Let’s explore the medicine of love through heart-opening plants connected with the faerie: foxglove, hawthorn, rose, and blue water lily.

These fey-heart medicines, like the amanita muscaria mushroom, can help us tend our grief, ease heartbreak, cultivate compassion, unconditional love, and an open heart. They can expand our capacity for self-love, intimacy, vulnerability, profound feelings, and sincerity in our relationships generating more meaning, understanding, and depth with ourselves and others.

*Always use discernment and caution if taking plant medicines. Do your research and consult with a physician. Information in this article is for your educational purposes only.

1. Heart Plants As Teachers
2. Heart Plants As Portals
3. Heart Plants As Protectors
4. Heart Plants As Healers
5. The Spirit of Foxglove
6. The Spirit of Hawthorn
7. The Spirit of Rose
8. The Spirit of Blue Water Lily

Heart Plants As Teachers

Heart-centered plants offer Fae lessons to us, reminding us to see the world alive in each moment with wonderment and awe. Rose especially opens our awareness to the erotic, beauty, love, and ecstatic, sensual contact with spirit, the divine, and nature.

Foxglove improves our relationship with rigidity, reminding us to be malleable, open to possibilities, and release expectation so magic can flow. Blue water lily teaches us about the currents of time and the mysterious nature of the divine and dreaming realms that our spirits are connected with.

These are teachers of the landscape of the heart, how to be in touch with bliss, ecstatic joy, play, and pleasure just for the sake of it. Pleasure as a pursuit in and of itself is purposeful and valid, even though we live in a world that wants us to be addicted to depriving ourselves of the erotically charged experience of being embodied. Working with these plants connects us to the archetypes of The Lover, Eros, and The Heart.

Heart Plants As Portals

Rose, Hawthorn, and Foxglove all act as a bridge into the Other World of the Fae. When you work these plants, the veil between material and spiritual thins. While you can ingest hawthorn and rose as plant medicines, foxglove is deadly poisonous so this plant should be worked with energetically through flower essences, meditation, or journey work. These plants are amazing gateways into Faerie magic and using them in witchery can call the land spirits of the other world closer to us.

Heart Plants As Protectors

These Fey-heart plants are energetic protectors. The rose and hawthorn maybe most obvious with their striking thorns. We can call in the potent forces of these plants to surround our energy field when we need to guard our hearts from harm.

Foxglove’s medicine as plant poison also offers energetic protection to us, calling us to integrate our shadows so we can be more aware and self-aware. The more we understand our triggers and act curiously towards them without shame, the easier it is to accept and work with them while generating unconditional love for all our parts. This grants us a kind of protection against lies, lies we tell ourselves or the urge to live in denial of what is true through self-justification. When we live fully in our ‘innocence’ or awareness we can be more present to working through and protected from the complexes that relentlessly riddle the human heart.

Heart Plants As Healers

We all carry around pains and traumas, stories that weigh on us and energetic wounds stored in our bodies. These plants are master healers, guiding us tenderly into the most sticky, stuck places within our beings to untangle what has been bound up in shadow.

They show us how to live in the present and in a state of beauty and heart-open enthusiasm with life’s unfolding. Embodying pleasure, Eros, and desire is our birthright, but we can get stuck in patterns of shame, hurt and confusion that keep us from our truest longings and desires as embodied beings. While these cycles are a part of the process of being human and contribute to deeper understanding of ourselves, it doesn’t negate the discomfort or ill-ease we feel in processing it all. But the sweet honeyed medicine we can receive is well worth putting ourselves through a journey of radical exposure.

Heart-Love Plant Profiles

The Spirit of Foxglove

Latin Name: Digitalis purpurea

Parts used: Essence, spirit, energy medicine

Indicated for: Rigid patterns and conditioning, the need to control, loss of wonder, lack of connection to one’s magic, deepening connection with the spirit realms, especially plants, nature, and the Fae.

