Tarot Interviews

Magic That Grows: Amy Blackthorn on the Power of Plants

• Fin | Tarot Interviews • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Amy Blackthorn is a respected author and herbalist best known for blending plant magic with practical spirituality. Her best-selling books include Blackthorn’s Botanical Magic, Blackthorn’s Botanical Brews, Blackthorn’s Protection Magic, Blackthorn’s Botanical Wellness, and Sacred Smoke.

Ordained through the Order of the Golden Gryphon and certified in aromatherapy, Amy has appeared on Netflix’s Top Ten Secrets and Mysteries and HuffPost Live. She is also the founder of Blackthorn’s Botanicals, offering teas and oils rooted in magical practice.

Learn more at her official website: amyblackthorn.com

NEXT EPISODE: Professor Carrie Jenkins, philosopher and poet exploring the mysteries of love, identity, and the self.

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If you're curious about the cards we use and want to find out more, or if you would like to be a guest on the show, visit our Tarot Interviews podcast page.

Fin:

Tarot Interviews. Welcome to Tarot Interviews, where we uncover the stories and insights of fascinating individuals through the lens of the tarot. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Amy Blackthorn, a best-selling author, renowned herbalist, famous for books like Blackthorn's Botanical Magic and Sacred Smoke. With a deep love of nature and a lifetime of experience in the green arts, amy has inspired her readers to connect with plants for healing, growth and transformation. Amy Blackthorn, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Amy Blackthorn:

Oh, my goodness, thank you so much for having me. I'm great. I've been working with perfume all day, so I'm just happy as a clam. That way, people have an immersive experience as to the tarot that they're experiencing, or the magic that they're understanding, and how to bring that forth from themselves by involving as many senses as you can to really not just experience that thing but connect it to the other parts of your senses so you can really ingrain that learning that you're doing.

Fin:

Amy Blackthorn, you are an olfactory oracle so, as you're aware, we're here to deal some cards, make some questions and see what comes out. I have the Rider Waite in my hand, I'm going to shuffle this and then I'd like you to say stop, are you ready?

Amy Blackthorn:

I can see, oh my goodness, the six of cups.

Fin:

So, gazing upon the six of cups, could you describe what you see and your first impressions of this card?

Amy Blackthorn:

Absolutely, there is a farmer's market in my little world. In my little world, uh, the vendors got a cup that is filled with beautiful flowers, some tudor roses and some different, uh, greenery, and they're holding it forth to the person looking at this fine arrangement, uh, warmly, because they're they're little earmuffs, uh, but I always, I always, take this card, um in spreads to make sure that people understand that their emotional health and their emotional well-being is something that deserves its own time and energy. And you have to make time for that, because otherwise this world will eat you alive.

Fin:

Yeah, for me it's that reminder to embrace joy. Okay, so the question I have for you is how has your past influenced your love of plants?

Amy Blackthorn:

Oh goodness. So I was born in Baltimore City and I lived my formative years in a very industrialized area. The elementary school where we went to play had a paved parking lot. There was no grass, there was no trees you know one tree per block sort of neighborhood and so going through our backyard there wasn't a lot of biodiversity, but there was.

Amy Blackthorn:

I found at probably kindergarten age, this little mint plant that some that a previous tenant in our apartment had planted, and so I was trying to figure out, like why does this smell so good? Why is this different than all the other plants out here in kindergarten? My goodness, yeah, I'm about four or five years old and I go and I talk to my mother and I say, okay, why does this smell good? Why is this amazing? Why is this important to me? She says you know the mint ice cream and the mint candies that you really enjoy. This is where that stuff comes from.

Amy Blackthorn:

And this was my first experience as a child growing up in a very urban city, of understanding that the food that we ate came from somewhere, the plants that we were consuming came from somewhere. They lived and they experienced their own plant-based life, but they had their own experiences. So it was really important to me to figure out where those experiences started and why I was so removed from that experience, being in an urban environment. So, as a writer, it was really important to me to make sure that people understood you don't have to grow all of your own plant allies. It's beautiful if you have the opportunity, but if you are living in an urban environment you don't have space for a window box or you don't play with indoor plants.

