Ways of Knowing Plants

I thought I knew my plants, or some of them: a fair sprinkling of native Northeastern herbs and trees, some Rocky Mountain and desert species of the Southwest, and a cross-section of the flora of the Himalayan foothills.  Cultivated crops (sounds simple, but not everyone can recognize a potato leaf or the overgrown thistle that bears artichokes) and the naturalized European species that are more familiar than half our native plants.  I can take a walk down a Vermont back road and recognize Wild Sarsaparilla and Blue Cohosh and Dolls Eyes and Bloodroot; in Nepal I kept an eye peeled for Nirgundi and Chutro and Amala.  I knew them by name in three or four languages; I knew their traditional classification and uses and some of their constituents.  I often knew something about when and how to harvest them, how to prepare them for medicine, how to combine them with other plants to bring out certain facets of their personalities.  I knew, I knew, I knew--though I knew there's always more to learn, I thought I knew quite a lot.

But what is knowing?

This is a question at the heart of most of the debates surrounding so-called alternative medicine.  What is so challenging, so alternate, in traditional-style herbalism, or Chinese medicine?  It isn’t so much the techniques we employ, but the reasons we employ them.  It’s the fact that we rely on subjective instruments, on qualities over quantities.  The feel of a pulse and the look of a tongue instead of the clean lines of an ECG or the starkness of an X-ray.  It’s our subjective ways of knowing, our trust in intuition and in the power of the human instrument, that set us apart.  

Likewise when it comes to medicinal plants.  With them, there’s knowing and knowing.  I can recognize a species, know its names, its chemical constituents, its traditional classification according to one or another materia medica, and still not really know it, no more than memorizing the stats on Cal Ripken’s rookie baseball card makes me know the man as a person or even as a player.  The facts are signposts, fingers pointing at the moon; they are springboards, points of departure.

When asked who her own favorite teachers and sources of knowledge were, one of my herbal teachers replied “the plants themselves.”  At the time (not much more than a year ago) this struck me as a bold and perhaps outlandish response.  Direct communication with plants was something limited to those gifted in shamanistic journeying and plant spirit medicine, I thought.  Sure, chatting with the soul of Burdock or Queen Anne’s Lace was nice work if you could get it, but we mere mortals had to make do with study and accumulated experience.  

I don’t mean to say I hadn’t had any direct experience of the herbs I was coming to love.  There were inklings.  The sense of nourishment and groundedness I began to notice when taking a spoonful of ashwagandha after meals; the almost palpable fire-in-the-belly feeling that ginger can provide.  With these experiences, I started to realize that part of the work of becoming an herbalist is refining the senses; I suppose I’ve come a ways in that regard, since these days a sip of coffee sends an impulse through my system that I feel before any of the caffeine could have entered my bloodstream.  

But the ashwagandha and ginger were herbs I needed; what about coming to know the scores of others I had no personal use for?  The madders and yarrows, the docks and daisies?  I wasn’t going to take these for days and weeks to get a sense of them.  And I wasn’t subtle enough in my perception to get to know them from one or two encounters.  

Or maybe I was.  The key was sitting in plain sight all along.  It was deceptively simple: simply tasting the plants, usually in tincture form, and sitting with them in meditation to observe their effects.  I was introduced to this technique of plant meditation in my first session with the School of Traditional Western Herbalism, and it was a revelation.  

We tasted yarrow that first time.  When the little brown bottle--like something out of Alice in Wonderland--came around, I didn’t recognize the herb by taste, so my experience was unbiased by preconception.  On the tongue I noted spiciness, resin, pungency; bitterness too.  As the initial taste sensations faded, I noticed feeling of upward and outward pushing.  I became more aware of my skin, my surface, and of the back of my neck.  I don’t recall every nuance of that sitting, but as we went around the circle and shared our experiences, I was blown away.  Few of us had recognized the plant (it turned out to be tinctured from a high-altitude, unusually potent specimen), and though we all had varying experiences with the plant, a vivid and coherent portrait emerged. In my mind I’d had yarrow categorized as a blood herb, helping to move or astringe the blood (stopping bleeding) as necessary, and indicated (according to my teacher Matt Wood’s instruction) by a red and blue complexion; also as a specific remedy in certain kinds of fevers.  Now I began understand why and how the plant might have such effects.  More than that, I began to see the personality of the plant, its particular energy and presence.  It was not so much a blood herb as a surface herb: the skin-deep sensations I’d been noticing reflected its ability to govern the blood flow to the surface.  A number of us felt a warmth within that then diffused to the surface; this is how yarrow helps in fevers, by bringing out a sweat.  Neurons fired; connections were made; my intellectual understanding of the plant came face to face with the direct experience of it, and each helped inform the other.  I’ll never be able to forget what yarrow does, because I have at least a first level of knowing who or what yarrow is.  

There’s more to be said about trusting our senses, not just our vision but our smell and taste and the landscape of inner sensations I was first introduced to in Vipassana meditation.  I want to ramble about the value and power of the subjective.  And I want to describe all the plant meditations I’ve done since that first one, the plants I’ve started to get to know in a way that makes me feel like I’m starting my education all over again.  I’m sure I will write more about certain herbs as time goes on (especially if I pick up on any reader interest in that area--any herbal folk reading this?).  But my experience, conveyed in words, dies as it crystallizes once more into run-of-the-mill knowledge.  Maybe all I’m really trying to say is, ‘There’s a whole living world out there. Go taste it!’