Floromancy: The Oracular Garden
As the Wheel of the Year turns and spring inches toward summer, roses return to the gardens and wild places. In their oracular gardens, Witches and Pagans engage with flower magick. Flower divination is known as floromancy, and you’ve likely been practicing since childhood - do you remember plucking a flower and announcing, 'they love me…they love me not…' each time you removed a petal? This childhood pastime was a form of floromancy, a way to intuit how someone felt about you according to the flower.
Crossing paths with certain flowers on certain days of the week is also a form of flower divination. Just like the bees and the birds, in the old world, people saw flowers as oracles.
Floromancy & Flower Divination
The Victorian Era popularized flower scrying and flower gazing by emphasizing the language of flowers. While meditating with a living plant, a person would intuit messages according to the shapes, patterns, visual flaws, and peculiarities of the plant. Another form of flower scrying involved asking a question before sprinkling a handful of petals into a bowl of water. Beneath a soft light (like a candle or the moon), people gazed into the bowl and searched for secrets amidst the floating petals.
For modern practitioners, Flormancy might involve tending a small garden, pressing dried flowers into your grimoire, or bringing potted flowers indoors to encourage their seasonal unfolding alongside ours. Flowers possess unique subtle vibrations that interact with humans on a cellular level, and this month is a potent time to work with what’s blooming—just ask the moon.
