The Oak and the Christmas Rose

Down at the furthest corner of our land, beneath a rocky outcrop that juts over the wooded creek below, a lone oak grows. I don’t know how old it is. It is small, as though stunted by the weather and the rocks, anchored precariously into the slope and split in two at its base, its twin trunks wrapped with ivy as thick as my wrist, and it heaves bravely against the wind. But it must have seen many storms.

The oak tells a story. Trees have a presence, you know, if you quiet your own and feel for it. They breathe, and hum with stories of howling winds and of salty seas carried in on raindrops and feathered wings. They tell of earth and decay and rebirth and the old ones hold an ancient wisdom, an earth magic that pours up through their roots from deep below. Connected by an underground hyphal network, they share their stories through the soil and the forest reverberates with the songs of a thousand souls.

It is some years ago now, at plant medicine school, where I trained on an apprenticeship with herbalist Nikki Darrell, where I learned to listen to plants. I was sceptical. Of course you can feel the presence of trees, they are big and old and take up space, and I am an ole tree-huggin’ hippie, but listen to their stories? I probably rolled my eyes and wondered for a moment what I was doing with my life. I was there to learn the science and application of herbal medicine, not the kind of woowoo that turns people off it.

We were asked to go into the herbalist’s garden, find a plant that we were unfamiliar with, and sit with it. We could write or draw whatever came to us, this in the context of intuiting the plant’s medicinal or energetic properties, something like the herbalists of old, we were told, might have done before modern extraction and testing methods. Or perhaps something like how animals will sense and self medicate when allowed to browse a variety of herbs. I was quite sure animals can smell the volatile chemicals in herbs and some physiological drive informs them what to eat, and I wanted hard science. But I decided I was here for the experience and followed the other students out into the garden and sat down under a tree with an open mind and an hellebore, the Christmas Rose, a shy little woodland plant with leafy, nodding flowers in camouflage colours that I was vaguely familiar with as a gardener but knew nothing of as an herbalist—but surely everything in the herbalist’s garden would have some beneficial use? And I am not sure what happened next. As I sat and studied this little plant that hid in the leaf litter in the shade like it didn’t really want to be seen and doodled on my notebook, words began to form in a hissing whisper and I wrote from somewhere deep beneath my consciousness, “stand off, don’t touch!”.

I had no idea then just how toxic hellebore is. I later learned it is a potent source of deadly purgative, cardiac and narcotic chemicals and was traditionally used a poison and associated with dark sorcery and witch’s invisibility and flying ointments, its narcotic properties being absorbed transdermally (through the skin), “don’t touch!”.

That experience opened me up to the field of energetics in plant medicine, and a whole new depth of connection, an immersion, into the community of life. But I still do not understand it.

Plants emit sound waves. We know this because scientists have studied, measured and recorded them. But this is not a sound you can hear. It is a knowing that rises from the depths of your being like a gut feeling or a soul connection, like the intuitive bond between a rider and his horse, a shepherd and her sheep, or empathically sensing the pain or the loss or the heartbreak of someone you love—a child, a sibling, a lover—across miles or oceans. As though connected by an invisible thread that weaves through the fabric of life.

I have a friend who tells me we are old souls, connected through some cosmic, spiritual realm. Perhaps she’s right, I don’t know. We are all made of stardust but my trust is in this earthly, human existence, here and now. To understand the world in physical, tangible reality is not to take away from the magic of that which we do not yet understand but gives us a base of depth and substance from which to bathe in the awe of the unknown.

The human heart has an electromagnetic field that can be felt three feet outside the physical body. All life is animated by a divine spark of electricity. All life pulses with energy, even the land itself. And when I press my palm against the wizened skin of that oak and feel its thrum of life pulsating, it grounds me, it pulls me down into the land and into the tangible here and now—it earths me. And it is here in the resonance of the land that reverberates through the oak and through my soul and in the spark of electricity that dances through my beating heart, where magic lies. Maybe you call it Spirit, or God. I call it Life.

In this thought-provoking piece on the sense of connection to place (specifically to Ireland) in The Women of Ireland Project, Belinda Vigors describes the land of Ireland as having “a particular energy and resonance that you can touch, taste, and feel. ...a felt sense.” What she describes is the spirit of place. The memories and magic of aeons that run through the land in its fissures and forests and emerald green fields. 

Back to the oak. It was suggested to me that I might tear it out. There is a platform of rock below it that would make a solid foundation for a house, and it would indeed be a fine location: a secluded, south facing sun spot on the best part of the land with a view over the wooded valley below and access to water from a nearby spring. But, no. The tree and its creatures already have a home here. This old oak, heavily hung with ivy that feeds the birds and the bees, that I gather for my goats, covered in mosses and lichen and thrumming with life, grows wild, likely from native stock—it is hefted, like the sheep, and it offers acorns for the jays to repopulate the heath, already imbued with the memories, the magic, the spirit of this land.

This land where the valley shrouded in magic and mist meets the hill hewn from shale and Atlantic rain and moulded from the fallen leaves and footprints of millennia. This land has a story; a story of forests and feathers and floods and ferns, of ravagement and rebirth, of the flowing seasons and stoic permanence of earth.

And that is the story the oak tells.

the oak