribal healers spoke of plants singing to them. In fact, this was how they created their plant medicines — they listened to the flower songs.

National Geographic explorer, anthropologist and Harvard-educated Wade Davis discussed this in his TEDTalk, boasting over 4 million views. 

He explains how ayahuasca, used sacred rituals by certain Amazonian tribes, gains its hallucinogenic properties when two different parts of two different plants are combined. Given the tens of thousands of plants in that region, including many varies that look indistinguishable, there’s no way the ayahuasca recipe could be created through trial and error. 

One Amazonian culture had over 17 different varieties of ayahuasca, identifiable because the sub-species of one plant, the native people said, sang in different keys on the night of a full moon.

 

There’s even scientific research that suggests plants can exhibit fear and read humans’ minds. Research like this is promising, but our modern scientific approaches often prevent us from having the relationship with nature that’s inherently required to communicate with her.

SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE 

I create herbal remedies for myself and my clients by literally “listening to plants.” When I explained this previously, some readers told me it was “way too woo-woo.”

But many more people had a different response… they felt validated in their own communication with nature. 

Here are some examples from emails I received: 

Thank you so much for sharing a vital aspect of your journey. It resonated so much with me. I also have a journey story to share that I don’t find easy to contain in words. Perhaps I can simply say that it became clearer when I visited a lake in Canada and a wolf replied to my song.

A palm tree spoke to me once. Someone had bound up the fronds with rope and when I untied it, I heard an audible “Thank You.” I almost fell off my ladder! There was no one around. I rarely tell anyone this for fear of them thinking I’m crazy. Thanks for being “out there.”

I’m studying psychology and there is so much that we have not discovered. The field of psychology grows with every century and I feel that we are onto making a connection between nature energy and the human mind. I had a similar experience in nature but it was Mother Earth talking to me. It’s not strange at all from what you’re saying. I am not a religious person, in fact I’m an atheist. 

You are right, flowers do sing and are filled with joy. I recall years ago when I stood in my flower garden and heard what sounded like child laughter. Isn’t it fun to have that gift of hearing?

Two of my friends shared their similar experiences with me.

My friend Kama, an expert in Hawaiian skincare, told me:

In my Hawaiian healing training, a student asked our kumu (teacher) and all the kahuna (master healers) in the room, “how did the Hawaiians discover the medicine of the plants? How did they know all this?” The elders and teachers in the room laughed and said matter of factly, “the plants told them, of course.”

In a conversation with another highly intuitive friend and mentor, she told me of a time she visited a botanical garden and walked up to a certain tree. She said,

Suddenly, I experienced a flashback of my mother giving birth to me. I felt a rush of my mother’s fear, excitement, and pain and I realized my body had been carrying my mom’s overwhelming birth emotions. As I stood in front of the tree, I heard the tree clearly say, “Leave this here with me, I can handle this for you.”  It meant the overwhelming emotions.

In many of her pieces, mystic and poet Mary Oliver discusses receiving communication from plants and other aspects of nature. In her poem, “How I Go Into the Woods,” she wrote:

I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.

It’s a funny thing, when you tell an unusual in the world… some people will say, “You’re crazy! You should comply to the narrative of normalcy our Western culture has prescribed!”

But others will say, “Thank you for sharing your truth because… me too.”

Have you ever experienced communication from a plant or other aspect of nature? Please share!