After 40 years of delving into Dr Steiner’s (RS) Agriculture and Medical lectures, working out what his story is, Glen Atkinson  got to wondering what it was he actually said about how a plant grows. So, he entered ‘Plant’ into the search function of the Rudolf Steiner archive, and up came a range of references, of which around 20 provided some direct story of his view of how plants grow. Some of his stories Glen knew but a couple he had not come across before.

All the lectures and paragraphs that he found relevant are collected together, as a summary in ’The Layers of the Story’ essay, while the original study text is available at http://garudabd.org/dr-steiners-plant-story/

In the first chapter, Glen has attempted to condense all the various bits into a cohesive story through the seasons. As is RS’s way, each reference tells a slightly different part of the story from all the others. Our challenge is to layer these stories over each other, using the obviously common denominators as the ‘structural’ pieces, and merge them together to find his overall message, for how we can use nature forces to grow healthy plants, animals and humans.

The theme running through it all can be summed up in this from “The Spirit in the Realm of Plants” given in Berlin, December 8, 1910 –

“Thus, we cannot picture the earth only as a physical structure, for the physical structure is for us something like our own physical body, which can be seen with the outer eyes and touched with the hands, and which is observed by outer science. This is the earth body that present-day astronomy or geology studies. Then we have to direct our attention to what in the human being we have come to know as the etheric body or life body. The earth also has such an etheric body, and it also has an astral body. This is what awakens every spring as the thoughts and feelings of the earth, which recede when winter approaches so that the earth rests in its own ego, closed off within itself, retaining only what it needs in order, through memory, to carry over the preceding into the following, retaining in the plant’s seed forces what it has conquered for itself. Just as the human being, when he falls
asleep, does not lose his thoughts and sensations but finds them again the next morning, so the earth, awakening again from sleep in the spring, finds the seed forces of the plants in order to permit what has been conquered in an earlier time to emerge again from the living memory of the seed forces.”