the scent of stars

mysteries of the cloven heart, speckled with light

Mar 11, 2025

Hello my friends. As we near the threshold of spring Equinox here in the northern hemisphere, I am sharing a mysterious love story from last season’s garden. Every single cycle is an entirely new revelation, for the garden, the wildlands and all of Earth. I wonder what is in store for all of us this season, yet to be revealed by Mystery, and how much we might be willing to trust it when it comes. What particularly interests me these days are the stranger lessons, that at first appear to be failures, or come in the form of apparent disaster. May we always remember the word “emergency” contains within it the very secret of its gifts: Emergence. May we trust the wild ones to lead the way forward, even through the darkest night.

One morning in early July, I went out to the garden at dawn.

Still early in the growing season, every day contains challenges and delights. After my morning tea, I like to go straight outside to greet the young growing plants. To check in with everyone, make sure the plants have what they need, and to look for new flowers opening. Every day in the garden is a new mystery.

I walked out to the dewy garden barefoot, in curiosity and gladness as the morning sun rose. But something felt off as I gazed across the expanse of adolescent green. At first I couldn’t quite place it. Then, my eyes fell like burning hot daggers onto a jasmine tobacco plant. Every single one of its flowers had vanished, the buds too, when just the day before the plant had been in full flowering. I took a small breath and walked, with forced calmness, through wet grass to the other side of the garden where I had planted a larger patch of jasmine tobacco. Now I gasped with unrestrained horror. All of those flowers had also vanished from the plants, eaten one by one, as though they were a rare delicacy.

With a slowly darkening heart, I toured the entire garden and found that the night predator had a very specific appetite — in a sea of plants, it had devoured only the flowers of jasmine tobacco. My very favorite flower in the garden, the most heavenly, perfumed, fragrant one— every single bloom gone.

But I collected myself and thought, I’m sure it was just random, those are poisonous plants anyway. Gardeners are used to these sorts of griefs, after all, and a poisonous flower was such a bizarre choice of snack that surely it wouldn’t happen again. But the next morning, it happened again. And then again. And each morning, the plants were chewed down more and more. By the fourth day, with the nicotiana plants all eaten down to their stalks and hanging onto life by a thread, I started to lose it.

Finally I stopped attempting to be optimistic and stormed inside in outrage. In my many years of growing jasmine tobacco, never once has anything eaten them. I knew it had to be the deer who were eating the flowers. No one else is tall enough to reach those high blooms, or to jump the five foot high garden fence for that matter.

I swear I am usually quite generous with the garden. I love wild animals so much it hurts. I consider the garden a refuge for all of us.

I have never attempted to remove or deter gophers, and let them do their underground tunneling work. I am certain it benefits the soil and therefore the rest of us. The resident barn skunks are free to come root around as much as they please. I have always been glad when the deer jump the fence in the fall and eat the last remaining vegetables during the early frosts. They leave their droppings throughout the garden which feels like a magical gift. The grasshoppers feast freely here, even when they descend upon it like apocalyptic locusts. All of it feels important to me, that we share the garden space and not mechanize or hyper-colonize it, to not banish the wild ones from their part in the feast. But deer in the summer, specifically decimating my favorite flower, this was an unprecedented, very mysterious, terrifying new issue. My generosity was being tested in the most uncomfortable way possible. I peered out the window at the garden, with a building sense of doom.

Out of curiosity and desperation, I typed into a web search “deer-proof flowers.” Can you guess what comes up on that list? Jasmine tobacco. There it was, at the top of the list of plants said to be toxic and known to be disliked by deer. What kind of sick cosmic joke was this??

This particular deer had a very particular palate for the most highly perfumed flowers in the whole garden.

The deer touched nothing else in a sea of tender and delicious plants. Spinach, beet greens, chard, kale, carrots, snap peas— all untouched. I had to admit that there was something perfect, peculiar, enchanting about this deer and I loving the exact same thing. It was simply too precise to be random. And I thought to myself, well, I would eat them too, if I hadn’t been told they were poisonous.

Nicotiana— jasmine tobacco— is the starry fragrant nightflower of my wildest dreams. It blooms at night, and by early evening lets out the most hypnotic fragrance to attract night pollinators— the hummingbird moths are particularly mad about it. The white blooms glow in moonlight, like stars scattered across the night garden. I always make sure to plant lots of them, even though it also wildly self-sows year after year. I am devoted to this plant, because it offers me reflections of my own deepest essence. Everything that happens between us is a beautiful mystery. Our love doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t need to.

All I know is that the presence and fragrance of this plant is a need for me.

I once heard that the ancestors, the hidden folk, the devas and earth spirits are not able to consume food due to not having physical bodies, but that they are able to receive love and sustenance through scent, light, color and sound. Somehow it made sense to me, and it always stuck with me, that sound, scent, color and light are of frequencies that easily reach between worlds. That these are the language of spirit. Why else are our altars covered in candles, incense, flowers, bells and chimes?

