Old Friends Among the Heather

This summer, I had the rare and beautiful gift of traveling through Europe with my best friend. For a few days, we shouldered our packs and wandered the Scottish Highlands, tracing narrow trails through the heather and mist.

As I walked, eyes fixed on the path before me, I began to recognize familiar faces among the wild growth — common plantain, yarrow, self-heal, and dandelion. Each one felt like an old friend, quietly reminding me that the languages of plants and people are never separate.

The first two — plantain and yarrow — once marched across this land with the Roman soldiers, carried for their healing powers. The latter two — self-heal and dandelion — traveled in the opposite direction, from the Old World to the New, arriving with immigrants who couldn’t imagine leaving behind the plants that had always cared for them.

It struck me then how deeply woven together the stories of people and plants have always been. We depend on them for food, medicine, shelter, and beauty — and in turn, they often thrive in our presence, following our migrations, taking root where we settle, and softening the scars of our movement across the world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass,

“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’”

She also reminds us that the relationship goes both ways:

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”

Walking through the Highlands, I felt that truth in my bones. These plants — these teachers — have followed humanity not because they must, but because they can. Because our fates are intertwined.

At Roots and Rites, that relationship sits at the heart of everything I create. When we return to the plants — to those old friends who still whisper in the wild corners — we remember that we are not separate from nature. We are part of the same story, still unfolding, still connected by root and soil and breath.