Plant Teachers

To heal ourselves and the planet, is it time to tread more quietly to hear the lessons from the more-than-human world?

“I want to salute the father sun and the mother sun,” says Carlos Papá, an Indigenous leader and filmmaker hailing from the Guarani Mbya people, in his opening blessing at OmVed Gardens in Highgate, north London. As he speaks, I can hear the chimes dangling from the ornamental mulberry tree blow in late June’s warm wind. He and Cristine Takuá, a philosopher, educator and Indigenous artisan, both close their eyes and begin a chant to salute the sun’s rays, which dapple the tree’s foliage.

We are gathered for a two-day education symposium at OmVed Gardens. The symposium is a part of the Meeting at the River event series exploring diverse ways of knowing. It is hosted by OmVed for Selvagem, a collective articulating knowledge from Indigenous, academic, scientific, traditional and other sources, with Where the Leaves Fall, Flourishing Diversity and Synchronicity Earth.

Anna Dantes, who conceived Selvagem, opens the morning session, saying: “We are inside a world where life permeates through everything, which is wild. And this wild is seen as a threat - life is seen as a threat. And the world built a series of elements to avoid this ‘jungle’. So, for us, it is very interesting to be in a garden that has broken the ground so that life can cross and run through everything.”

Participants, mostly youth, education and climate workers from the UK, are here for talks, sharing circles and a screening of Selvagem’s renowned short film series, Flecha Selvagem (Wild Arrows), which seeks to express a non-hierarchical coexistence of ancestral, scientific, artistic, and mythological forms of knowledge, while opening up the possibility of asking new types of questions.

Dressed in burnt oranges and reds with two plaits laced with ribbons, Cristine addresses the plants, and more-than-human life in the garden, something I’d never thought to do. “I asked for permission because I found all these beings who live here,” she says. We’re surrounded by sturdy bushes of pale green sage, fragrant lavender and the occasional crimson poppy bowing to the wind. Bees lazily float from flower to flower travelling to and from their apiary. “They have their own spirit,” Cristine tells us, and it’s easy to spot the innate care she has for plants and the more-than-human world. “I had to ask for permission to be here in their house. We need to learn more and more to ask permission, if we don’t ask for permission, we might get ill.”

It’s no secret, Indigenous communities across the globe have a first-hand experience of what many in the west are only just starting to grapple with: An intentional understanding and connection to the-more-than human world, knowing the devastating consequences of what happens when this is lost.

As we sit under the shade of draped willows flanked by neatly curved hedgerows, the speakers bring us on a journey exploring Indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge. Similar themes and topics stud conversations from both speakers and participants, showing a reassuring synergy, crossing continents and languages - from the power of plant teachers, to the role of technology in education, to questions of how to shift the western worldview and the fundamental need to see ourselves as part of nature.

Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge aren’t necessarily in opposition: in fact, a lot of Indigenous knowledge of ecology has historically been stolen by western scientists.

As anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby, a self-proclaimed westerner “born and raised in rationalism”, points out: “One can know the world scientifically by objectifying it, but one can also know the same world by relating to it.” He talks candidly about his own journey, and how the culture-versus-nature dichotomy so prevalent in the west corrupts our connection to the natural world. But by learning from, and spending time with, Indigenous communities, he soon understood that all living things were “people” in their own right.

“Why is it that I am so sure that plants aren’t intelligent?” he asks, noting that the western view of nature is void of intention, looking at a plant as just a bag of molecules. In that same vein of thinking, he says, humans could be looked at as bags of flesh and bone.

I’m reminded of the short story, They’re Made of Meat, by the US writer Terry Bisson. Told from the perspective of aliens looking at Earth, the two characters are bemused by intelligent life being made from “sentient meat”, playfully reducing humans down to our physical anatomy: “They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

If we humans are simply bags of meat, yet we can feel, communicate and love, why can’t a plant? Our view of the more-than-human world as being less complex than us has created untold damage. A blade of grass can remember - Jeremy goes on to say - it is covered in photoreceptors perceiving light and colour: so is it a being or is it an object?

“What’s so difficult about personifying the plant - identifying with it?” He says, after all, western science understands that all of our cells are just copies going all the way back to plant cells and organisms.

Thinking of ourselves and other living beings on an equal footing is a theme that is threaded throughout the two days. “Plants produce us,” says Ailton Krenak, a Brazilian philosopher, environmentalist, advocate for Indigenous peoples’ rights and guide for Selvagem, as he slowly paces around the circle we’re sitting in, effortlessly commanding our attention. He explains that it is actually plants that create the gardener: “We must imagine ourselves as the results of the work of the plants.” Honing in on the work being done at OmVed Gardens, a former garden centre where much of the land was tarmacked and concreted over, now transformed into a living, thriving habitat, he adds: “Each little bit of this garden has a multitude of gardens in itself, housing memories.”

While Jeremy provides examples of how western scientific knowledge, outside the framework of spirituality, aligns with Indigenous knowledge - a helpful tool for those of us who still think through that lens - Ailton, Christina and Papá talk of all knowledge as being circular, not controlled by time and theory.