Amy Blackthorn:

It's still really important that you understand you can have a relationship with plant allies, whether or not you grow your own plants, whether or not you have that first-hand experience. There are so many ways of making those connections. You can cook with herbs, you can diffuse aromatherapy oils. You can build those relationships and they're not dependent on your finances, necessarily, your biome, your your country of origin and in some cases, when we're talking about sacred plant magic, you don't even need the physical plant material present to have that connection. You can develop relationships with the spirits of plants and get to know them as entities with their own agency and understanding of the world, and experience their, their lives, without necessarily relying on a bunch of rosemary that you got from the grocery store produce section.

Fin:

Is there a special way of preparing the seeds or the plants before it goes into the earth, or do you just trust in the natural process?

Amy Blackthorn:

Well, a little bit of both. When it's time to plant the seeds, when it's time for them to germinate, I will tell them. I want to wake them up. I want them to know that they're being honored as new life in my garden, in my yard, in my recipes. So I'll let them know. I'll give the seeds a little pat and tell them the things that I hope that they can grow up to be. These seeds are rosemary seeds and I want you to have the knowledge and understanding of connection and remembrance and offerings. I I love to cozy up with rosemary milk in my tea in the morning. There's, there's always going to be, something that's greater than the sum of our parts, before I even plant them in the ground, trying to think of plants that have traveled with me and they've changed.

Fin:

I mean that. I mean when I was very small, I would, I would love all the pretty plants. I would like your, your gerberas, I'd like your tulips, tulips especially. Um, the particular part of the country that I live in has these big victorian era parks filled with tulips. But now I like, I like the scratty plants, I like the, the raggy ones, especially ragwort, any plant that you could get in a meadow that attracts bugs.

Amy Blackthorn:

These are the plants that I like now. Pollinators are so beneficial because they're they're not just looking at how can we be of service to you. We're attracting the pollinators that allow other things to grow. We think of pollinators as being a daytime event, because we're out in our gardens at that point, but there are so many things that pollinate in the darkness. They allow us to grow.

Fin:

Can you give an example? I wasn't aware of that. I assume it is a daytime activity.

Amy Blackthorn:

Yes, most people do. Bats are are very good at pollinating their, their flower friends. Uh, a lot of the moths are still eating because they're nighttime, they're, they're out and about they're, they're, they're still hungry. So, yeah, bats and moths um different, for they're so excited to be out and and pollinating our gardens.

Fin:

I was um, I was gripped by this image of just happy moths darting from from flower to flower. That is a delightful image. During my lunch break I'll often even in you know the depths of winter. I'd like to sit in the middle of a meadow and just look around me. And you know, see the. You know the various bugs do their thing, not so much in winter, but that's when you start getting things like your birds of prey appearing in the sky. You get the occasional pheasant visible. I feel that it's cleansing is too much of a probably a woo term, but it feels vital to be in that kind of environment every so often.

Amy Blackthorn:

The body craves it and I can't quite articulate what it is that the body needs but it just feels right to be able to identify it in every portion of the year, and so it really gives me a time to connect with the, not just the landscape, not the visuals, but the emotional connection in my heart for the lands that I'm sitting on let's find out what the next card has in store.

Fin:

I've been shuffling away merrily while you've been speaking, so when you're ready, tell me when to cut the deck.

Amy Blackthorn:

Oh, it's the Ace of Wands.

Fin:

Ace of Wands. Okay, could you describe that to me and give me an idea of what the meaning means to you of the Ace of Wands? And give me an idea of what the meaning means to you of the Ace of Wands?

