Plant Energy Medicine: The Guiding Voice and Healing Vibration of 58 Plants

by Rhonda PallasDowney, Sandi O'Connor, Rosemary Gladstar (Foreword by)

Overview

• Presents in-depth teachings on 58 flowers, trees, and plants

• Each write-up features a full-color close-up photo along with the plant’s medicinal and flower essence traits, the voice of its flower, energetic impact on the chakras, and an affirmation

• Also explores plant biofield energetics, how to use flower essences, and the sensory experience of connecting with a plant

By learning to listen quietly to flowers and plants, we can tune in to the inner teachings they have to offer us. Plants can not only heal us, but they can also teach us how to live a more joyful, healthy, and balanced life.

Sharing the teachings they’ve received through years of attentive listening to flowers, trees, and plants, Rhonda PallasDowney and Sandi O’Connor explore how to deepen your personal experience with the world of plants and connect with their energies. They look at the life force energy of plants, their sensory systems, biofields and electromagnetic energy fields, and their growth from seed to root to stem to leaf to blossom. They offer insights into how to deepen your sensory experience of plants—including their taste, texture, and sounds—and they also teach you how to work with flower essences.

Presenting in-depth teachings on 58 flowers, trees, and plants, the authors explore each plant’s medicinal and flower essence traits, the voice of its flower, its insight, its energetic impact on the chakras, and an affirmation to help you embody the teachings of the plant. Each plant discussion also features full-color close-up photos by Rhonda PallasDowney that capture the energetic imprint and personality of the plant.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888501764
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	07/08/2025
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	35 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Rhonda PallasDowney is an herbalist, flower essence practitioner and formulator, and plant medicine teacher. She is the founder of the Center for Plant Studies and Healing Arts in Cottonwood, Arizona.

Sandi O’Connor is an herbalist, plant medicine guide, and flower essence practitioner. She lives in Clarkdale, Arizona. Both Sandi and Rhonda explore and study the doctrine of signatures, symbols, and myths of flowers and plants.
A practicing herbalist with twenty-six years of experience, Rosemary Gladstar is the founder of United Plant Savers (UpS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving America's native medicinal plants, and cofounder of Sage Mountain Herbs, which offers a comprehensive herbal training program. She is also the author of numerous books, including the bestselling Herbal Healing for Women.

Read an Excerpt

1

The Language of Plant Energy

The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest
force in getting well.
Hippocrates

HUMAN BEINGS—INDEED, all animals—are naturally interdependent with the plant kingdom. Plants offer us many gifts. Certain plants are believed to contain sacred and magical powers as well as natural medicinal properties. Plants have served as a primary source of nourishment and have also been used for heat, shelter, clothing, protection, and medicine.

Our relationship with plants goes back to earliest recorded history. There is a longheld tradition of relating to plants, talking to them and being with them, that is not well-understood by modern science. However, traditional and Indigenous cultures all over the world, going back thousands of years, have developed a sophisticated body of medicine that integrates knowledge of the language of plants to bring about healing, and this knowledge has been passed down to us through countless generations of medicine men and women. Today’s herbal wisdom derives from the practices of these ancient and traditional cultures, which acknowledge the role of plant consciousness as an energy used in healing.

Plant energy medicine gently inspires change in the basic essence of our being, our energy, through a process of resonance. As is now confirmed by quantum physics, before we come into physical form we are first and foremost energy and vibration. Plant energy medicine seeks to encourage the healthy flow of energy throughout the body by employing the subtle vibrations of healing plants. Plant energy medicine offers a blueprint of any given plant that includes all the medicinal values that the plant carries. This blueprint identifies the signature and design of a plant. The signature of a plant refers to its characteristics and may include its unique form of root, stalk or stem, leaves, bark, blossoms, or medicinal properties. A plant’s signature shows us how to gain access to the spirit of the plant.

The design of a plant supports its growth as well as the impact of that growth in its development from seed to fruit. Our awareness and experience of the natural evolution of plants draws attention to both the visible and invisible intelligence of the plant kingdom. By experiencing the intelligent nature and pure beingness of plants through our body, mind, and spirit, we go deeper into the human-plant connection. Doesn’t it make sense, then, that the development of higher consciousness in human beings runs parallel to the same development of higher consciousness in the plant kingdom?

