There’s a scene in Terry Pratchett‘s and Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens in which Crowley, the lucifer-like character, looks after the plants in his London apartment:
In fact the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge and green and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves. This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister, spraying the leaves and talking to the plants. He had heard about talking to plans in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. He put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley.
In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants.
“Say goodbye to your friend,” he’d say to them. “He just couldn’t cut it…”
Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuous around the flat.
The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. They were also the most terrified.
It’s entirely possible that plants respond positively to being spoken to. Maybe it’s the humidity in our breath, or the extra carbon dioxide, or the vibration. I remember someone in the biology department of my university doing experiments on this twenty years ago. I don’t know what the outcome was, but I don’t particularly care either. If it turns out that plants grow better with some sound vibration, it wouldn’t be particularly surprising or interesting.
There are other things that plants can do that are interesting and, at least to me, surprising. Here’s a section from Michael Pollan’s book on consciousness, A World Appears:
Mimosa pudica is a tropical plant that, when touched, instantly folds its leaves to protect itself from being eaten, a reaction that has given rise to its common name, the sensitive plant. [Plant scientist] Monica Gagliano showed that this touchy plant can be taught to ignore a stressor (its pot being dropped) that would normally trigger it to react, and it can remember what it has learned for more than twenty-eight days. (By comparison, a fruit fly can remember something it was taught for only twenty-four hours.) Plants can predict changes in their environment and take appropriates steps: Given a choice of soils in which to invest root growth, pea plants will pick one in which nutrient levels are increasing rather than one offering more immediate nutrients, suggesting that they can predict future conditions and prepare for them. Plants can send and receive signals from other plants and alter their behavior in response to those signals. They can distinguish kin from competitors and both from their own selves. If two unrelated plants are grown in the same pot, they will compete for nutrients by attempting to colonize as much soil as possible, whereas related plants will cooperate and share the pot, suggesting that they can recognize their own kin.
A few pages later, Pollan writes about a time lapse video of a bean plant growing in a pot:
A metal pole on a dolly stands a few feet away. The growing tip of the bean plant slowly spirals through space, exploring its environment and “looking” for something to climb – you can feel purpose in its movements. Every spring, I witness the same process in my garden, though in real time. I had always assumed that bean plants simply grow this way until, by pure chance, they pump into something to climb. But the bean plant in [the] video seems to “know” exactly where the metal pole is long before it makes contact.
The video is here. It’s intriguing, but it’s also not convincing proof if the plant actually aims for the pole, or if this is an isolated incidence.
It does present the possibility that plants have some form of sentience. If they do, it’d be very different from ours, and even more alien than that of a bat, or of an octopus.
