What a plant knows

What A Plant Knows is...a lot, if we broaden the concept of knowing. This book by Daniel Chamovitz has introduced me over the last couple of days to the realm of sessile brainless beings that, nevertheless, are "acutely aware of the world around them...of their visual environment...of aromas surrounding them....of when they are being touched...of gravity...of their past--past infections and the conditions they've weathered."

The experiments by which we have learned these things are presented in detail, and fascinating; Darwin would be famous for his work in this area if for no other. Still the mind-boggling aspect of this book for me is the new world I find I live in: the plants around us, grasses, trees, flowers and bushes, stems, roots and leaves, not just growing but knowing. "A plant is aware of its environment and people are part of  the environment,' says the author, who is at pains not to anthropomorphize the vegetable kingdom.

So my plum tree, planted last year, with its spindly branches knobbly today with wen-like buds already cracking open into white blossoms, and the pear tree in the opposite corner of the yard with the dusty khaki eruptions on its twigs, puffing out leaves as clothes too-tightly packed might erupt from a suitcase, and the poppy that, without my noticing it happen, has extruded long hairy plume-like leaves (oh so brilliant flowers by Memorial Day), and the wand-like vines untorn from my fence last November now squirting forth green leaves like toothpaste, all these are monitoring their surroundings and responding to it in subtle and intricate ways so as to better survive. Never passive (though sometimes still), plants are now not insensate.

Talk to them? Sure, but they are deaf actually, though leaf to leaf, plant to plant, they do communicate with each other. There's no secret channel of sympathy that unites us. There are some surprising elements of our chemistry which are also represented in plants, but basically we are very different. What unites us is our being alive, a challenge in response to which we are pursuing very different strategies.

Yet, contemplating the 'awareness' of plants, I have a sense of strangeness. Outside my window this evening, out in my yard, there are plants inhabiting their special sensorium which are poised to receive, perhaps already responding to inputs from our common environment. Plants now seem more engaged than they had before, more interested, therefore more interesting.