An old-fashioned viticulture practice is to plant roses at the end of every row of grape vines. Roses, apparently, are very sensitive plants. Look at them wrong and they will shrivel up and die or get some kind of disease. So why plant them on the end of every row of grapes? The answer is that roses were used as indicator plants. Indicators are more sensitive to the environment and more fragile than vines, so they were thus the first to exhibit signs of an inhospitable environment. Maybe the vineyard was getting too much water or not enough water or it was too damp or there were pests or diseases present.

This offers a new perspective on the motif of Black Sheep. Typically, the family is successful and everything seems to be in order, but then there is the black sheep who does not fit in. The black sheep is in trouble with the law, has issues with drugs adn alcohol, with sex and infidelity, has no stable job etc. The rest of the extended family rolls their eyes at the black sheep and says, “Why couldn’t she just be like us? Why can’t she just sort herself out?”

The new idea here is that the black sheep is the indicator for the mental and emotional health of the entire family system. The black sheep is typically the most fragile and sensitive member of the family. They are often more intelligent or more creative, take more risks. These are the characteristics of an indicator.

So the black sheep isn’t acting out for no reason. There is an impetus, a force that is driving them to do what they are doing. Perhaps, as successful as the family looks, there are massive problems with anger, with keeping secrets, with lies, with a lack of forgiveness etc. These issues, of course, are buried far below the surface which is why the family looks so successful. But when there are subtle deep changes in the family organism that everybody else can ignore, it’s the black sheep, the indicator person, who is the one who acts out. If the family focuses their blame on the black sheep, they are looking in the wrong direction. Instead of trying to simply blame the rose for getting sick, they need to look at the conditions of the soil and the entire vineyard. Something is wrong.