The Plant Spirit Oracle Project

Yarrow is common throughout the world and has long been associated with invisibility.  Yarrow keeps things hidden, just as the image for this card–painted in 2017 at the full Lunar Eclipse–also conceals much.  The luna moth comes out at dusk and flies in the night, a sign of concealment and yet beauty.  The yarrow flowers spiral ever inward.

Divination Keywords: Invisibility, Hiding, Protection, Being Unseen

Witch Hazel

Witch Hazel has the unique feature of blooming in the late fall and early winter, when everything else is dying, brown, and still. Witch hazel, therefore, is like a beacon in that dark time. The left half of the painting shows Witch Hazel during the light half of the year, with green leaves and dried seed pods. During the dark half of the year, Witch Hazel turns crimson and orange and then, even after her leaves drop, she blooms. And blooms, and blooms. As the snows come down, she blooms. Her song of hope and change is played by the babbling brook which flows between the dark and light half of the year. Witch Hazel offers us a very powerful message for these dark times—not to give up hope. Our children’s children’s children are waiting for us to become ancestors.

Divination Keywords: Shining in the darkness, overcoming difficult odds, hope for the future, music of the earth, spirit songs

Comfrey is one of the most well-known medicinal plants on the planet, well-loved and well respected by herbalists.  She is known by many names, including knitbone, boneset, and mending plant.  This is because of her many uses for mending bones, healing serious wounds, and healing the body inside and out.  Comfrey also is an amazing garden plant; she is what is known as a “dynamic accumulator” meaning that her deep tap roots can pull up nutrients and make them available to other plants.  She also is a summer-long producer of nectar for insects and birds. In the card, we can see the hummingbirds feasting on her nectar while her roots hold the power of the planets.

Divination Keywords: Resources, personal action, leveraging one’s skills and abilities, favor from the heavens, astrology, manifestation, recognizing the opportune moment, “stars” aligning, taking action now

There is nothing quite like finding an apple tree in full fruit in the fall months. A single apple can produce hundreds of pounds of fruit and each apple tree, particularly those that are wild, offer incredible diversity in its fruits. The Appletree has had a tremendously long history with humans. Ancient humans, and some modern, engaged in rites to “wassail” the tree so that she would produce more apples, which could be dried, turned into sauce, butter, fresh cider, or hard cider. Truly, Apple is a tree of fertility, offering many blessings and gifts with her magic.

Divination Keywords: Magic, Fertility, Creativity, Nature Connectedness

If you’ve ever tried to pick wild blackberries in the height of the summer, you likely will have paid a price for those delicious treats. Wild Blackberry produces amazing, large, juicy fruits, but she often demands a blood price from those who seek her fruits. The deeper you get into a blackberry patch, the more difficult the patch is to escape from. In my region, we call her a “jagger bush”, and getting “tangled in jaggers” is not a place you want to be! The blackberry painting features a huge tangle of bushes growing from a porcupine—another creature that enacts a strong price if you get too near. The blackberry, therefore, teaches us that actions have consequences and to tread carefully.

Divination Keywords: Entanglement, Consequences, Wrapped up in Troubles, Rewards after a long struggle, Doing things the hard way, Paying a price

Poison ivy is one of the most feared and avoided plants in the natural environment due to the contact dermatitis it creates after several days of exposure. Because many have had a previous run-in with poison ivy with lasting consequences, it encourages people to learn to recognize it, to avoid it, and to avoid areas with it. In other words, poison ivy, through its hard lessons and pain, teaches us to be aware of our surroundings and stay guarded.

And yet, this defensiveness can go both ways. When I encounter poison ivy, I see how it protects places—growing thick so that none can get through. It especially grows thick along the edges of forests and fields, in “edges” where the wildlands are meeting cultivated lawns and other human-dominated ecosystems. It works, in this way, to be strongly and visibly defensive: growing to keep people out. In fact, it is this “edge effect” that has allowed poison ivy to substantially spread its range due to the increasing disturbances caused by modern buildings and lawns, and is, in some ways, nature’s response to human incursions and lawn cultivation. Today, it is much more common than several centuries ago, primarily due to the amount of disturbance in the landscape that humans have created and due to the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This ecological reality parallels its divinatory meaning.

If you’ve ever suffered from poison ivy, you know that the more that you scratch it, the more you spread it, offering yet another powerful lesson: sometimes we have to just let things run their course and not do anything to further upset the situation.

Divination Keywords: Defensiveness, Awareness, Hard Lessons, Letting things run their course, Caution, Danger

Closing Thoughts and Links for More Information!