Plants heal

Many cultures believe that every plant is considered useful and with its own beneficial properties. While some would say that many plants contain healing qualities, others believe they may only be considered useful in gardens as "ornamental plants".

The value and energy of each can depend on who you talk with concerning plant origins, uses and powers. The mystic or herbalist may explain the importance of all plant life and healing ability. For example, plants like spearmint might relieve your cold symptoms, a physical ailment, while the supposed "ornamental" rose garden you lovingly care for each day helps you relax each evening as you admire its unique beauty and scent. There are healing qualities by plants in all of our senses, many of which we may not even know about or are no longer attuned to understanding.

While scientific advances have culminated its own strength in society, the supernatural concepts that historically were applied to plants were diminished with the dawning of pharmacology and allopathic medicine. With the onset of such medicine, powerful components of plants have been extracted or isolated, removing it from its original healing modality. While a family may have grown its own plants for its own use when first coming to settle in America, as an internal or external source of healing energy (or both!), much has been lost with the current gains in newer medicinal practices.

Careful review of history and how traditional western medicine like anatomy, physiology, chemistry and botany were derived can be traced back to herbs and plants tended and categorized by the Greeks and Romans. Before the Dark Ages, they gained knowledge of herbs and plants from their experiences, travels and encounters with the Chinese, Egyptians, and Arab nations. Unfortunately, during the Dark Ages in Europe, much information regarding plants was lost. Thankfully, during this time, herbalism continued in other places and trickeled back to Europe during the Crusades.

Even as the United States was developing in the seventeenth century, it was common belief that all plants had healing benefits. This included healing of the body and the mind. Was there a better psychic connection with plants in the past? Have we turned our backs on its healing energy of our psyches? Has the mystical side of plants diminished and been replaced by manufactured drugs in a clinical setting? I'd like to think we still believe in the magic of plants and their healing abilities. For example, how magical is it to see a seed you planted in soil grow and sprout into a seedling, transform into a small sapling and one day, become a large tree in your backyard that provides shade from the summer sun? Does the tree have its own healing quality besides the scientific explanations of providing us with oxygen and shelter from the summer sun?

Components of plants are being isolated and extracted into medicine for treatment based on scientific facts. Usually, we never see, touch, or smell these plants. We don't visit these plants in the wild or tend to them each day. While I am not disagreeing with the healing component of these plants being ingested in pill, lotion or potion form, I recognize that with powerful drugs and treatments, side effects evolve. Some of which are in our own bodies...others which manifest in our world...through scarcity of treatment modalities, overprocessing of a plant making land surrounding it infertile, to rampant consumption and waste without necessity.

When you walk in a park or through your own garden, I encourage you to reflect on your own family history and any ailments that may have been treated by your grandmother, grandfather or their mothers and fathers. Families learned the healing benefits of plants as they tended their own over the years. Treatments derived long ago and passed down from generation to generation have been lost as farmers' children decide to pursue another field of work. Many crops and foods are now mass-produced through methods of science and machines.

Information from our ancestors and plants that they grew in their own fields or outside their kitchen doors is most likely a memory as we reside in suburbia with our manicured grass lawns. As the organic movement for farming and the increase in homeopathic medicine and natural healing "comes back" or as some say, evolves, I encourage you to look back at the past, especially your own, so you can harness the healing importance from your own history and that of the plants in your life and those of your ancestors.