Smelling the Remembering

Tapping into our most ancient way of knowing

A flower’s scent is so much more than simply a balm to soothe us in a frantic, disconnected world.

I have found that if I am feeling upset or worried when I walk into my garden, my large lavender bush smells much stronger than it does on other days. I can remember the day I realized they were reaching out to me to offer me their calming strength. I told myself at first that I was just more sensitive to their fragrance because I was emotional, but after I noticed it happening several times, I realized they can sense my feelings. We all know animals can sense our feelings. Why not plants too, and why shouldn’t they be responding to us in turn? After all, that is what we do for those we love.

Science is finding that plants have a vast capacity to respond to the world around them in ways we are only beginning to understand, and their ability to produce chemical messages and receive messages in return is the least understood, perhaps because our own sense of smell is so limited.

Smell is our first sense, our oldest sense, deeply embedded in our body and the one least connected to our linear and logical mind. Once, our ancestors’ sense of smell was much more prominent and we were able to intuit the language of the plants through their smells, their chemical signals. Today though, we have a very weak sense of smell compared to other animals and plants. For plants and flowers, scent is their primary way of communicating. They produce thousands upon thousands of chemicals that they use to sense and interact with their surrounding environment.

Long before we could focus on a flower and see its colors, our forebearers used smell as their primary way of sensing the world around them. Ed Yong in his book An Immense World says, “Many living things can sense light. Some can respond to sound. A select few can detect electric and magnetic fields. But every being can detect chemicals…Chemicals then, are the most ancient and universal source of sensory information…They’re also among the hardest parts of it to understand.”

The connection between smell and emotion goes back to our very beginnings. The area of our brain where emotion is processed—the amygdala—grew out of the primitive olfactory cortex. This means that the ability to have emotions grew directly out of our brain’s ability to process smell. Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire, says, “I have often wondered whether we would have emotions if we did not have a sense of smell; I smell therefore I feel?”

She goes on to say, “Emotions are to us what scents are to our animal cousins. Smell for animals informs survival in direct and explicit ways; for us its primary survival codes have been transformed in our experience of emotions.”

Emotion is our sixth sense. If smell and emotion are so deeply intertwined, and flowering plants primary communication is through smell, then it follows that flowers and plants can smell our emotions the way animals can. They can sense our emotional states and can influence and activate our own emotions and intuitions with their volatile chemicals. This is one basic way they communicate with us.

Our emotionally connected sense, our sense of smell, is intimately intertwined with our desire—our desire for life, for eros, and for connection. Eros is all about smell. Smell is our original lover. The flowers taught us to smell, to desire them. It is one of the primary ways they taught us to love them and how they love us in return. It’s how we fully understand eros in three dimensions—in a storyline of the past, present, and future—through realm after realm, lifetime after lifetime, generation, after generation. We follow the song line of the smell of eros, the scent of our ancestors, the smell of our life force energy.  

When I dream of lavender now, I dream of laying down in a huge field full of purple lavender, with their fragrance seeping into my skin. But long ago, before they were cultivated, when they grew wild, they would grow in a diverse landscape with myriads of other plants, animals, and insects around them. Lavender’s scent, while loved by humans and bees, is a deterrent to many other insects and wildlife. I know the deer in my yard won’t touch them, thankfully. Lavender’s original gift was to provide a balance, protecting themselves and others around them from predators, as well as feeding the bees. Who else might they have been a special medicine for?

What would it be like to eavesdrop in a meadow of lavender mixed with grasses, spiders, insects, animals and many, many other plants, and wildflowers? I imagine they exchange information about the same things we “small talk” about: the changing weather, their needs for food and water supplies, their children, and potential threats to their community.

What else are the flowers sensing in this field? Can they feel the long story of the land they live on—its history? Can they sense the people and animals that have lived there before? Do they know the fertility of the soil? Do they perceive upcoming threats to their community? Can they predict the weather? Do they know where they need to go in a changing climate?

There was a time in our past when the knowledge of how plants sustain us and what they had to offer was largely instinctual. How to know and understand and hear their wisdom was taught, not just learning their traits by rote memory. We believed, as whole societies, that plants could communicate with us, that we could receive messages from them.

When I sit with my lavender plant it is like sitting with a wise grandmother—or better, a whole council of grandmothers. They say to me: “Come sit by the hearth and let us help you remember. Remember when you trusted your deep knowing, your intuition. Let my scent awaken those ancient pathways and open your intuition and lead you to your heart.”

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