I have gradually become more of a plant-person. My houseplants have begun to feel like friends through the years, and the garden’s call has strengthened. I wanted to be more thoughtful about these relationships, so I read Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano, Ph.D. Dr. Gagliano began her academic career studying fish in the great barrier reef, but soon moved to plants. I won’t spoil her reason for the shift; it was a fascinating beginning to her story.
We’ve been raised to think of plants as mindless and soulless, but Dr. Gagliano gained spiritual insight into plants through plant medicine. An indigenous shaman in Peru taught her how to meet the plants spiritually, sometimes with ayahuasca’s help. In her psychic visions, she met plants at a spiritual level where the plants spoke with her and taught her about their medicinal uses, spiritual lessons, and more. She learned that plants are so much more than humans think they are, as they can communicate, remember and learn. They look simple, but they are much more complex than we ever dreamed.
Having confronted her belief system about plants, she challenges other tenets of our culture that may be false as well. She considers the nature of time and reality and asks how we can open eyes that we thought were already open. The plants even give her great wisdom about herself, her experiments, and her life – things she at first didn’t expect them to know.
This book was a fascinating read. I was afraid that the scientific parts would be dull, but Dr. Gagliano presented them engagingly and interestingly. It was challenging to prove that plants can remember and learn, but she confirmed it through groundbreaking experiences that plant spiritual archetypes helped her design. She is full of dynamic out-of-the-box thinking as she knows more about the world we live in, where nothing is really what we previously thought.
I highly recommend this book, particularly to those who need a bit of evidence with their metaphysics. It is enlightening to those who suspect that there is more to plants than they think, but they aren’t sure in what way. Given that plants can remember, learn, and communicate, is it ethical to genetically modify them? Is farming exploitation? So many new questions presented themselves; I enjoyed them all.
I received no compensation for this review; I just wanted to share my thoughts on this book.