Amy Blackthorn:

A cloud has burst forth with a hand holding a long stick. The neat thing about it is it's got very small leaves that are coming from it, so you can tell that it's a living thing that it's coming forth. Right now. The background is actually quite far away. You can see it. It's small enough in the distance that you'd have to walk for a day or two to get to that space. So it tells us that it's not just an idea. These projects are taking their time, coming forward. They're coming now so you can actually work for that attainment, something that comes in the future, where the journey tells us that it's not something that's happening right this minute, that the project is being born. Now the idea, the intuition is guiding us towards our final goal, but it's not the goal itself.

Fin:

My understanding of this particular card, the Ace of Wands, is it's something that is inviting you to say yes to the fire within. So the question I'm going to ask you is what got you excited about plant magic, and do you still feel the same excitement?

Amy Blackthorn:

Oh, my fire, that passion to dealing with plants. When I was probably in the third grade, we moved from the inner city Baltimore to the county and so we actually had some land to have a garden and really have the space that I was yearning for as a smaller child, looking for something to play with, the space that I was yearning for as a smaller child looking for something to play with. So we've gone from the smaller primary school understanding of what's happening to having some really open spaces to sort of experience and investigate, and so we've moved into this home. In the garden there is a plant with beautiful fuchsia flowers and I'm thinking this is beautiful. I've seen flowers on TV, I've seen flowers in places, but we've never had access to them.

Amy Blackthorn:

And so I sat down in front of this azalea I didn't know it, of course, at that time and I see this hot pink flower and I'm just gazing into the center of this flower. And I'm just gazing into the center of this flower trying to understand what it is, what it represents, what it does, and when I brushed my fingers across the flower, the flower cup just falls out wholesale, falls at my feet, and inside this smaller cup that holds the flower is a seed, and that seed it was like the universe downloaded into my brain as an eight-year-old going wait, flowers make seeds to make plants, to make more flowers. And I'm utterly fascinated with the way that the cycle of the world works. It's not just things grow and they die, they make the next iteration of themselves for the next bit of cycle. So it's not just living or not living. There's that secondary piece that allows us to understand that there is something else. There is something beyond our own experience experience.

Amy Blackthorn:

These azaleas were there before I moved in. Someone had planted them and those seeds, being pollinated, can make more seeds, whether we were here or not. That azalea could keep creating seeds to keep creating other azaleas. And so that fire, that passion, that understanding was so important to eight-year-old me that I immediately started doing chores for the neighbors so I could get pocket change to make my own garden myself. And so I bought soil and I bought a window box and I bought some petunias, because they smelled nice and they were very pretty, and I said, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to be part of something, and that's what drives me to write to this day. I want to be part of something and the natural order of things really feels like it's not just something that's greater than myself. It allows all of us to have ownership and pride in where we are, the grounds that we're living on at that point, and a way to connect us to the grounds that we're living on.

Fin:

Presumably, you have a small, medium, large size garden, but you have a growing space near your house. Is that right? Oh, yes, and could you tell me what kind of plants you currently have growing there?

Amy Blackthorn:

Yes, oh, my goodness, I have a. There's an acre of land around my home. So an acre, yeah, there's some good space. And my home backs up to a nature preserve, so deer and foxes and frogs and all sorts of wildlife just wander through the yard all seasons. So it was really important to make sure that there was something for those guests to nod on, because they were definitely going to go after my garden if I gave them the chance.

Amy Blackthorn:

I have one side of the house that right now, of course, it's winter, but in the spring will be beautifully coated in mugwort, which is a boundary plant which gives us the ability to walk between the worlds the world where we are and the world where we, you know, spend some of our time.

Amy Blackthorn:

But the front of the house is mostly it's a tea garden, so there's all sorts of different mints there's orange, apple, chocolate and peppermint. There's a lot of lemon balm because it's very calming, it's a sedative plant. So if you're feeling stressed out from your day, especially in the height of summer when, at least here in Delaware, it can be hot and sticky and miserable, so it sort of brings down the excitability that lives in our bodies when we're a little bit warmer and I actually make a lot of lemonade with that lemon balm, so it's sedative, it helps smooth out the grumpies when we're in the height of summer and it can be. Oh goodness. One of my best friends in the whole world lived in New Yorkshire for 10 years and I still have a hard time with Fahrenheit versus Celsius. It was this summer we had oh my goodness, it was 127 degrees at one point.