Human language is a living, changing phenomenon, as seen in the earliest pictographs of Stone Age humans, the petroglyphs of Indigenous peoples, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egyptians, and the digital bits and bites of computer age humans. So it is true for plants, whose language has evolved along pathways parallel to ours. Learning the language of plants is like learning the language of different peoples and cultures. It allows us to connect with a plant and that plant’s biological family on much more intimate terms.

Just as human language is expressed in symbols, signs, letters, and pictures that represent an idea, word, or phrase, the language of plants is expressed by the plant’s roots, vascular system, structure, stalk or stem, leaf patterns, veins, petals, blossoms, seeds and seed pods, as well as its cellular makeup. Learning the language of plants can help us connect to all levels of our being—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. By becoming aware of the energy that a plant carries, both in seen and unseen ways, we have an opportunity to become more mindful and step into a deeper state of self-awareness. This in turn supports a state of inner and outer balance, or homeostasis, as we become wise energetic beings with the support of plant energy medicine.

THE VITAL LIFE FORCE ENERGY

To become aware of the energy of a plant, one must first understand what the vital life force is.

Herbalist JoAnna Castigliego Sánchez writes the following in her curriculum Breaking Ground:

Rooted in natural laws, herbalism captures our hearts and spirits

and guides us along towards many wisdoms and knowings. Through

direct experiential association with the natural world of creation,

herbalism is both an intuitive art and exact science. We best learn

of nature with curious exploration, keen observation and eyes of

wonder, with sensitive hearts filled with awe, with patience and

deliberate awareness as well as deep contemplation and introspect-

tive thought. Through research and study, we blend experience with

knowledge, and then learning is an appropriate context. There are

fundamental concepts, groundwork that is required and manda-

tory as requisite foundational study for the newcomer to the herbal

profession.1

Let’s take a moment to understand the plant mind, not in the sense that a plant has a "mind" as we humans understand it, but referring to how a plant navigates its existence. In many ways, how a plant lives is instinctual. When you stop and think about it, it’s the same as when a baby is born. The newborn is instinct and feeling first, and then sometime later, experience and training are added to that instinctive drive. We are all born with the instinct to survive, the same as any living organism that has taken on a physical existence.

Just as a fetus lives in its mother’s womb and a seed lives in the soil, both fetus and seed naturally find their way forward through feeling and sensory perception. With further nurturing and environmental support, both the fetus and the seed naturally begin to develop a vital, energetic life force field. In a fetus, some heart rates are stronger and some are weaker. Infants born with a physical disability generally have a lower life force energy and require more medical attention to build up their life force. The same is true of seeds. If a seed, which is an embryo, is undeveloped or lies dormant and is delayed in germination, the seed is put on hold. Often this is related to too much or too little water content and lack of oxygen.

All living things possess the vital life force energy, and they all have ways of processing sensory input. They possess what American herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner calls "sensory gating channels . . . tiny apertures or gates or doors in specific sections of the nervous system’s neural network."2 The quaking aspen tree, Populus tremuloides, offers an example of how a plant’s nervous system works via its signature of quaking or trembling in even the slightest breeze. Sunflower’s flower head is radiant and bright, tilting toward the sun all day long, triggered by the intensity of the sun, which energizes its sensory input and neural network and sustains its life force. Yuccas are night-blooming plants, its blossoms opening to their fullest under a full moon—yet another example of how a plant connects with its life force and sensory system, as yuccas emit a sweet aroma that attract the plant’s sole pollinator, the yucca moth, which flies only at night.

Known by a wide range of names in countless cultures—as chi in Chinese medicine, prana in Vedic medicine, and Spirit in traditional Indigenous medicine—the vital life force is a universal energy that flows through all living things, from the celestial to the molecular. It is essentially spiritual in nature. As herbalist, alchemist, and medical astrologer Sajah Popham says, "It’s the animating factor that gives all forms their unique expression of life. It is invisible, but it can be seen through its effects upon a physical organism."3

The concept of the vital force began with Hippocrates (460–350 BC), the Greek physician known as the "Father of Medicine," who referred to it as a healing power in nature. Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) called the vital force "archeus, an arch-principle dominating life processes in a biological entity . . . It was all-pervading and powerful within that milieu, yet invisible to the material eye. Only through its effects could the existence of the archeus be known. Through these, the realization was possible that life was governed by a self-regulating and self-healing intelligence."4

