The magic of plants: remembering the living intelligence that supports us

There is a deep ancient remembering that happens when we slow down, tune in and listen enough to connect with a plant.

Not as an extract, a capsule, or an isolated compound but as a living being rooted in soil, shaped by sunlight, rainfall, seasons, and stars. Long before medicine became clinical and compartmentalised, healing was relational and rooted in observation, reverence, and connection, plants were not “used”; they were listened to.

Across cultures and millennia, plants have been understood as teachers, allies, and intermediaries between the human body and the greater intelligence of nature. To work with plants was to engage with a living language one spoken through form, flavour, rhythm, and celestial correspondence. Healing was never just biochemical, it was energetic, symbolic, and deeply ecological.

In returning to this way of seeing, we do not reject modern science. Rather, we widen the lens through which healing is understood.

Plants as Living Intelligence

Every plant carries a unique intelligence shaped by its environment. A plant rooted in harsh alpine terrain expresses resilience and mineral density. A plant that thrives in damp, shadowed forests often carries antimicrobial or protective qualities. These are not coincidences they are adaptive expressions of life responding to its conditions.

Traditional herbal systems observed these patterns intimately. The shape of leaves, the colour of flowers, the time of flowering, the taste of a root each characteristic was seen as a form of communication. This is often referred to as the “doctrine of signatures,” but more accurately, it was an early language of pattern recognition and relationship.

Plants do not heal us by force they invite the body back into coherence and balance. Their actions are often regulatory rather than suppressive, nudging physiological systems toward balance rather than overriding them. This is one reason whole-plant medicine has endured across cultures it works with the body’s innate intelligence rather than against it.

But beyond chemistry lies something subtler.

Many traditional cultures understood plants to possess spirit. Not in a metaphorical sense, but as a vital animating essence. To work with a plant required presence, respect, and intention and healing emerged through relationship, not extraction.

The Language of Plants

Plants speak and express themselves, possessing their own intricate intelligent language.

They communicate through bitterness that stimulates digestion, through aromatic oils that open breath and awareness, through mucilage that soothes irritation and inflammation. They speak through timing appearing when needed, growing where imbalance exists, often thriving in disturbed soil.

Modern research is now confirming what ancient traditions long understood: plants communicate not only with humans, but with each other. Through chemical signalling, root networks, and fungal mycelium, forests behave as interconnected systems rather than isolated organisms.

This mirrors how traditional medicine viewed the human body not as separate organs, but as an integrated whole influenced by environment, emotion, season, and cosmos.

To “connect in” with plants is not mystical escapism, it is a practice of deep listeningm asking us to slow down, observe, and participate rather than dominate.

Astrology and the Ancient Art of Medicine

In ancient traditions, astrology was not superstition it was actually a diagnostic and therapeutic framework.

To be a physician was to understand the movements of the heavens and their influence on earthly life. The macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (the human body) were reflections of one another and what occurred in the sky was mirrored in physiology, psychology, and pathology.

This worldview shaped medical systems across Ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, India, and medieval Europe. Timing treatments according to planetary hours, lunar phases, and seasonal cycles was considered essential. Certain organs were associated with planets and certain plants were governed by celestial forces.

Illness was not random, it was a sign of disharmony within a greater rhythm.

Astrology provided a map for understanding constitution, temperament, vulnerability, and healing potential. It allowed physicians to personalise medicine long before the term “individualised care” existed.

Nicholas Culpeper and the Stars Beneath Our Feet

One of the most well-known champions of astrological herbalism was Nicholas Culpeper, a 17th-century English physician, herbalist, and astrologer (often mistakenly dated earlier). Culpeper believed that separating medicine from astrology rendered it incomplete.

His work The English Physician (a great book for those who are interested in his work) made herbal medicine accessible to the people at a time when medical knowledge was tightly controlled. More importantly, it restored the idea that plants, planets, and people are inseparable.

Culpeper classified herbs according to their planetary rulerships. Mars-ruled plants were often stimulating, warming, and circulatory. Venusian plants tended toward moistening, soothing, and reproductive tissues. Saturnine herbs were grounding, astringent, and slow-acting.

This system was not arbitrary, it was based on observed effects, energetic qualities, and pattern resonance and Culpeper understood that a plant growing under the influence of certain celestial forces would express those qualities in the body.

For him, healing was about restoring harmony not just symptom relief and to this day, his work lives on with impressively correct comparisons to modern day medicinal plants.

Everything Is Connected

At the heart of traditional plant medicine lies a simple truth - nothing exists in isolation.

The health of the soil affects the health of plants. The health of plants affects the health of humans. Our internal rhythms are influenced by light, darkness, season, and lunar cycles. Disconnection from nature, from food, from rhythm creates imbalance.

Plants remind us how to belong again.

They anchor us to place and teach patience through slow growth and cyclical return. They demonstrate resilience without aggression and show us how to respond to stress by adapting, not collapsing.

When we engage with plants consciously whether through herbal medicine, gardening, or ritual we participate in a reciprocal relationship. Healing flows both ways.

Remembering What We Forgot

Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary things, yet something has been lost in the process, reverence.

Plants have been reduced to “active constituents.” Astrology has been dismissed as irrelevant and the body has been fragmented into systems and specialties. While this has brought precision, it has also brought disconnection.

The resurgence of interest in herbalism, ethnobotany, and traditional medicine reflects a collective longing to remember what once felt natural and thats not to abandon science, but to integrate wisdom.

True healing does not occur solely at the molecular level, it happens when the nervous system feels safe, when the body feels seen, when the individual feels part of something larger.

Plants offer this remembrance effortlessly.

Re-Entering Relationship With the Green World

To work with plants in a meaningful way does not require elaborate rituals or ancient texts. It just begins with attention.

Noticing what grows around you.
Observing seasonal changes.
Learning the taste, smell, and texture of plants.
Understanding when to harvest, when to rest, when to wait.

When we approach plants with humility rather than control, they respond. Not because they “serve” us, but because relationship itself is healing.

The magic of plants is revealed when we remember how to listen.

In reconnecting with plants, we reconnect with ourselves, with the earth beneath our feet, and with the stars that have guided healers for thousands of years.

And perhaps, in doing so, we begin to heal not just bodies but our relationship with life itself. After all we are nature.