I have felt a natural affinity with trees since I was a very young child and my grandmother taught me to hug them and see how it felt. Whenever I see a tree, I can feel out something of its personality by staring at it for a while. However, I found that older trees were much easier for this, and hardest of all were regular plants/ flowers, which kind of left me cold. I read this unglamorous-looking book to try and get some insight into how to commune better with plants.
The basic idea underlying it is that plant "devas"- like plant spirits, angels, faeries, whatever you'd like to call them- can be communicated to via the plants they live in- and all you really need to do is sit and listen (so buying up a load of fancy incense etc turned out to be a bit of a waste of money). The original founders of the Findhorn Garden claimed that the plant devas gave them very specific and often unorthodox gardening advice that led to a bountiful garden of enormous fruit, vegetables and flowers to grow on a previously desolate and windswept patch of sand on the Northern coast of Scotland.
The sweetpea deva was the first in the Garden to make contact, apparently!
I was excited to be visiting maybe the most appropriate site in the world to be at Lunar Lammas. I visited the gardens during the day and crashed in one of the village hippie's spare rooms in their eco-home that night. Having read the book, I did get a little thrill out of seeing the original caravan in which the founders lived.
Disappointingly, the Findhorn Garden feels very commercial now. The guy in the ticket office more or less openly sneered at the idea of "pixies" existing in the garden, which sort of annoyed me. Why work there if you're just going to scoff at what it is? Despite the devas having apparently told the founders not to eat meat, meat was available to buy from the cafes onsite. Incredibly, I also struggled to find somewhere that had vegan milk for a coffee. It all just struck me as a bit of a betrayal and I most certainly didn't see or sense the presence of anything supernatural. It was just a pleasant garden on a nice day.
If anything, I felt that whatever magic might have happened there, was over, at least for now. It's still an interesting place to drop into if you're passing. The most exciting thing for me was discovering that I could feel part of one of the ley-lines running through the site. I don't know why I could only sense it in one spot, but there it was, fizzy energy exciting my nervous system from the soles of my feet upwards when I stood on a certain spot. This was very exciting to me as I've never felt this when visiting places like Stonehenge or Glastonbury Tor.
A dead leaf, teeming with life.
What I learned at the Findhorn Garden- other than the ley-line thing- came to me while I was meditating in the garden. I'd been over-complicating things with research, getting props together for a ritual to contact Pan, and travelling all the way to the North of Scotland to see a few flowers. Plants are everywhere. It's not a question of dragging your physical body to a special spot in order to appreciate them, it's learning to feel what they are on a deep level, which is a skill that travels with you.