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), founder of the science of homeopathy, referred to the life force as the dynamis:

[The] spiritual vital force (autocracy), the dymanis that animates the

material body (organism), rules in unbounded sway and retains all

the parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation

as regards both to sensations and functions, so that our indwelling,

reason-gifted mind can freely employ this living, healthy instrument

for the higher purposes of our existence . . . The material organism,

without the vital force, is capable of no sensation, no function, no

self-preservation.5

Table of Contents

Foreword by Rosemary Gladstar

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Synchronicity and
Interconnectedness

PART ONE
CONNECTING ENERGETICALLY
WITH PLANTS

1 The Language of Plant Energy

2 Plants’ Sensory Input

3 Dynamics of the Biofield

4 Flower Essences
Unseen Gifts of Nature

PART TWO
THE WISDOM IN PLANT READINGS

5 Pathways Uniting Body, Mind, and Spirit
The Chakras

6 How to Do Plant Readings
Daily Insights and Plant Medicine Readings

7 An Invitation to a Plant Journey
Welcome a New Doorway into Your Life

PART THREE
THE GUIDING VOICE OF FLOWERS,
TREES, AND PLANTS

Aspen to Yucca

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

This book is an amazing treasure chest about flowers and plants and how they help us. They can touch us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. When a flower or plant touches us spiritually, it is because the plant and the person are heart-to-heart. It is about love, and love is our greatest healing energy on every level of our being. Rhonda and Sandi are deeply in touch on this divine spiritual level with every plant they work with, which in turn transfers to the person who needs it.

author of Walking the Land Eileen Nauman

As our intelligent sisters of the green, the authors understand the power of the potential for our healing earth journey. I recommend this work so that we may find the reward of illumination within ourselves that the living green shows us through Rhonda and Sandi’s work. The authors share with us their keen association—the relationship they have earned with the plants.

JoAnna Castigliego Sánchez

“Plant Energy Medicine is riveting and a must-have for all students of plant science and for those who want to explore deeper into the plant world and the healing gifts that plants offer.

Southwestern herbalist and owner of the Winter Sun Phyllis Hogan

This delightful, inspiring herbal brings readers the opportunity to enrich their self-awareness, growth, and healing through deepening their connection to plant wisdom. The authors share valuable insights gathered from their own personal experience, offering the reader practical hints, tools, and encouraging guidance for exploring their own personal plant journey. I really loved hearing the flowers’ voices as they shared their wisdom and personalities. The photos are lovely, with so much information. Truly, a unique treasure of an herbal.

Mary Bove

“Plant Energy Medicine is a tender and sensitive collection of writings that reveal the personalities of many common plants in a delightful and insightful way. The authors’ deep connection and familiarity with plants shines as they guide us through exercises that are sure to deepen your understanding as you work with these gentle spirits. Treat yourself to a stroll through the spiritual garden of our plant brethren.

Jillian Stansbury

I have not read or heard more in-depth, profound observations on the physical features and natural history of our green friends. For that alone—to enlarge our perception—this book is valuable. The foundation of this book is the interweaving of plant life stories and physical characteristics with the life lessons they incarnate for us. Above all, there is the wisdom distilled from the ‘plant experience.’ This book is an important contribution to the literature of plant wisdom.

herbalist and author of A Shamanic Herbal and Holi Matthew Wood

Rhonda PallasDowney and Sandi O’Connor have created a beautiful gift for all by creating this book. They introduce us to another way of connecting with the plant world that surrounds us. Through poetic descriptions, each plant leads us to a different and deeper understanding of ourselves. Plant Energy Medicine provides a means to gain insight and perspective into our current situations and to catalyze personal transformation.

Kenneth Proefrock

“Plant Energy Medicine provides an in-depth understanding of the beneficial offerings of specific plants. The visual descriptions and the insights and energy impacts (chakra correspondences) the flowers provide are presented in a clear and easy-to-understand manner, backed by the authors’ extensive knowledge and years of experience with flowers, trees, and flower essences. Through the book’s guidance you are offered a way to explore the pathway plants provide to self-exploration, healing, and renewal.

co-owner of Foster Farm Botanicals and founder of Annie Christopher