“All Plants Are Teacher Plants”
An interview with PAM MONTGOMERY
Pam Montgomery is the author of Partner Earth: A Spiritual Ecology and the bestselling Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness. She teaches internationally on plant spirit healing, spiritual ecology, and people as Nature Evolutionaries.
THE ROWE CENTER: In your foreword to Carole Guyett’s book Sacred Plant Initiations: Communicating with Plants for Healing and Higher Consciousness, you describe how revelatory it was for you to learn her processes for working with plants. Was she a teacher who changed your life?
PAM MONTGOMERY: Really, it was the plants who were the teachers. My friend Carole’s book describes an initiation that’s coming from the plants. The plants are the elders — they’re initiating us into what it means to be truly human. Traditionally, initiations were when young people became members of the tribe. Often they would get new names. Now we’re a culture full of uninitiated humans. There might be a few remnants within traditional cultures, but not many. How do we become an intact culture again, so that you become a part of the whole, the community, the tribe? Where are the elders now? They’re mostly gone. So plants are stepping into the role as elder to initiate us into what it means to be truly human taking up our place within the collective.
R.C.: What specifically did the plants teach you?
P.M.: The teacher that changed things for me was the primrose (Primulus vulgaris). The biggest aspect is that it was the primrose that brought to me the whole piece about being initiated by these common plants — a lot of people will say, “This is a Master Plant, this is a Teacher Plant,” and when they say that, they mean a psychotropic plant like ayahuasca. But primrose taught me that all plants are Teacher Plants. Primrose is called the key flower, because it unlocks the treasure chest. There are stories in different cultures about this. It unlocked a whole new way of working with the plants. And primrose is this little tiny plant, it looks very sweet, yet it is such a powerful being. This whole experience with primrose, it had a lot to do with stepping further onto my path. I feel like I’ve been doing my thing for a long time, but this was more like stepping into a place of leading ceremonies, especially the plant initiation ceremony.
R.C.: How did you come to your life-changing experience of these sacred plant initiations?
P.M.: There’s a Buddhist saying that when you’re ready, the teacher appears. That’s what it’s like with plants A bizarre series of synchronistic circumstances got me to this very, very big step.
I was teaching in England, and behind the cottage where I was staying the whole hillside was covered in little yellow primroses, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is so beautiful, these little yellow heart-shapes.” So already the plant was getting aligned with me. It was the spring of 2010 and I was supposed to fly home, but a volcano erupted in Iceland, spewing volcanic ash over much of Europe and disrupting air travel for five days.
I finally decided to try to make it to Carole’s home in Ireland. But I was in London, and when I inquired at the front desk about how to get a train to take me to the boat I would need for traveling to Ireland, the woman pointed out the door and said, “Stand on that corner and wait for the red bus.” But all the buses were red. And as I stood there with a teardrop running down my cheek I stood at the bus stop and I called on my tower of strength ally, the tree White Pine.
R.C.: This is something that would be familiar to people in traditional cultures — calling on plant allies — but seems unusual in modern society. What happened when you did this?
P.M.: I said, “I need help. I can’t do this alone.” Suddenly a businessman who was of Indian ancestry appeared and asked if I needed help. I explained my situation and he told me which bus and which train connections I would need to get to the ferry. When he offered to take me to the train, I went inside myself and asked, “Can I trust this man?” Of course, the first voice I heard was the voice of my mother: “Don’t ever go off with a stranger.” But then I checked in my heart, and it went, “Ping!” He safely delivered me to the train platform, and when I asked him his name, he said, “Hans.” So I’m like, “Who was this, an angel?” There was some kind of intervention, and I was thinking, “Did White Pine make this happen?”
R.C.: What was it like for you to have the plants as your teachers and to learn the initiations?
P.M.: When I arrived in Ireland I was exhausted and so grateful to be there. Carole’s husband picked me up and when I was at their home, Carole was starting to prepare the primrose initiation — she does her plant initiations on high holy days, and it was April, so she was preparing for Beltane on May 1st. I was able to take part in the preparations, harvesting the flowers, roaming the countryside with Carole and picking the little heart-shaped flowers to make into an infusion for the plant elixir. I was with her when she made the elixir and put the prayers into the elixir. You can make an elixir from harvesting different parts of the plant. You make a water base, or an alcohol base, and at every step you’re working with the plant ceremonially in a sacred way, treating it as an elder to guide you.
Then when you’re doing the initiation as a group you ceremonially mix components of the elixir together, you fast, and throughout the three days you’re drinking the elixir. And you do different things with the plant, journeys with it, embodiment with it, a fire circle wearing masks of the plant, dying and being born — all kinds of things with the plant — so by the time you’re through with three days, you’re truly with this plant, it’s an experience of being one with it. This is what Carole was preparing to do for Beltane.
R.C: Were you able to stay in Ireland to participate in that?
P.M.: I was back home in Vermont by then, but after I learned firsthand from Carole how to do the elixir, she gave me a bottle of what she made, and on May 1st when they were doing the primrose initiation ceremony in Ireland I did as much as I could of what they were doing over there. One thing that came to me was this image of a carved and inlaid wooden staff with a crystal on the end, and it was the staff that I was supposed to use during these ceremonies.
So it was this series of unbelievably, amazingly fortuitous events that brought me to the plant initiations and working with primrose and with many other common plants in this deep way. I could never have planned it this way. But the plants had something else in mind for me and it seems I had no choice but to be there taking the next step in my evolution with the green beings.
Pam Montgomery will present “Plant Spirit Healing” at Rowe Center, May 20–22.