I grow nicotiana because her scent does something to me that goes far beyond sensorial pleasure. The fragrance of this plant provides me more nourishment than any of the vegetables I grow. It is spirit food, sacred offerings to the deepest heart essence. One morning in the garden I even pleaded out loud, please, eat the spinach, the beets, the snap peas!! Take all the food!! Just leave the fragrant flowers! I tried what I could to deter the deer, but as an animal lover, there were only so many options that felt kind. In any case, none of it remotely worked. What was left of the jasmine tobacco were leafless, nub-like little green sticks coming out of the ground, somehow continuing to bravely send out one new bloom each day. But none of their flowers survived the night.

I saw her one evening, lurking in the darkening forest just outside the garden fence, waiting for me to leave so that she could come in and begin her flower feast. She was staring directly at me, unafraid. This deer was determined, and her soul’s hunger for those flowers was unstoppable. As I glimpsed the soft fire in her eyes, I felt a sudden tenderness come over me. I deeply admired her courage and conviction, her fierce dedication to what she loved. Right then, I surrendered. I sent a silent invitation from my heart to hers: They’re all yours. I reminded myself that there would always be flowers next year. And I started sleeping soundly again.

Do you know what else happened then? I stopped being so precious and prohibitive with my own garden. I often can barely bring myself to even gather a bouquet, so devoted is my heart to leaving all the flowers for the pollinators. But this deer’s ravenous hunger for beauty ignited my own. I started gathering flowers for myself more freely. I began talking out loud to the flowers about how much they mattered to me, not taking one single second with them for granted. I also stopped taking myself for granted. I could finally see my own dedication, the enormous work of love I had created by tending this garden, feeling its beauty emanating from my bones. Who wouldn’t want a taste of this luminous nectar? I let go into my own flower rapture and spoke my love out loud.

This deer helped me see the feast for the soul I had prepared, in tending a space so flourishing with beauty.

Then suddenly, after those weeks of nightmarish nightly flower decimation, the deer just stopped coming. Upon my morning inspection, the garden shone eerily untouched in the morning light. The absence of the deer hung like mist in the air. Many days passed after that with no nighttime visitation, and the flowers began to grow back. As they always do.

Here is the thing that broke my heart: Every nicotiana plant that the deer had eaten began to bloom wildly, more abundantly than ever before.

In all my years of knowing this plant, I have never seen anything like this. There was one jasmine tobacco growing closer to my house that the deer was never able to access. That plant remained normal sized and with a normal amount of flowers. But the deer-pruned plants emerged giant, vibrant and exploding, dripping, singing with starry blooms.

I now felt the searing tenderness of the deer’s absence, the great gift she had left behind in exchange for the flowers she ate. What had seemed to me like reckless destruction was actually her own mysterious way of tending the flowers. Her way of giving a gift to me and all the pollinators. I marveled at how upset I had been. She left behind more nightflowers than I have ever seen in my life. And the night garden once again became its wild expanse of perfumed glittering stars, more luminous than ever before.

Around a month later I was turning into my driveway, and a deer slowly walked out in front of my car. I stopped and smiled, always delighted to see a deer, and let her pass by. And then I saw why she was moving so slowly. A perfect, tiny, wobbly newborn fawn emerged from the trees, her back speckled with luminous patches. I was flooded with this being’s preciousness. Her mother looked straight at me through my windshield, with eye contact that stopped my heart, and the two walked off gently into the forest. I remember thinking it was a peculiar time for a fawn to be born. And that something in the mother’s gaze felt so familiar.

I felt my eyes widen and spill over with wonder. Was it her? The flower tender. Was this why she had suddenly stopped coming — to give birth to her little fawn? Had she been pregnant that whole time, insatiably filling her belly with the most magical, fragrant nourishment she could find for her growing little one? I felt certain it was true, that I had been a witness to this story. And that I had been given the strange and miraculous gift of being part it.

I recalled the bright spots on the fawn’s back, and saw there the imprint of the starry nightflowers she was made from. That her mother had so carefully crafted her from, choosing only the most particular, special flowers to feed what was most precious to her. My very favorite flowers, now intricately connected to a fawn’s mysterious becoming.

As long as they are here, the animals, the keepers of the wild heart, will always tend this planet with their love. Everything in the wild world bestows a ripple of benefit to others, just through their way of existing— it is a wisdom and a way of being that flows forth freely from all life. The human heart belongs to that lineage. We are being called to remain fearlessly devoted to our heart’s vision, no matter what. To jump the high fence in the dark of night, to courageously taste what this world may have told you was poison, and discover it to be nectar. To follow our longing toward what our soul knows will benefit this great web of life. This is the mystery that calls us from the dark woods, the heart of the dark mother, the firmament of soil and stars. The path forward is guided by cloven hooves. By fang, claw, wet nose and wing. How much relief we will find if we remember how to trust them, and to protect them, and their wild homes, as though our own lives depend upon it.

Deer mother, if you are listening, I have received your gift. It has fed me through the dark winter. I will keep planting scented nightflowers for you forever. I will grow enough for all of us. So that you can keep giving birth to many more fragrant new fawns, speckled with flowering starlight. Thank you for leaving your soft imprints of flourishing on my garden, my heart, our world.