Beeman Pollination Blues (passionfruit) by teZa Lord

My interest in plants began with my upbringing, as my mother was a Lithuanian immigrant farmer’s daughter. There was always a garden to be grown, plants to be harvested, and relationships with all aspects of nurturing, protecting and enjoying plant life of all sorts filling my memory as early as I can remember.

Of course, plants feed animals (including us!) so my earliest memories are filled with domestic farm animals such as pigs, chickens, cows, horses, and wild animals like deer and crows that ate from the cornfields, as well as dogs that barked at strange events everywhere, and cats which kept the mice population in the barn at bay. Around the farm’s kitchen table wild turkeys and rabbits were often served, loaded with buckshot as well as the berries that kept them plump.

Always—we need plants. For farmers and everyone, vegetables are grown for home or for sale, some to be canned for winter, others dried for medicine. Instead of doctors, my grandparents made remedies from bark and roots, from trees like soothing witch hazel, and sassafras that was bottled as delicious root beer. Along with life’s staples like wheat, corn, and barley, were the ever-present red zinnias decorating my grandmother Antonina’s farm door.

After attending Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts School, I was asked to make formal studies for a graduate student at Harvard’s Botanical Museum. That stroke of good fortune began how I merged my love for art with my love for plants. My professional career as a botanical illustrator, culminated in illustrating two Ph.Ds. and one US Government-funded research project on the source-plant of the world’s new scourge—cocaine—the debilitating drug created by pre-Nazi German scientists, distilled from the helpful coca leaves of the Incan sacred plant Erythroxylum coca. This plant is also known as the goddess Pachamama by Inca culture, revered by many still, as what we English speakers call Mother Nature. I was privileged to scientifically draw E. coca for the first time in two hundred years.

All the plants I studied and captured on paper with strokes of ink are so-called divination plants, i.e., plants that the world’s indigenous used for eons to connect to the sacred of everyday life. Divination plants, also called plant medicine, provide spiritual understanding to those who seek their psychic assistance.

I illustrated two doctorate theses for protegees of Richard Evans Schultes: T. Plowman’s and T.L. Lockwood’s, concentrating on various members from the Brunfelsia and Brugmansia, respectively, of the Solanaceae family, both used as complementary plants in shamanic formulas for ayahuasca experiences. Harvard’s Professor Schultes later became known as the Father of Plant Medicine and coined the phrase “ethnobotany.” He invited me to illustrate the taxonomic (evolutionary study) of the Erythroxylum, the entire coca family. E. coca is its most well-known genus, being the mainstay plant of the ancient Inca; the same plant that in modern times became the source of the medically useful, but unfortunately highly addictive drug, cocaine. From ancient times till today, the benign leaves of E. coca are used by the indigenous of Bolivia and Peru and other parts of Latin America to ward off fatigue and hunger, and boost energy in the taxing high altitudes of the Andes, besides giving a general feeling of euphoria. Sadly, the prevalence of cocaine and its nefarious cartels, operating in plain sight in many South American locales today, continues to be a plague.

My development as a visual artist was inspired by my desire to be a more conscious human being. I imbibed many of my subjects—the benevolent plant medicines—to assist with communicating with the higher realms of perceptive possibilities. Like many, childhood dreams of flying beckoned me to reach for the highest experiences available to my species. The ideas I portray in my art work are a direct result of having explored the possibilities of this higher perspective offered by plant medicines that was overlooked in my early education. From my early twenties onward, I benefited immensely from exploring what plant medicines offered my stuck-in-suburbia consciousness. Truthfully, I can say that plant medicines taught me as much, if not more, than the string of lovers I enjoyed before marrying my heart’s anchor, my husband of 34 years.

Ayahuasca I never took, being considered taboo for women to take by the indigenous brujos who we worked with in our research. Instead, my studies concentrated on the so-called “sister plants” that are essential to injest when using the Ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi. Both Solanaceae species, Brunfelsia and Brugmansia, whose properties of extreme sensations keep the Ayahuasca-taker mindful of his or her physical body during their altered-state, because the cold, tingling, or otherwise energetic bodily-reminders of the physical realm serve an important purpose. A sister plant assures that one might not get too “far away” from their physical humanness, and remain safe in terms of one’s sanity and capabilities. Without these body-reminders that sister plants provide, a person can easily slip into a dangerous and perhaps permanent, dissociative mental state, staying in an unbalanced, non-physical, spiritual state. Yajé (Ayahuasca’s indigenous name) natural gift (because of its alkaloidal chemical makeup) is to bridge the mundane to the sacred so that life becomes more meaningful. Spirituality is meant to be part of our physical experience.

Peyote was my esteemed plant medicine spiritual teacher, as were San Pedro cactus, psilocybin (magic) mushrooms and other divination plants, including cannabis sativa. I studied many other “jungle plants” with names such as Dragon’s Blood and Ipena (of the Amazonian Yanomama people), and closer, more common ones like Coleus, Nutmeg, Morning Glory, all plants that help humans understand the Unseen forces of the Spirit World. And let’s not forget LSD which was discovered from mold (a plant life) growing on plain bread.

Today (2025), and for the last 40 years, I am solely a meditator in the yogic tradition, and no longer look to plant medicines for what is natural to anyone who wishes to know the innate power of their true humanity. By true I mean every human’s natural potential, their connection to the sometimes subtle, always present, metaphysical and elevated understanding of “normal” life that is as real as our body’s physical bones and blood. Portraying the evolution of higher consciousness through art and writing remains the passion of my life’s work.