A Druid's Handbook to the Spiritual Power of Plants: Spagyrics in Magical and Sexual Rituals - Jon G. Hughes 2014

Knowing and Identifying Plants
Assessing the Natural Resources

Knowing the qualities of the energies and attributes of the plants you use is essential. Even more fundamental to any work you may wish to do with plants is having the knowledge and ability to distinguish between one species and another and to identify the plant you need growing in its natural habitat.

Plant species identification is beyond our scope here, but there are many books on this subject. There is a wealth of field guides that will provide you with photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of local plants, the habitat in which they are most likely to be found, and the time of year they appear. Just arm yourself with one or two of these books and venture out into the area where you suspect you’ll find the plants you need. With a little practice and experience, you will soon be able to identify those plants and recognize the other species surrounding them that may affect their energies and attributes.

Very often local bookstores and libraries have specialized books on the plant species that grow in your particular area. This can make the job of identifying plants much easier, by eliminating most of the species that are not found locally.

One of the first things you encounter as you read through any book of plants is the often confusing system of nomenclature. Most plants were named centuries before the official Latin names that were introduced by Linnaeus in 1735 were adopted. Many of these original names refer to the general appearance of the plant, some form of symbolism associated with it, or the use to which the plant was most often applied.

The difficulty was—and still is—that many of these old names had some form of significance that varied from place to place. It would not be uncommon, therefore, to see exactly the same plant referred to by a number of different names depending on where you were at the time. In order to eliminate this confusion, Linnaeus devised a system of categorizing plants using the common academic language of the time: Latin.

Each plant had a binomial categorization—a family or surname (genus) and a first name (species). The plant’s family name (genus) is usually of ancient Greek, Persian, or Latin origin. The genus is always a noun, and, due to its antiquity, it is often impossible to “translate” into modern English.

The species name of the plant may have been created from a number of sources. Sometime it indicates the plant’s country of origin, other times the plant’s natural habitat, its color, or its fragrance, or even on occasion the discoverer’s name. One very interesting genus is officinalis, which indicates the plant’s use as an ancient herbal medicine.

In Welsh Druidic lore, plants are identified by their ancient local names, as Welsh tradition predates the Latin classifications by centuries. Like many names in the Welsh language (ancient and modern), those of plants are usually descriptive, saying something about a plant’s appearance, natural location, or use. For example, the Welsh poppy (Meconopsis cambrica) is known in the Welsh tradition as llysiau cwsg (the herb of sleep).

To ease the reader’s understanding and to ensure concordance with botanical publications throughout the world, whenever plants are mentioned in this text and the accompanying tables they are referred to by their common name (Welsh poppy), their Latin name (Meconopsis cambrica), and their Welsh or Irish traditional name, together with the literal translation where possible (llysiau cwsg, the herb of sleep). In this way the reader may refer to the plant’s Latin name to confirm the identity of the plant even if the local common names differ from the ones given.

Now, armed with your botanical guide and your knowledge of the names of plants, you should be in a position to venture forth and begin your work in seeking the plants you require. Remember, though, that in most cases we shall not be harvesting the entire plant, nor will we be haphazardly harvesting plants at just any time in their life cycle. Thus, our next step is to gain an understanding of the physical structure and life cycle of the plants we will be using. We shall, from this point on, focus on the two types of plants most commonly used in the Welsh Druidic tradition of plant lore—that is, the flower and the tree.

While other traditions rely on herbal remedies, Druidic plant lore employs mostly flowers (mainly from flowering herbs) and trees. Druidic lore uses most of the herbs used by other traditions, but it distinguishes itself by using only the flower of the herb as opposed to other herbal traditions, which use the entire herb but rarely the flower. And even when we do use other parts of herbs, berries, and nuts, for example, they are treated as flowers or trees during the complex refinement. This further emphasizes the Druidic significance of these two groups of plant.

Let us now explore the flower and the tree.