Who are your best plant friends?

Meditations with Mother Earth

Day 6. Lennox Head Dog Beach. Early Afternoon. Warm with a bite. 4th September 2024.

I sit on a warmed sand dune today: me and the dog as my youngest daughter spends time at her first homeschooler’s girl’s group. Grey clouds smudged across a deep blue ocean of sky and whales breaching far out on the horizon. This whale season (which spans May to November) I have only seen them on the horizon, so seeing one breaching its white belly to the wind feels special.

The wind continues, drying my skin uncomfortably, reminding me that hot dry and wind are the usual patterns of the Waking time and I only have to endure a little while longer for the humidity to land heavy over the land.

This beach is new to me, and I can feel this newness as I walk the sands. The dog can feel it too, I can tell by his perky ears and carefulness — watching, alert in the newness. It is a vast beach, spanning one jutting headland to another and the council have generously designated half to dog walking. I picture us walking all the way to the northern headland together (one day), my boy and me.

It feels odd writing of my morning walk here, in an environment so different to my swampy, gum laden home land. However there is a connection to both places: a plant. She showed herself to me while walking earlier and I know her to grow well in the strip of land just beyond the beach and dunes, where tea-tree and mangroves grow. I know several mother plants straggling their vine-like bushes across my favourite mangroves, and now I know another.

She’s growing fresh on a tree only steps along our road at home. Young, just one tender trailing stem and several bright sunny flowers. Hence why I’ve not noticed her before, perhaps? I think it was the scent of her uniquely pungent flowers that my body noticed before all else, which made me look around for the familiar source. There I saw her bright flowers: not large, but vibrant and the almost orange pollen centre releasing a smell some find unpleasant, but which I’ve always been compelled to sniff repeatedly: musky and sweet, almost sickly. I asked her if I could take a flower, feeling I needed her vibration and scent around me, on a day I feel under the weather, needing a lift. She’s been with me since, coming on my journey here in a hot car, continually giving of her scent as she dries up and turns brown.

She’s a very special plant to me, because she came to me. She wanted me to know her, many years ago now. She made herself known to me in a dream, telling me her Latin name as I woke from sleep, I guess because the Latin name would be the simplest one for me to look up. I tend to be given insights through words and speech, rather than images and visions (which maybe explains why writing and reading are such a huge part of my life, or perhaps vice versa?) and I realise now that just an image of her might have meant a very long hunt that led me to no ‘prey’. With the Latin name I just needed to look her up and found, what I had suspected at the time because I was doing a lot of research on native plants, that she also was a species of plant. Her name is Hibbertia and, most commonly found growing around here, is Hibbertia Scandens. I honour you and the journey we continue to share.