Creating The Webbd Wheel: Plant Stories
In which we recognize our need for plants ...
When I was sharing oral stories with audiences, some of my favorites were plant myths, legends, and folklore. The Greeks handed down many stories about plants, as did indigenous cultures around the world. I’ve found old plant stories adapted into children’s picture books. Traditional ballads and poetry contain plant stories. Herbalists throughout the ages have recorded plant legend and lore.
Herbs and other plants are closely intermingled with medicine and magic; many flower stories involve the Fair Folk. “Witches” were often older women who grew, gathered, and used plants for everything from murder to healing, as dyes, in cooking and in brewing.
I love herbs, too, and am fascinated by the beliefs and uses for various plants which have been handed down through the centuries and generations. Plants were our first medicines and provided food and drink for humans and our animal companions, as well as tools, shelter, landmarks and indications of wind, weather, water, fertility, and temperature.
As climate change sweeps over our planet, higher temperatures challenge all life. Tension increases between those who continue to see our world as a money-making commodity and those who realize the complex system of life on earth will be destroyed, and us with it, if we continue to manage land, plants, and animals with ignorance and disrespect.
My work is an effort to honor plants and those who love and value them, especially our ancestors, who were observant, curious, and caring enough to record their interactions with plant life in art and language. Recognizing plants as living beings, many traditional tales assign magical human-like creatures as symbiotic with plants, especially trees. Eurydice, for example, was a tree nymph, or dryad, in Greek mythology, and I have maintained that characteristic as I write about her.
In post #33 of The Hanged Man, Mary hears a story about the anemone flower that comes to us from Greek mythology. It’s the first of several plant stories in the series. The Wheel of the Year, of course, honors and marks the cycle of seasons of planting, growth, and harvest, increase and decrease. The Nordic Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, is a giant, three-trunked Ash tree whose roots drink from the magic Well of Urd while its branches support the sky.
Seeds are small packages of regeneration, of hope, of life continuing, and seed-bearers sacred archetypal figures who turn the wheel containing the ever-changing web of life.
You will shortly read a story about the common plant we call plantain. Many people think of it as a weed, but it has a long history of being useful medicinally. Years ago I came across an old story about plantain, and with it the lines below from an anonymous 10th century herbalist, which I always recited when I told the story. Ever since then I have welcomed plantain in my gardens and lawns wherever I am, as it grows on every continent.
And you way broad, Mother of plants
Over you carts creaked
Over you queens rode
Over you brides bridalled
Over you bulls breathed.
All these you withstood
And strongly resisted.
As you also withstand
Venomous and vile things
And all loathly ones
That rove through the land.
(This essay was published with post #33 of The Hanged Man.)