The Witching Herbs: The Secret Life of Perennials

The Witching Herbs: The Secret Life of Perennials March 6, 2017

Annuals germinate, grow, flower, and produce seeds in the space of a single season; biennials take two years to accomplish that work, although it’s not uncommon for them to live longer if they’re in a happy situation. Perennials, on the other hand, can live for much longer. They thus have much more of an underground life than annuals and biennials. Furthermore, perennials know their way around under the ground in ways that the other two types of plants do not comprehend.

Perennials use various means during their time beneath the soil to strengthen themselves, build reserves for future use, and propagate. They can send white stems complete with vestigial white leaves through the soil to colonize new areas. Because they’re underground, we think of these structures as roots and call them rhizomes and stolons. They also create underground storage tanks that we humans often like to eat (tubers). And they can pierce the underworld with a spear-like tap root, rather than traveling through the ground horizontally with a rhizome or stolon.

Flowers from the editor's yard.
Flowers from the editor’s yard.

Tap roots often have arms and legs, like the mandrake. These limbs seem to exist, not only to charm us but also so that, when the root is pulled up, some will break off and remain in the ground to produce clones of the plant. It seems that this type of reproduction, which involves traveling, takes much less plant energy than reproduction through seeds. It makes sense, then, that the slow, Saturnian perennial makes use of low-energy reproductive strategies like this.

What does it mean for us that perennials do not rely on making seeds to reproduce as much as annuals and biennials do? Making seeds is a risky business involving a lot of trust on the part of the plant—for instance, the trust that pollinators will appear. Perennials don’t bother with that kind of trust. They just go ahead and make more of themselves with no outside assistance. If I chose tarot cards to represent the different types of plant life, I would select the sun for annuals, The High Priestess for biennials, and The Hermit for perennials.

What is the tarot Hermit looking for? Not buddies, not a crowd, but something that will further his own enlightenment, an expansion of his consciousness. I see this as the perennial’s quest as well, with the same sort of self-reliance and lack of interest in the great, crowded world of variety. The perennial has Hermit business below the ground: digging, burrowing, traveling in the night of the underworld, going where the sun and even The High Priestess cannot or will not go. Perhaps part of the reason why so many witching herbs are perennials is because witches sense this plant group’s Hermit nature.

Reproducing through seeds is a gamble, but has the advantage of allowing for expression of the complete cache of genes that the plant carries. It favors adaptation, variation, and risk-taking. Annual plants generally make good charms for gambling or for protection in urban environments, since they have mastered these. That doesn’t generally happen with the vegetative reproduction of perennials. Instead, what you see is what you get. They reproduce themselves, not as a motley crowd, but as individual duplicates.

The editor's rose bush.
The editor’s rose bush.

“Making more me all the time” may sound kind of selfish, but perennials break down the very concept of the unique individual. Consider: What happens to a plant’s self when it is divided, as may happen to a yarrow plant in its third year? You can dig up the crown, rudely split it apart with garden forks or even rip it apart with your hands, and plant the two different clumps in two parts of your garden or in two different hemispheres. They will grow. But are they still the same individual? Do you have one individual in two different places? Or do the two clumps, by being separated, somehow become two different individuals? Personally, I wonder if plants produced this way—by dividing the crown, or breaking arms off a tap root, or even rooting a cutting—have a consciousness that extends to all the parts of itself, no matter where they may be. In effect, do all the clones share one mind or a collective soul?

We are not advanced enough in our communication with plants to know this, one way or the other. But it may be worth trying to make use of the possibility in magical practice. For instance, if a group of magic practitioners separated by distance encouraged vegetative reproduction in a single plant and then shared the clones, could they amplify the power of the plant through long-distance communication if they worked with it at specified times?

The offspring of plants that reproduce through seeds are each as unique as any mammal’s offspring. Perennials can also reproduce through seeds, but seem not to favor it. Nor do they engage in the same level of risk-taking or trust as annuals and biennials, although they do not reject it completely. After all, perennials build parts of themselves that they know full well may be broken off and eaten, or lost to disease or killed through lack of water or nutrients. They gamble that, even if some part of them is broken away, that part will continue to grow, which permits the experience of a different part of the world, a different perspective on their environment.