Fin:

So to me I have no idea what that is, but that sounds hellish. Yes, yes, it is.

Amy Blackthorn:

She lived in Yorkshire. She could say, oh, it's 18 degrees and I'm like, oh wait, I need math. Why it does take a minute to switch back 18 degrees in Yorkshire is high summer.

Fin:

Normally it it feels probably a lot chillier than it is. I mean, it's. Yorkshire is a wonderful place, obviously bronte country, but you often get these big, ominous, overcast skies. Um, the weather is extremely changeable and I would say it always feels about 13, 14 degrees or so.

Amy Blackthorn:

Yeah, I did the math, it is 127 degrees. Fahrenheit is 52 Celsius.

Fin:

Okay, well, there was a day a few years ago in my country where I think we approached 40, 41, 42, something like that, and it's like something from a zombie apocalypse film People putting large pieces of cardboard over their windows and making the flimsiest barricade to try, and you know, keep some of the heat out. But that's a. That's a temperature I would just fry. I would just be a puddle of me.

Amy Blackthorn:

Yes, they would just melt into a puddle and my goodness. And people think, oh well, you have air conditioning, so that should be fine. No, we're air conditioning it to the temperatures that people are boarding up their windows for. Oh, my goodness, it was, we'll say, 75 in the kitchen during the summer, so that's 23.

Fin:

So we're air conditioning it to get to 23 to see, and when it hits those kind of temperatures, what was your pet up to? Did you bring them in?

Amy Blackthorn:

Oh yes, millie, Thick them in the fridge.

Fin:

Don't put your pets in the fridge.

Amy Blackthorn:

Don't do that. I actually have a cooling blanket that I would leave in the refrigerator and so bring it out and let her lay on it just to try and keep cool because, my goodness it's those temperatures are really dangerous for anything that's alive. So it was really important as someone who spends as much time as I do in the garden, spends as much time with the plants as I do to sort of make sure that the ones that were the going to have the hardest time with that heat have some extra water, have some extra fertilizer to deal with the stress of how those things are going to play out yeah, it's a beautiful idea of um, paying back, uh to nature, especially the idea of you having the space where all of these creatures, no matter what they are, can stop as if it was a cafe, just spend a little bit of time and then heading off on their own little journeys.

Fin:

I, yeah, that is a beautiful idea. I, I have to say my garden is half feral. I mean, it's just this overgrown nonsense towards the end and the rest of it's semi-manicured. It depends on how bothered I can feel about it at the time. But you have inspired me to actually think about what could benefit the local foxes any, I should say any frogs coming. We have newts in the pond. Every so often there tends to be this war going on between sometimes it's the frog, sometimes it's the newts. They'll try and hold the pond as their territory. What would you recommend for newts? Are these are crested newts, I believe beautiful?

Amy Blackthorn:

um, they want more shallow spaces. So I usually get a large dish full of marbles or small stones. It's shallow enough that they can wander around. They can cool their bodies as well as have a drink. The frogs, we do the same thing. So, uh, I leave that lead out large platters or even chargers and fill them with stones. They're also great for keeping the bees. They can stop and get a little bit of water, because they'll land on the stone. Instead of falling into the water and hurting themselves, they can land on the stones and stop for a drink. So pollinator stations and watering holes, so to speak, definitely really important for all of that nature and all that wildlife.

Fin:

Okay, it's time for the third card, the last one. Here I am shuffling away. As before, same rules apply, just say stop.

Amy Blackthorn:

Stop Right, the the harsh snow falling. They are, they're bundled and they're sort of, uh, trying to figure out the best way to both stay warm and make time headed to where they're they're going. They're illuminated by a church window filled with five pentacles, so they're golden stars lighting their way, uh, as the two figures make their way towards the understanding of the next location yeah, the uh.

