Yesterday, I harvested flowering herbs. It has been an interesting season of experimenting with “do I cut? Or, do I leave it all for the bees?”
Well, after some months of observing the health of the plants post flowering, I decided to harvest
Yarrow
Rosemary
Mountain Mint
Lavender
…to sustain the overall bounty and health of the plant as we move through the summer.
What I observed over the last several months, is nothing out of the ordinary for flowers or flowering herbs. And, really, it’s not unusual for humans to experience this either.
Everything in nature is about information & resource management.
In the winter, perennial herbs go dormant, focusing all of their energy on keeping the roots in an energy low neutral state. There’s no growth, but there’s lots of potential energy stored. Let’s liken this to a “freeze state”
In the spring time, when there’s enough information allowed to move through, there can be growth. Now, this growth is extremely vulnerable, but there’s growth. In this stage, it’s using the fresh green growth to capture energy and process information from its environment. Sunlight, temperature, watering cycles, nutrition available in the soil, etc. it begins to move into an energy neutral state and depending on if all of the information can be processed through, it will move to a high energy neutral state. Meaning, it’s growing, but slowly and is very vulnerable, depending on the circumstances, it might stay “stuck” or even be susceptible to drought, opportunistic diseases and bugs, keeping it in a neutral or no-sustainable growth phase (kinda like when we start a program for diet, nutrition, overall wellbeing and no matter how hard we try, it just isn’t sustainable and doesn’t “stick” for us. BUT, if the plant is healthy, it’s incurred no environmental trauma and is able to process the information from the environment and make appropriate changes to allow for growth, it will begin to flourish and the potential for fruit exists.
Summertime is such a magnificent time. There’s an abundance of blooming and fruiting. The plants that don’t bloom or fruit focus on growing their roots deep down so they can connect to the wisdom of that they need to bloom and fruit, because that’s how the plant survives and spreads its seed (or, information/wisdom) to keep the species alive. The plants that do bloom, will either set seed or fruit. Seed heads will then spread hundreds of seeds from the one plant, so from one becomes many (teachers, healers & parents, this is you!!). Plants that set fruit, have to become stronger because the weight of the responsibility of growing mature fruit is heavy. Sometimes branches break. Sometimes they have to drop fruit to carry an increasingly heavy load. They know to maintain a high energy state, they need to focus, prioritize and drop some of their personal load (aka delegate).
But, here’s what I noticed about the flowering herbs I mostly plant for the bees & beneficial insects, but sometimes I use them for aesthetics or in culinary preparations. If the flower is to remain on the plant, the plant must focus all of its energy on preparing the plant to spread healthy and viable seed. What often happens is that the health of the plant often suffers for a while. Parts of it die off. Green growth is stunted. It looks like it’s been through the wringer. It’ll often not bloom again that season. Essentially, it’s BURNT OUT.
But, IMO, that doesn’t have to be the case.
I’ve learned that resource management is most important in growth. For us to grow into who we were put on the Earth to be, we must get back to our roots. Connection is at the heart of EVERYTHING, but we must choose intentional connection over distraction. Choosing inner wisdom over environmental chatter. Being true to your design over trying to be like someone or something else (you’ve never seen an apple try to be an orange).
When we do BEGIN to grow, growth must be focused on both our roots and setting up for our fruitfulness. Connection, health, healing old wounds, saying NO, more connection, being brave & branching out, gathering data of any kind, learning from it, and using it for our good.
When we begin to bloom and set fruit, resource management is even more crucial. We pull information, wisdom and strength from our roots, we learn what’s most fruitful, we learn to delegate because if not one of our branches breaks, and we learn to let go of whatever fruit that won’t make it to maturity to focus more on the fruit that will.
And folks, plants show us that this is something that happens over and over and over throughout our lives, not just a cycle that happens once. So, if you’re in a winter season, have hope and know there’s so much potential stored up for you still to grow, bloom, fruit and flourish.
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