Wortcunning Wednesday for February 19th, 2020

🌿 Wort-Cunning Wednesday’s 🌿

This weeks Plant Oracle Card is “Bramble.”

Bramble Berries (Rubus fruticosus)
(Blackberries)

✨Tenacity ✨Rootedness ✨Boundries

🔆 If you’ve ever tried to pick wild blackberries in the height of the summer, you likely will have paid a price for those delicious flavor bombs as the thorns can be ruthless. Wild Blackberry produces amazing, large, juicy fruits, but she often demands a blood price from those who seek her fruits. The bramble painting features a Blackberry bush displaying unripe as well as ripe fruit, hinting at its long fruiting season. The Ogham sign for Bramble is on the stone-M, which represents Muin. The fruit of blackberry can produce wine, which provides the associations to this Ogham of the relaxing of inhibitions and the accessing of intuition as a result. 🌿

🌈 If you have ever done any gardening and tried to dig up bramble roots, you have experienced their tenacity first-hand. The roots travel long and deep, and some root systems can cover a wide area and be of tremendous age. Because of this, the Bramble is the perfect symbol of tenacity and the importance of being well-rooted. 🌳

🌿 If this card speaks to you it may mean that you have been feeling like digging your heels in, just staying put and holding your ground. Good advice actually for the current Mercury Retrograde! It’s also possible that this card is signifying another person or situation that is stubborn or “prickly.” It’s important to remember to everything it’s season-The bramble may be hard to remove from his position but during the harvest season it gives freely of its delicious fruit. This card certainly signifies the importance of boundaries. Boundaries are essential to our spiritual and emotional health. Be sensitive to other people’s boundaries while reinforcing your own. 🌿

August

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

Mary Oliver

🌿 Look for More botanical posts on Bramble (Blackberry) over the next few days. 🌿

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Bramble| Druid Plant Oracle by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm | Illustrated by Will Worthington