Fin:

The last time I had this card I was actually sat out in the meadow in the snow. I did feel rather spooky. So to me, the five of pentacles is I think it's a call for re-evaluation um what sustains you and how you can find a balance between material and spiritual needs. So five of pentacles, shall we ask you. Okay, have you faced difficult times in your career and how did you recover?

Amy Blackthorn:

Oh goodness, growing up as a very poor child, I definitely had some concerns over being an author and what that meant fiscally. Because most people go to a job nine to five and they get paid to be there. They get a paycheck weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, what have you and it gives you a sense of stability. But writing as an author, you don't get paid to write. I do this because I love it. But one of the things that people don't understand about the way that this work as an artist comes is once you sell something, whether it's a fiction, nonfiction. Once you've sold it, you're being recouped in royalties. So after we'll say six months is very common. So twice a year I'll get a paycheck that says, okay, you've sold this many copies and your portion of that is X.

Amy Blackthorn:

Be really scary to sort of figure out what those limitations offer us in terms of financial support and the way that we are executing, not just the day-to-day tasks. But how can I connect who I am to my spiritual self through the medium of being paid for my work? It can be intensely scary, as you know, the lack is what really concerns me. As a person who was, I experienced homelessness as a child. There was a lot of issues with will we have food tomorrow? Over my own life and my own experiences, my idea is usually okay, I'll stock up, I'll make sure that the pantry is full. I'll feel more comfortable if I have X amount of food in my storage.

Amy Blackthorn:

But as someone who gets paid twice a year, it definitely makes it more difficult to say, okay, what is it that I am needing and what is it that I just would like to have? What are my needs versus my wants? It makes it really important to stop and say okay, what is the idea that I have? As far as want, what is a need? Because there's no longer just a safety net, because the job that I do is full-time, I volunteer, I do a lot of different organization helps that I do is full-time, I volunteer, I do a lot of different organization helps that I do. I'm writing full-time. Is this something that's going to pay the bills? Is this something that's going to put that effort into something? Are people going to appreciate the way I'm talking about? And so it can be scary.

Fin:

As you're saying that and as I'm watching your expression, it's as if you're revisiting some of those moments, and thank you for sharing those.

Amy Blackthorn:

Absolutely.

Fin:

Do you feel? Now I'm trying to think of what the words would be. Do you pay homage to that past self through your magic, through your practice? And how do you express that? Thanks if you do, assuming that you do I do, I do I very.

Amy Blackthorn:

It's very important to me to not only stop and understand how lucky I am to be where I am today, because there are a lot of voices who don't get to be heard. Because of the finite resources that publishing has, it can really take away some of the more diverse voices that we have that I would really love to have the opportunity to talk, to, listen to and learn from, because those voices have to be working a nine-to-five job and they have kids and they have experiences. Experiences and they have things that need to be handled that don't include sitting down to write a story or write a novel. When I'm writing, it is really important, especially as a magical practitioner, to emphasize that the things that we do sometimes can require different materials. So people say, okay, I'm doing a spell and I want, I need a red candle and I need this oil and that material.

Amy Blackthorn:

There are a lot of people who don't have access to it. They don't have a shop near them where they can procure supplies from. They don't have the cash to pay for the supplies that they would really like to have. So it's important in every book that I write that I remind the people who are reading that these are nice things to have, but the magic lives within each of us. The cards that we read, the books that we discern pull the three of blues from the Rhythm and Soul Tarot of the three of cups really gives us the opportunity to listen and learn and enjoy each other's company. But it doesn't have to involve any cost at all. Magic doesn't require you to purchase beautiful books and candles and oils and materials those are the things that keep the inner three-year-old happy where glitter and gum and candy and crayons. But the magic lives within each person who is present, in their time, in their energy, in their space, in their home. That's what gives us access to magic. It's not the material thing.

Fin:

Amy Blackthorne. Thank you so much for joining us on Tarot Interviews. If you're inspired by Amy Blackthorne's wisdom, be sure to check out her book Sacred Plant Magic, and we'll see you in the next episode. And we're done.

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