Casting magic with living plants
How to work magic with living plants, project ideas, and some of the basics to being a gardener with a magical touch
Note from Taylor: This is a guest post from
If you enjoy this article, please subscribe to her substack to get more content around plant and elemental magic and much more!A living magic
Incorporating living plants into your magical practice is an excellent way to create strong magic that is capable of sustaining energy.
You can do magic workings with live plants that are already established, from seeds, or by selecting plants with adequate life spans based on short-term or long-term goals.
Rituals and spells that utilize living plants allow plenty of room for creative license. They are easy to set up and maintain.
Using plants in magical workings is similar to using sigils and, in much the same way, requires upkeep and charging. They act as batteries and placeholders for intention, collecting energy and constantly feeding the work with its life force.
Plants are an excellent choice for spells that require extra energy and devotion. Using living plants as a symbolic representation of a ritual or spell means that you are giving energy and focus to this work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, depending on the plant's care and maintenance.
Want more content like this? Subscribe to the Magical Experiments podcast and get a weekly article and access to podcast episodes.
How to work magic with plants
An upside to using plants that have already been started is that you don’t necessarily need a green thumb to become familiar with the process. Store-bought plants can be a great way to familiarize yourself with using living plants in your magic workings.
The hardest part, getting the seed to sprout or the plant to clone, is already done for you. All that is left to do is to prepare for the ritual or spell of choice and dedicate the plant.
Plants and gardening can be a daunting idea for those who have little to no knowledge about how to grow things or keep them alive. Combining gardening with magic workings can make things seem even more complex. Using healthy, already thriving plants takes a lot of the pressure out of the process.
While store-bought plants are usually what come to mind first, there are also wild transplants. I point this out for green thumbs of the magical community.
If you often walk in nature and find a plant that speaks to you, you can carefully dig it up and then replant it in a pot or the garden to tend and dedicate to a cause, goal, or purpose.
Cleansing and dedicating plants to specific purposes or spells is a simple process. Yet it is a necessary one for store-bought plants that are already growing. Plants absorb energy just like everything else, and store-bought plants come in contact with numerous different frequencies every day.
To cleanse them, they need to be removed from the containers they were purchased in, given fresh soil that has been prepared and dedicated to the magical working, and placed in a new pot.
Leave the plant in the cycle of the sun and moon by itself for a full 24 hours before performing the ritual of choice. This allows the plant to fully release its built-up energy and make room for the energy you will be feeding it during the ritual.
The benefit of plants that have been started before use is that they are more likely to continue living with proper care and upkeep. Using already started plants can also be a way to make use of what is available to you, based on factors such as income, living situation, or other limitations.
How would you work with plants and practical magic?
Working magic with plants from seed
Magic that utilizes plants can also be started from seed. This opens up the floor to variety. Starting from seed increases the possible options available to match a plant’s magical purpose to your magical intention.
Using magic to plant seeds of intention is pretty standard, planting a physical seed as you plant your intention is a way of linking the two acts and creating a permanent connection. Programming intention into seeds is an act of planting new magic.
New magic needs a lot of attention and energy to be productive. Seeds need fertile soil to sprout, and seeds of intention need dedication and faith to survive. New projects have no established currents you can link them to. All energy given to new projects comes straight from the source.
In this context, the source is the quality of the soil, your energy, and attention. When you work on new magic, it's essential to take time to let the idea rest. Let it develop and fully form. The better designed the thought becomes, the more precise your vision will be. Planting seeds and working with new magic is a blended mix of physical work, energy channeling, mental projection, and programming.
Working with seeds is slow, but the routine care plants require engages you in the work even after the ritual is over. Watering the plant and keeping the soil fertile helps maintain its health, keeping the plant magically charged.
The ritual of care while you focus on the plant and its purpose in your magic becomes a waking meditation. Working magic from the seed provides opportunity for slow and steady growth: suitable for goals requiring serious commitment and a lot of focus.
