When I sit in a place of nature I feel a different mood to each location.
Just like each plant has a unique plantality (like a personality), the ecosystem can have one too. Each place holds a vibration from past and present activities that took place there. Sometimes the land has a story to tell, sometimes it has a request, and other times the lessons come from the observer.
I’ve wanted to share what I feel in these natural places with my readers and podcast listeners; just like I often share what I feel about herbs and plants with my Plant Priestess Circle and during Plant Temples.
Though, it can be a bit tricky recording a podcast in a park or public place with people moving about. I have to find a place where I’ll be undisturbed. More reasons to explore remote places!
This week I left the house to go for a solo hike at a nearby park. I brought my camera in case I found some plants to photograph. Though, my main focus was to get some fresh air, exercise, and quiet time.
I climbed the steep hill meandering through tall prairie plants and stopping often to take photographs. I eventually stopped at a maple tree at the top of the hill. The view stretches over the park, neighborhood, and beyond over the city.
It was fairly quiet with a few people moving in the park. But, finally! the inspiration came, I had a recorder on my phone, and the rest can be read and listened to here. The blog post is a transcript of the audio podcast, though it’s been edited slightly for easier reading.
Have you ever sat in a field or prairie and noticed the wonderful landscape design that nature has done?
As I sit on this steep hill, it looks like a prairie in front of me. The tall grasses and flowers that are living here remind me of a remnant prairie. Some may call it simply, a field.
In landscape and garden design usually the main goal is to create a symphony of colors, textures, heights, bloom times, and colors.
Mother Nature has done it very well here. After all, she is the original gardener.
The plants here are in various stages with some in their early bloom stages, others half in and half out of bloom, and some have been resting for quite some time.
Plants closest to the ground are the ones that look the most Brown. Those seem to be taking shelter in the shade of the taller ones.
There’s just a perfect amount of bushy flowers, large leaves, tall spiky leaves, and a perfect amount of greenery from the grasses that don’t have showy flowers but have very intricate designs with their inflorescences. Some look so small and diminutive that I can see right through their foliage, and some create huge, thick bushes that are almost impenetrable by foot. It’s just the perfect design.
So if you’re ever looking for ideas of how to design a garden, or landscape, or help to rejuvenate an area, go sit in nature for a little while and take note of the different timing of all the plants coming to bloom to fruit to seed and which ones like low during the rest of the season to take respite and shade in the taller plants.
It’s a really good way to time the seasons as well. For instance, I see Goldenrod blooming right now. It’s yellow. Solidago canadensis, is one of them. And I know that when that one blooms, we’re getting into late summer or just getting into late summer.
Purple asters are the next time keeper. I know when we’re almost to the end of summer when the purple asters blossom. So far, I don’t see any blooming right now. So I know we have some time. But just like how nature designs itself, so can our gardens and our natural places, so that not everything is blooming at once. Not all the activities happening at once.
It’s sort of like our lives, we don’t want everything to be happening all at once. You don’t want to have a whole day happening the minute we put our feet on the ground from waking. We want to space things out.
The medicines that we find in the natural places and in our gardens need to be the same way. We can’t have all of the medicines coming to maturity at the same time. We need them to be spaced out because we don’t need them all at once. Nor can we process them all at once.
So there’s so many life lessons happening in nature, with the herbs, with the flowers. Just take a moment to sit and feel them and watch them and listen. So many benefits to listening and watching nature.
Take the Herbal Pathway Archetypes Quiz here: bit.ly/QuizArchetypes
