Plants and Animals are two sides to the same coin: Life.

Plants are indeed living creatures and as such, they too have responses to things you would not believe they have responses for. Plants can see, plants can feel, and plants can hear. All of these things have been proven scientifically over a course of time but were already known and understood concepts of our tradition dating back a very long period of time. Plants are indeed “people” too and one can build relationships with these people just like with any other. There was a study performed years ago in which a polygraph was connected to plants and certain things were done to see if a response could be measured and several responses were actually captured. Keep in mind that the polygraph is not a magical machine that works on spooky dust and fairy tales, its a machine that measures different variables like breathing etc. and people interpret these changes when certain things are said or done to determine whether they are lies or not. The machine does not actually determine if a lie was told, just gives you the facts of many variables. What you do with this information is up to you. Back to the results of someone hooking up a polygraph to plants, certain things that were previously believed but unverifiable were verified using such a machine to measure responses to different things. For example, when someone would bring a knife near a plant it would respond to that according to the polygraph. There was also responses to fire, threat of fires, sounds etc. All this to say, plants have been reasonably proven to actually be living beings and they do have the ability to react with fear to things before those things affect them, which implies that they can see, feel and hear. Everyone knows about the science experiments kids do, playing classical music to plants to make them grow better etc.

Building relationships is no different than building relationships with people. They are built over time, with good communication and positive intentions. What you put in is directly correlated to what you get out. In this instance, I am being very literal with this explanation. I do mean go and talk to your plants, tell them about yourself, tell them what you goals are, tell them what pains you, tell them how good they look. Literally just talk to them. When the day shall come that you need a piece of them for whatever spiritual purpose, tell them what you need and why. These practices can be extended in so many different ways. For example, some older practitioners even went as far as feeding some of their plants actual scraps of their own table food so they too can taste what they were having. We also see the traditional practice of thanking plants and paying them for their assistance in our needs. The practice of thanking and paying should be a default for any practitioner of Nkisi Malongo and should only be skipped in certain isolated instances. It has been proven several times over, a plant that you interact with grows stronger than one that does not. Its precisely for this reason that you build relationships via communication and interaction.

Caring for plants goes beyond simply communicating and interacting with the plants, just like people, plants have needs. Fortunately, plant needs are mostly the direct opposite of other animals needs, so they don’t need to compete for the same resources. They require sunlight like most every other living animal but that’s an abundant resource. They also require certain temperatures, water and nutrients as well as space. The space is already understood by most, if you want your plant to grow to a certain size you have to provide it enough space to grow to that size. Now the temperatures, watering and nutritional needs of each plant can be unique and varied. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to these specifics and each plant should be understood and maintained accordingly. As important as communicating and interacting is to building a relationship is, properly caring for them is too. To give you an understanding, think of them as elderly patients in a nursing home. Simply caring for them and letting them keep their dignity in tact goes a very long way towards building a relationship. Then you add in the communicating and the relationship flourishes.

Learning energies and uses of plants is a simple process but its not one that comes easily to everyone. First you have to be receptive to the idea that you are not the one that defines the energy of the plant, you are simply the one observing it and using the energy and properties it already displays. You also have to understand that the energy of the plants is the same but reacts differently to the energies of the people observing them. In other words, one specific plant will have a specific set energy and feel great to you but toxic to me. The energy of the plant did not change, the person interacting with that energy changed. With these simple understandings in place, you can then begin documenting the energies. Keep in mind, there is already well-established understandings of certain plants and this should be your first resource. Moving forward from this, you document your experiences and ask the spirits what works for what scenario and keep logs of everything. These logs of your journey create a large body of information that will one day serve you more religiously than any publication.

There’s much more that goes into this, like what gives you permission to even address these plants with any kind of authority? You can take a piece of the plant but did it grant you the energy you were seeking or did you just take without consent? If you practice a tradition and attempt to take understandings from another, will they work for you in your tradition? There are so many things that were left untouched but they must remain untouched in the public eye.