On Being Agapanthushearted - June 14th, 2021

Note 1: This was originally posted in response to questions posed to me on the forum Nonhuman National Park.
Note 2: Following this, I understood that my hearttype was most likely Agapanthus praecox, often mistaken for Agapanthus africanus due to their similar appearances.

For me, being planthearted involves familiarity, seeing them as “my own” (like “of my own group”), feeling a strong connection to them and desire to be around them, and feeling drawn to them, for the most part. Agapanthus are a common plant in my city, so I’ve grown up around them, seeing them everywhere and watching them throughout the year as they went through blooming and wilting. But while I’ve also seen this for all the other plants in my city, for some reason the Agapanthus feels most important to me. Every time I see them, I feel compelled to greet them, I like spending as much time with them as possible, just staring at them, and seeing them in full bloom energizes me. I’m unfortunately not very good at explaining, but it’s that strong and lengthy connection to them that has caused me to consider them a hearttype. I wouldn’t say I experience shifts related to them; maybe I haven’t noticed, because I’m so used to animal-based shifts rather than more subtle ones, but I haven’t felt roots or petals or anything like that.

In comparison, there’s another plant I like a lot, the hydrangea. I like seeing them, I think they’re quite pretty and delightful to look at, and they’re important to me for ‘kin reasons (they’re a plant I associate with someone I knew), but I just don’t feel that same level of connection. There isn’t something drawing me to them, aside from thinking “oh, these remind me of A-ya, and they’re so pretty.” So, despite me also liking them a lot, I wouldn’t consider them a hearttype; it’s because my relationship with Agapanthus goes beyond that, and deeper, that I have grown to consider them a hearttype and not just “my favorite plant”.

I think I came to realize that I was hearted with Agapanthus in high school; it's always been important to me, and seeing them always made an exclamation point spring up in my head, but I didn't know their name until high school, and didn't consider it part of my general alterbeing experience until I did more thinking about them once I'd finally found out what the plant was that I was attached to. In my archives, it shows I included a picture of it in the hearted section of my Tumblr from 2015, so I figure it was around or before then. Unfortunately it doesn't look like I wrote much about the realization, if there was one; it might have just felt like "common sense" once I had a name for it.

They differentiate a fair bit in their expression. While both feel close to me, something comfortable that I’ve grown up with and that is important to me, crows have much more observable behavior and capacity for interaction. For example, while cawing and other mimicry is a way that I sometimes express this connection, and it is a sound that comforts me, there aren’t any particular visible behaviors associated with an Agapanthus (unless you consider growing and facing the sun). I experience shifts sometimes that I associate with being hearted with crows—a beak, wings, feet, throat-sounds—often from thinking of them or seeing them, but as I explain above, I haven’t observed any shifts from being hearted with Agapanthus. They both trigger a feeling of excitement when around them, which is very possible because both are frequently seen in my city (which likely played a large part in them developing as hearttypes), but crows are more “interactive”; I can listen to them, observe the differences in their local dialects and who will respond to me, who won’t, that I simply can’t with Agapanthus. I don’t think it makes my connection with crows stronger than my connection with Agapanthus, as both are important to me, but they certainly have their differences.