Plant Witchery: Discover the Sacred Language, Wisdom, and Magic of 200 Plants - Juliet Diaz 2020
Becoming a Plant Witch
What is Plant Witchery?
I am a Plant Witch. I’ve always had a profound connection with plants and the Magic that they possess. I first learned of my gift around the age of six. I was in class and my teacher was talking to us about seeds. She proceeded to lift a plant from its vase. She pulled on the roots and I yelled, “Stop it! You’re making her cry.” My teacher gave me a confused look and asked me, “Now how does a plant cry, Juliet? I’m not hurting it; I’m simply showing you its roots.” I said, “Don’t you see her smoke? Don’t you hear her? She doesn’t like you pulling at her hair.” I used to call the tops of plants “hair,” and I see smoke coming off plants when they are being harmed—for instance, if they are infected with pests, when grass is mowed, when people cut flowers or pull them from the ground. I’ve come to realize it’s a scent plants release to alert other plants of danger. I smell it, but I also see a mist of energy that comes out of them. My teacher put the plant back down and took me out of the class to speak to me. She told me that if I kept making up stories the other children would make fun of me and she didn’t want that to happen. I obeyed, and for a long time never spoke to anyone but my family about my adventures with plants and the stories they told me.
The thing is, I knew what I saw and felt was real. This knowledge, this Magic, runs in my blood, and has been true of every generation of my family, from my mother to my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and onward. It is a part of my heritage. My ancestors, the Taíno people of the Caribbean, were known for being communicators with plants. Indigenous people in general are in tune with nature, but the level reached by the Taíno is unusual—so much so that healers from other tribes would come to learn from them. My ancestors had the gift of communicating with plants—this helped them understand which plants, herbs, and roots to use for healing and Magical purposes. This gift was passed down to me. Today, I am known as the plant whisperer in my community.
But despite what I knew and believed, I had a really rough childhood. Part of that was because I could see things that other children couldn’t, and I wasn’t able to relate to other children or to communicate with them—and they saw me as “other.”
I was also going through physical and emotional abuse. We lived in public housing, and there were always fights—always some kind of crime going on. My father, a drug dealer, was murdered when I was five years old. For most of my childhood, I lived in fear.
So I retreated. My siblings and I weren’t allowed to go to friends’ houses after school—I didn’t have any friends, anyway, being that weird girl who talked to plants—and I was afraid to hang out around our apartment building. Honestly, the only time my siblings and I would go outside and play was when it rained or stormed. My mother believes in the Magic of a storm, and the good cleansing of the rain. She always sent us outside to play and dance in heavy rainfalls and among the huge puddles that accumulated at the bottom of a hill where we lived.
Most days, I went to the only place I could—to the cemetery nearby. That was my playground, and it was beautiful. There was a huge forest, trees, flowers . . . and tombstones. I often saw ghosts as a child (and still do) but rarely there. I didn’t feel haunted there. The cemetery was the most peaceful place I knew.
Like many children with my kinds of gifts, I had imaginary friends—but for me, they were the plants I found in nature or in pots in our apartment. I was always having conversations with them. I thought these exchanges were all in my head, but as I grew older I realized it wasn’t my imagination: that those conversations were real, and those friends had been taking care of me for years. Those plants and trees saved me. That cemetery, filled with so much natural life, was my mystical safe space, a healing retreat.
I remember hearing plants, as they spoke to me so clearly. For instance, I remember the first time I smelled cut grass. It was a spring day, and I was about six years old, hanging around the cemetery as I often did. As the groundskeeper rode around in his mower with its big spinning blades, leaving behind shreds of cut grass, I was struck by an awful numbness that left me unable to move or speak. Time slowed down, and the sharp sounds of the blades echoed through the air. The pieces of grass seemed to float, falling slowly onto the ground, and when the smell of the cut grass reached my flesh, all I could feel was STOP!
I ran toward the groundskeeper as fast as my little legs could take me. Halfway there I had to stop to vomit, gasping for air and trembling with fear. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I knew he needed to stop, I knew he was hurting the grass. When I finally reached him, he yelled, “What the hell, have you lost your mind?” I screamed back, “Stop, you’re hurting the grass!” He was so confused, but he definitely didn’t want to get into a conversation with a crazy child, dirty and running around a cemetery alone. He ignored me and kept mowing.
I felt hopeless. I dropped to my knees and held on to the dead pieces of grass in my little hands, sobbing, screaming in agony. I cried myself to sleep that night, confused about life, humans, and who I was and why no one would listen to me. As I grew older, the plants and tree elders taught me that they alert others of danger, and when all living beings are truly connected, they each feel each other’s pain, love, happiness, and, yes, they feel the warnings as well. I had been feeling the warning the grass was sending out to others. To this day, I refuse to cut my grass or pluck a flower from the Earth, as I can still hear them screaming. If someone I dated brought me flowers, I knew we weren’t meant to be!
Of course, now I know that some flowers, like roses, need to be cut, and oftentimes plants need to be pruned in order to keep growing and remain healthy, but I listen to them for their needs and never harm them.