THIS HAPPENED TO ME
Are There Fairies In My Garden?
Try communicating with your plants if you want to find whether they are magical
There is a school of thought, if I may generously call it that, claiming that plants are not sentient. Plants, they say, do not feel pain because they have no nervous system nor brain, and that they are devoid of plant cognition, that they do not have intelligence.
And as they are not living things — in the same way as animals we consume for food — there is no issue with eating plants.
Debunking or defending this plants-are-not-sentient point of contention is far from my mind.
I just want, instead, to share my personal experience with living beings in my garden.
Thirty months ago, in summer, my husband and I downsized to a bungalow. The garden — ornate, as he described it — is much larger than the garden in our previous home.
But, as I have just resigned from my 70-hours-a-week corporate job, I said I would help in gardening.
By the last third of autumn, we seriously checked on the plants. We needed to further identify which trees and shrubs needed pruning, or altogether removed.
A few plants we both liked had been planted, but I wanted more space for plants that I love.
Magical mahonia
For weeks, I had my eye on an unusual tallish tree. It had spiky leaves. Its trunk appeared very dry, struggling to live. It looked like those scary trees in horror movies.
Twice or thrice, my husband and I discussed while examining the tree whether we should have it removed. It seriously looked dead or dying. By that time, I already knew that it was a mahonia tree. It is also known as Oregon grape.
The next morning after that third discussion, I saw from the kitchen window yellow blooms on top of the tree. I thought I was dreaming. Instead of making my first morning coffee, I rushed to the bedroom to wake up my late-sleeper husband.
I must have seemed mad to him, babbling about the tree giving flowers after it “heard” that we would get rid of it.
And what did I get? A gift of lovely lemon-yellow flowers!
Mysterious cinquefoil
Potentilla is cinquefoil’s scientific name. When I first discovered that I have this plant in my garden, I was petrified. This was because cinquefoil has centuries-old history of being used in magical spells and rituals.
But the folklore that stuck in my memory is that cinquefoil is used by black witches and bad spirits.
(Call me superstitious but, on top of many other plants in the garden that are toxic, I immediately looked for and planted angelica archangelica to counter the black-witch capability of the cinquefoil. But this is another story.)
There is, however, a lot more good “magic” associated with cinquefoil. Its various medicinal uses, for one. Its use for protection against and the removal of curses and hexes for another, and many more.
Cinquefoil has palmate leaves and each palmate has 5 leaflets that represent power, love, money, health, and wisdom. It is also said that finding 6 or 7 leaflets in a palmate is lucky.
(Does the 4-leaf clover come to mind? 🍀 Yes, I do have a 4-leaf clover that I found by a river bank somewhere in England.)
In the first summer in our new property, I found a few palmate leaves with 6 or 7 leaflets.
In the second summer — and after I asked the cinquefoil plant, verbally — to give me more “lucky” leaves, I was surprised to find more than a dozen.
It has come to a point when I thought that maybe, just maybe, I should ask my magical plant to give me a palmate with 8 leaflets.
It was a whimsical wish delivered in kindly whispers in summer.
I did not, by the way, find whispering to my plants as weird. It was the same thing I did for my snake plants to flower — and they did. My two indoor snake plants — they have flowered this year, one after the other.
Snake plants rarely flower, by the way.
This autumn before pruning my cinquefoil shrub, I first plucked the palmates with 6 and 7 leaflets (to dry between book pages). And to my astonishment, I found one, just one, with 8 leaflets.
I admit that I was shocked to the core. My magical plant did hear my request! But I was not surprised.
There may be a few who profess that plants are not sentient. My continuing connection with my plants, however, seems to prove that they could be responsive.
Unless, of course, I have garden fairies who listen to my whisperings to plants, and who then grant my wishes.
Recommended reading:
An enjoyable read, this piece by , about good-luck signs and omens.
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