Areas prone to fires, desert droughts, or harsh winters—environments that would kill an annual or a biennial—are usually not problematic for perennials, as their vibrant underground life seems to make them much stronger. Their toughness is also demonstrated by how much more difficult it is to germinate a perennial seed than that of an annual or biennial.

Sometimes, perennial seeds can’t germinate until the seed has gone through some weathering that leaches out germination inhibitors—snowmelt, for instance—or that scratches entries for water into a very tough shell—sandstorms, or fluctuations of heat and cold, or even the acid and grit of a bird’s gut. This gives an immature embryo time to mature. A number of perennials actually do produce seeds with such embryos. But it’s almost as if the perennial’s vegetative reproduction has caused them to lose interest in reproducing sexually. Some perennials don’t even bother with an embryo in the seed at all, so that the seeds can never germinate. Some annual seeds can literally be tossed on the ground and they will germinate, but I am aware of no perennial seeds that will do this. Perennials are too involved with the underworld and with their connection to it to put much energy into the sexual world. What this means for a witch is that perennials ought to be first choice when working with the underworld.

Book C over

Plants are as influenced by memory as animals. Although we don’t know what is going on in the mind of a plant, we can see the results of memory in their form. An annual’s form is, for the most part, determined by the present—how much rain or sun they experience or the type of soil they are planted in. They are little influenced by the past, except in terms of the health of the seed itself—what has gone into forming it. Perennials, however, embody their past to the point that it trumps the present. For instance, if the previous year was very dry, a perennial will show the effect of that lack of water, regardless of how much water it receives this year. This is in keeping with their strong connection to the underworld. While it’s true that the ancient Greeks considered that those who wandered the shores of the river Styx had lost their memory (through the help of henbane, incidentally), memory is crucial when it comes to the underworld. After all, when we try to connect with that place, it is often because of our memory of someone whose shade is there. It is as if memory were the current that allows us to plug into the underworld.

When I look at the Hermit tarot card, I see a figure who holds memory and who looks into the past (generally the Hermit is portrayed facing left, where the past is located in our culture). For me, this fits well with the nature of perennials. This means that, if you are working on a spell that is dependent on memory, perennials can be excellent for sharpening memorization skills. They remind us; they reveal secrets of the past; they bring the past into the present— exactly as they return from the underworld every spring, remembering the previous year.

Biennials usually become taller in their second year, but don’t extend outward very much. Perennials, on the other hand, spread. Each year, they claim more ground and make more of everything that is them: leaves, stalks, flowers, fruits, roots. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the Swedish botanist who created the Latin binomial (two-name) system still generally used for plants (and animals), considered that perennials’ tendency to take up more and more space was a reflection of a fundamentally Jupiter energy, as Jupiter is considered expansive and is characterized as “standing out” from others—taller, brighter, bigger, stronger. Although he was a scientist, Linnaeus clearly had no trouble recognizing planetary influences.

The more aggressive perennials are especially beneficial for spell-work meant to create lots of something—in particular, duplicates, perhaps even as many as twenty. Because of their ability to travel underground and establish themselves in new places, they are also beneficial for magic involving attack, sabotage, or spying. Moon energy also strongly affects perennials. In the second half of the year, when the Full Moon appears higher in the sky and the sun lower, perennials begin establishing the buds that will be the basis of their growth the next season. By the time the moon is at its height, during the Winter solstice, perennials are finished bud-building and are in their deepest dormancy.

Perennials start to come back to life, back to the upper world, after the Winter solstice. It’s perfectly fine to cold stratify perennial seeds beginning in fall, but I always wait until late December to start stratifying them. I find that I get better germination if I go with the plant’s clear desire to stay dormant as the moon ascends. Perennials’ inherent connection to the moon means that Moon-ruled perennials are especially powerful for work with lunar energies. You get a sort of “double helping” of Moon with perennials that you do not get with annuals or biennials that are Moon-ruled.

More stuff from the editor.
More stuff from the editor.

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Adapted, and reprinted with permission from Weiser Books an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, THE WITCHING HERBS by Harold Roth is available wherever books and ebooks are sold or directly from the publisher at Red Wheel Weiser or 800-423-7087.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harold Roth is among the foremost authorities on plants within the modern occult community. For the past 15 years, he has owned and operated Alchemy Works, an online store focused on herb magic, where he crafts and sells incense, potions, and magical oils. The Witching Herbs has been in the works for a decade and is eagerly anticipated. Visit him at www.haroldroth.com


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