Learning and healing through plant teachers becomes a reoccurring motif for both speakers and participants. Cristine illuminates how conversing with plants can teach us the art of patience. Plants can awaken knowledge impossible to find in the pages of books, says Ailton: “They drag us into a transcendent experience which shouldn’t be excluded from daily life.”

Even the western medicinal model accepts the healing properties of plants. The willow tree, one of which is draped over us in OmVed Gardens, providing shade, has been used for thousands of years to relieve pains and fevers, eventually leading to the creation of aspirin. How can we learn from plants in a way that isn’t just through extraction but rather in a manner that is also holistic - healing both physically and spiritually?

But we also have to acknowledge that plants have been subject to what I think of as a form of biopiracy, where traditional and Indigenous knowledge and plant species are taken and patented with little to no acknowledgement - let alone compensation - to the people and regions they were stolen from.

The trajectory of many plant medicines is intrinsically linked to scientific colonisation and capital gain. The tobacco plant, for example, which is indigenous to several regions, including the Americas, is a far cry from the thin bleached poisonous sticks we find stuffed into boxes on shelves and labelled as killers. Tobacco was stolen and taken back to Europe when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and it soon became a lucrative global commodity, removed from its original purpose. “It’s violent the way this being has been captured,” says Cristine.

Tobacco is not just a recreational drug for profit, in the way it is now seen by most in the west. It is a sacred teaching plant and vessel between worlds, used in ceremonies, prayers and for its healing properties. “Tobacco has the power of opening the eye to another world. It opens the eye to see the other side - to see beyond - what’s not really here,” says Aristoteles Barcelos Neto, an anthropologist who has spent time with the Indigenous peoples of the Upper Xingu region of Brazil. “Because inside the eye there is a soul, so the tobacco takes the soul through the smoke to the other side - and that’s where the knowledge appears.”

Traditionally, tobacco is smoked, chewed, or made into a liquid, but not inhaled like western cigarettes. “Tobacco is something that is supposed to be used only in the mouth,” says Papá, explaining the traditional way of communing with tobacco, which is used as a “moment of healing” in gatherings. “We only taste it and receive information. We don’t put it in our lungs.”

In many languages, poison and medicine are the same words, often only the dosage and intention separating the two. “The spirits can absorb the energy of tobacco only if there is human intent to give it to them,” writes Jeremy Narby in his book, Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco and the Pursuit of Knowledge. “As such, if tobacco is grown and processed and offered with the intent of addicting people and making money, it will carry that intent as well.”

But it’s not just tobacco. The marginalising and extraction of plants, especially those with psychoactive components like coca leaves and cannabis, should be replaced with study and respect, learning to relate to them, explains Cristine. Or, as Ailton put it, these master plants have the ability to “move us away from our rationality and our control”.

If we look at the history of cannabis in the west, especially in the US, it’s easy to see how fear-mongering and its criminalisation through “the war on drugs” is intrinsically linked to racial discrimination, incarceration, violence and the deterioration of communities. Writer Alex Halperin notes that the term “marijuana”, which has Mexican-Spanish etymological roots, has been widely criticised for its historic use by xenophobes of the prohibition-era to emphasise its “foreignness to white Americans”. It is no coincidence that even today, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people in the US are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for cannabis possession.

Now the US and other western governments are acknowledging the value of the plant, which many Indigenous communities have known of for thousands of years, leading to its legalisation in numerous countries over the last two decades. Apart from financial benefits, one of the main reasons for this is because of its healing qualities. In the UK, cannabis was legalised for medical use in 2018, including as a medicine for children with epilepsy.

Using plants as a teacher isn’t common practice in Europe anymore, but on our guided walks with OmVed gardeners Randa Toko, Tej Rawal and Vicky Chown, we learn about mugwort’s use as an ancient pagan herb for fumigation and its connection to the dream world. Mugwort’s name - Artemisia vulgaris - comes from the ancient Greek goddess Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, wild animals, and the protector of young women, children, and the forest. We meander down the paths - some lined with small strawberries or wild carrot flowers - and through the circular vegetable beds. The gardeners speak with care and a mastery of the flora and fauna surrounding us, showing us slug repellents that are kind to both animals and the soil, and how they have documented the changes in the garden over the last year. There is also a bounty of garden sage, which grows in abundance in the UK, and has been a healing plant throughout the middle ages. Its name Salvia officinalis comes from the Latin salvare, meaning to save. What could we learn from the plants growing in our own soil, how do we listen to their wisdom and what could they teach us if we studied them?

If we are to learn to heal, we have to be willing to lean into our own ancestral knowledge, even if it’s painful. As Cristine says: “The history of mankind is a very hurtful one.” Being in community with the more-than-human world, to access knowledge from the plants surrounding us, is a form of healing and nurturing.

“When we absorb medicinal plants, we are invited to join a different kind of existence,” says Ailton. “Everything we absorbed also absorbs us, and I believe that’s applied to everything in the world. That’s why our choices are so important.”