Taken as: Flower essence

• Folk Names: Goblin’s gloves, faery gloves, faery bells, witch’s thimble, witch’s bells
• Poisonous plant ally, should not be ingested, best to be worked with energetically
• Portal for traveling into and out of faery realms through visioning and trance work
• Attracts faery guides, insect, and bee spirit teachers and insect entities 
• Opens up our capacity for joy, play, and pleasure
• Helps with inner-child healing and heart wounds acquired in childhood
• Helps us release grief connected with regret or ‘lost’ time

The Spirit of Hawthorn

Latin Name: Crataegus sp.

Parts used: Flowers, leaves, and berries

Herbal actions: Cardio-tonic, diuretic, astringent, vasodilator, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, nervine

Indicated for: improved cardiac function, angina, hypertension, high cholesterol, plaque build up, coronary artery disease, heartache, loss, trauma, grief, crossed boundaries, anxiety, and spirit exhaustion

Contraindicated: If on other heart medications. For those with low blood pressure.

Taken as: A tea, tincture, cordial, essence

• A gate or doorway into the Faery realm
• In the Rose family
• Thorny and protective 
• Helps us set boundaries and keep a protective barrier around our hearts when needed
• Heart protection, opening, and strengthening
• Releases a chemical called trimethylamine that the human body releases during sex and is the same chemical released by rotting corpses
• Symbol of the cycle of sex, death, rebirth
• Symbol of love, faerie power, and fertility 

The Spirit of Rose

Latin name: Rosa sp.

Parts used: flowers, fruits(rose hips)

Herbal Actions: astringent, analgesic, vulnerary, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, restorative, reproductive tonic, nervine

Indicated for: GI distress, nosebleeds, mouth sores, rose hips for an immune booster (source of Vitamin C), wound care for minor cuts/scrapes, diarrhea, joint issues, anxiety, grief, heartbreak, trauma, loss, spirit medicine, reproductive restorative, beautifying body care products, perfumes, and oils

Contraindicated: Can be drying.

Taken as: A tea, tincture, cordial, essence, smoke medicine, body care products, perfume

• Harmonizes and balances emotions or increases sensitivity to states of unconditional love for self and others
• Soothes the pains of trauma, grief, heartbreak, and loss
• Protective, thorny, yet gentle
• Associated with deities of love, sexuality, and sensuality
• Used in magic for romance, beautifying rituals, and self-love 
• Ancestral medicine, especially maternal lineages 
• Symbol of the Faery realm, found at the gates to Faerie 
• Mushrooms are known as the roses of the Otherworld
• Can be a plant that acts as a gateway into the faerie realms, a bridge into The Mystery

The Spirit of Blue Water Lily

Other common name: Egyptian Blue Lotus

Latin Name: Nymphaea caerulea

Parts Used: Flowers

Herbal Actions: Euphoric, sedative, nervine, aphrodisiac

Indicated for: Sleep aid, pain relief, spiritual connection, enhancing dreams, reducing anxiety, inducing states of euphoria, dreaminess and bliss

Contraindicated: Caution if on mental health medications. Can be very sedative. Read more here

Taken as: A tea, tincture, cordial, smoke medicine, essence, body care products, perfume

• Cosmic bliss, mysticism, and divine connections
• Aphrodisiac heart-opener and enhances mystical, ecstatic visions and experiences
• Helps us access an opioid dream-like state, drawing us out of the chattering mind and into the sensuous and the body
• Portal into the elements water and earth as the lily grows in the mud
• Connects us to ancient currents of magic, vision, and mystical inspiration
• Reveals the divine nature that resides in the heart
• Inspires experiencing the body and life through the heart of a poet
• Connected with bees, snakes, and jinn spirit guides and lovers
• Connected with goddesses Qetesh/Qedeshet, Ishtar, Astarte, and Inanna
• Associated with the Egyptian God Nefertem, ‘he who is beautiful’
• In Egyptian lore it is referred to as the first “thing that bloomed out of the mound of creation”