New magic only gets stronger if it’s worked with and believed in, the same way a garden only grows when the soil is worked. Projects that can be achieved using magical seeds include, but aren’t limited to, forming new habits, making life changes, pursuing career opportunities, and even boosting creativity and inspiration. Choosing the right kind of seed sometimes matters, but not always.
If you’ve found this article helpful, please share it with other people so they can benefit from it as well.
Advice for working with Seeds and Magic
Heirloom seed varieties make amazing plants, but their seeds can be challenging to germinate. Some can require specific germination steps that demand time you don’t have. To give your magic and your seed the best chance, it's better to purchase easy-start seeds or ones that are sprout-certified.
Working magic with plants for short-term and long-term goals
When it comes to plants, consider their maturation cycles and harvest times. When you link a magical working to a living plant, you don’t want to pair a long-term goal with a plant that matures quickly and needs to be harvested before the goal has time to manifest itself into reality.
Likewise, if you have a short-term goal and tie it to a plant with a long maturation cycle and harvest times, there is a chance that the short-term goal may take longer than necessary or not yield results.
Short-term goals require plants that mature quickly. For example, if you have a time window and you begin looking for a new job, you could transplant a store-bought plant to link with your career spell and harvest once you gain employment. Leafy greens work well for this. Greens like lettuce and microgreens grow relatively quickly, can be harvested easily, and are beneficial to the system when consumed. Due to their growth cycle and nutritional value, leafy greens have several synergistic properties that can be utilized to work short-term magic.
Flowers can be another example of short-term growth cycles that can be easily adapted to fit personal time periods and growth rituals. Flowers often have many magical properties that are attached to them, and that adds to their power when used in ritual or spellwork.
Long-term goals require plants that grow through several complete seasonal cycles. It is essential to choose plants that will continue growing through all seasons and last the duration of the project.
If the plant variety linked with goals that take years to complete isn’t something that is meant to live for years on end naturally, the magic that you link to the plant won’t extend its life long enough to help accomplish the goal and continue to feed energy into the intention.
House plants that produce large leaves are a good option. There are several colorful varieties of the Elephant Ear plant, also known as Monstera, that can be linked to long-term goals. If kept indoors and cared for, they can live for years. Indoor lighting suits them well, and that ensures the elements can’t alter the life span or health of your magical plant.
Plants used for short-term goals should either be harvested or allowed to die naturally once their purpose has been achieved. If the plants are harvested and can be consumed, be sure to leave out a serving as an offering of thanks and gratitude.
Keeping back a seed for replanting is also an option to use as an offering. If the plant is allowed to die off naturally after the goal is achieved, leave a portion of the dried plant out for the next season.
Then, let the rest add nutrients to your other pots or garden by crumbling the remains and sprinkling them lightly over the topsoil. Choosing the correct plant with the proper lifespan is vital to achieving success in the magical workings you perform.
Rituals and spells that utilize living plants are versatile and easy to set up and maintain. Whether you choose to work with plants that are already growing or plant the seeds yourself, there is a deep connection to the magic that is worked using a living ingredient.
The daily upkeep for living plants ensures a sustained and continuous personal connection between the work and yourself. Not only is magic with live plants versatile, but it is another way to help promote mindful behavior that settles the mind through the labor the plants require.
Not only is the ritual itself magical, but the routine care of the plant also becomes a ritual of intention. It is consistently serving as a reminder of the goal or purpose that has been attached to the plant. Working with living currents gives spells and rituals an extra source of energy beyond energy from your aura and the universe.
Bio:
writes articles that specialize in herbs, the five elements, and energy work at an intermediate level. If you enjoyed this article subscribe to her substack
I love this post! Especially as someone who has more ambitions then experience with the growing side of plants :)
One of my favorite plant to work with magically with the Rose of Jericho. I love the idea of Edible Greens magic, I'm going to explore this next!