01/12/2025
When I am sad, or feeling lost, it is not people I turn too, but my garden, or any type of nature. But my garden most of all....... it is something, somewhere, that I feel so much a part of. I sense deeply how we are intricately woven together. And for me that is healing.
Sometimes I think my garden has been healing me long before I ever truly understood what healing even was. Even though I have been involved with healing paractices for much of my life, most of the important lessons I have gained on life and living have come from observing my garden and the life that inhabits it.
My most favorite thing to do is to get up before the sun rises in the morning and hear the birds sing the world into being. The sound is quite breathtaking and unbelievable. It seems all the birds are gathered in the same spots. I never knew how many birds there were until I heard them all at once at dawn. I read somewhere once, that when the birds sing at dawn they signal plants to open their somatic cells which are responsible for almost everything a plant does. These cells are how they perform photosynthesis amongst other things.
How amazing is that.
Anyway..... I digress.... back to my mood and how my garden holds me.
This morning, with a heavy heart, I stepped into my garden. And it is not a grand garden, or a huge garden by any means, but I have been lovingly tending and existing within it for many years. The world feels softer there. My breath slows without effort, as if the plants themselves are reminding me that I am allowed to take up space and time. I often stop and just stand among them, looking at the sky, the horizon, feet planted firmly in our Mother, letting the quiet settle over me, and I always feel like I am being held.
There is something sacred about watching a plant or a tree, or an insect, move through its entire life. I love to do a thing I call wildcrafting, I don't know if it is something I was told along the way, or learnt, or if I completely made it up.... but to me it is the art of letting plants be what they want to be. It’s really very simple. It involves letting at least 1 plant of what you grow, or many, completely finish their life cycle and seed amd then spread the seeds where ever they want. And only removing what is left after it has completely died down. I call it wild-crafting because the plants that grow in this way are partly wild. They have chosen where and when to grow and how. And all I do, sometimes, is a little crowd control. I always notice that the plants grown in this way are so much happier and healthier than the ones I plant.
So you will see from the pictures I have posted that my gardening is a little bit of something everywhere, because of wild-crafting. The beetroot happily grows with the nettle - both like a bit of shade. The cleavers is happy growing under the shade of the kumera and cucumber plants and the rhubarb, skullcap, lemon balm and motherwort seem to love being together. And my self-seeded calendula is everywhere! The plants that grow of their own choosing are always stronger, richer in colour, fuller in spirit. They carry a kind of wisdom I can feel in my hands when I touch them. It feels like meeting something ancient that maybe I once knew, but forgot. Wild plants have strong power and they give that in their medicine.
When I am in my garden, sometimes I realise how much I am like my plants. I grew up believing I had to twist myself into shapes that pleased others in order to be ok. I thought my worth depended on how well I fit into lines someone else had drawn. But when I am amongst my garden, especially when I see how healthy the wildish plants are, I see a reflection of what it means to live uncontained. Some of the most powerful healing I have known has come from watching a plant decide for itself where it belongs, and how it should be. Every time I honour that choice for my plants, I feel a little more permission to honour that choice for myself.
Nature does not hurry. Nothing in the garden apologises for needing cycles of rest or bursts of growth or moments of looking a bit ragged while shedding the old. The plants do not question their timing and they do not compare themselves to each other. The nettle does not envy the rose. The rose does not wish to be the lemon balm. These simple truths have taught me more about boundaries and being me than any book ever could. I learned that I am allowed to say no. I am allowed to protect the ground I grow in. I am allowed to flourish in my own season. I am allowed to look scraggly, especially while healing. I am allowed to lie on the couch and watch movies with the curtains drawn and not feel bad about it, not feel lazy, not feel "unproductive ". And at the same time I am allowed to be amazing and unforgettable, no apologies needed!
Sometimes people ask why I spend so much time in my garden. I never know how to explain that for me it is the only place where the world feels safe enough for me to breathe. When I am overwhelmed, or when the old echoes of who I used to be come back and pull at me, I go to my garden. I dig my hands into the soil that remembers every step I have taken on my way back to myself. The earth does not judge the person I was. It only welcomes the person I am becoming.
I never wear gloves in my garden, I don't mind having dirty nails. I keep them short for exactly this reason. I also read somewhere long ago that when you put your hands in the dirt you drop skin cells and the plants uptake those cells and grow in ways that will benefit you and your needs. See. We were made to be together. If I love and give them attention, they give it straight back to me. In so many ways. And also, apparently, the soil has chemicals in it that when absorbed into the skin help alleviate sadness. These are all the reasons why I go to my garden.
I have, many years ago done Shamanic training and I still love the term I learnt back then “Mitákuye Oyás’in” (pronounced mee-TAH-koo-yay oh-YAH-seen).
It’s a sacred phrase from the Lakota (Sioux) language, meaning “all my relations” or “we are all related.” It expresses the understanding that:
every plant
every animal
every human
every stone
every river
every ancestor
every star
…is part of one interconnected family.
It’s not just a greeting or a blessing. It’s a worldview. A way of remembering that nothing exists in isolation. Everything alive or once alive shares a thread in the same web.
I see my plants like this. They are my green relations. Plants have a way of teaching without speaking. They show you resilience by simply existing. They show you balance by leaning toward the light and rooting into darkness at the same time. They show you how to stay when the wind rises.
What gardens give us is not just beauty. They give us a mirror. They show us what it looks like to grow honestly and wholly. They remind us that rest is sacred and cycles are necessary. They teach us to listen, to wait, to trust ourselves. And if we let them, they show us that we are not here to be ornamental. We are here to be alive.
And in that aliveness, in that slow returning to ourselves, we find the kind of healing that lasts.
Love Kim 🩷🌸🩷
Oh P.S. I almost forgot! I saw a study recently that had plants hooked up to ecg machines (or something) and they were measuring the reactions plants have when the person returns home, and they literally jump for joy. Apparently a bigger reaction than a dog has! And the study included your house plants. In the study your plants knew when you were over a kilometer from your house that you were coming home. All I can say is.... Your plants love you!!!!
