The Flowers Are Speaking

“Grounded in natural science yet brimming with mystical wisdom, The Flowers Are Speaking is a field guide to our own hearts. Blossom by blossom, Kerns travels through the seasons revealing how flowers have, over the ages, guided human beings into profound experiences of intimacy, belonging, and love—and can help us return to a more collaborative and generative relationship with the earth. Informative and intimate, earthy and prophetic, this book gives us back a world we may have forgotten but have never lost.”
—Perdita Finn, author of Take Back the Magic and Mothers of Magic, co-author of The Way of the Rose

“Why do humans find joy in air-suspended dandelion seeds and solace in the fragrant embrace of peony bouquets? In The Flowers Are Speaking, Mary Porter Kerns explores this kind of emotional flower power. She introduces readers to diverse species through personal stories, cultural history, and practical exercises to help them connect with flowers as guides to a more fully realized life.”
—Leigh Ann Henion, New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic

“The Flowers Are Speaking feels like drinking a magnificent sparkling floral tonic on a sunny summer day. Each chapter blends science, history, and Mary’s intimate relationship with twenty-two domesticated and wild flowers. You’ll never see magnolia, sunflowers, or bleeding hearts in the same way again. Come, drink deeply of this sweet medicinal brew that returns us to a joyful partnership with nature and brings much needed messages and teachings of some of our oldest kin, the flowers.”
—HeatherAsh Amara, author of Wild, Willing, and Wise and Warrior Goddess Training

“A luscious and generous invitation into an evolutionary love story, kindling a sense of magic that is simultaneously scientific and deeply poetic. This book is a bouquet that includes rigorous research with the roots still dangling as well as dazzling prose that seduces us back into interspecies dialogue with our vegetal allies.”
—Sophie Strand, author of The Body Is a Doorway, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand

“Beautiful, evocative, and moving, Mary Porter Kerns’s writing is truly a love song to the natural world, and a heartfelt prayer that we learn to see it anew. Let her open your eyes to the flowers that have interwoven with our lives since the very beginning, through an intoxicating intermingling of memoir, natural history, evolutionary biology and spiritual insight. The flowers are speaking, she reminds us. The question is: Are you listening?”
—Lucy H. Pearce, author of Burning Woman, She of the Sea, and Crow Moon