Do Plants Think?
Though they seem to lack arithmetic, plants can multiply and divide. They don’t know each other’s names, but they seek out the sun, send roots to find water, and speak the ultraviolet language of the birds and the bees.
Such innocent anthropomorphisms have always elicited the sneers of science teachers – the same teachers who told us that the squirrels who outsmart them every day have no intelligence – but now they have some tall explaining to do.
New research at the Warsaw Institute of Life Sciences shows that plants are able to remember and react to information contained in light –- information such as “What day is this?” Every day, every week in the year has a different balance of light qualities – color, strength, angle, etc. – which to a plant is a set of signals about the turning seasons, the likely weather, the amounts of moisture and nutrients to expect, thus the diseases that its immune system needs to resist.
And when a photon of light stimulates a chemical reaction in even one leaf cell, a cascade of signals carries the news throughout the plant via “bundle sheath cells” – a plant’s equivalent of a mammal’s neurons.
True, a rutabaga has no brain – no captain’s bridge with readouts from the engine room and a chain of command to make decisions and issue orders. But then, neither do we. Researchers have never discovered the nerve center with the sign on the door announcing, “Me.” Just networks networking with other networks of neurons and dendrites, some of them specialized but no one in charge.
So do plants think?
They don’t think about that. They’re too busy for words.
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For any of our loyal dandelions who would like to check out these studies, the lead researcher is Prof. Stanislaw Karpinski, and the findings were recently presented among potted palms at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Prague.
Comment by Al — July 18, 2010 @ 12:11 pm
Not only do they think, but the ones in my garden also speak to me. There are the sunflowers who gracefully tell me the time of day. The carrots and potatoes who tell me to never be afraid of the dark. The acorn and Hubbard squash and peppers tell me that having a thick skin IS important, while the zuchinni and summer squash say it is okay to overdo it! The tomatoes tell me that it is always best to go for quality, not quantity. The eggplant tell me it is okay to be black or white, as both are delicious. The green beans and limas, well they are too busy producing offspring to tell me anything except, “Pick me!” And the herbs, the wonderful herbs, tell me that a day is not complete until I stop and smell, not just the roses, but the dill, the oregano, the sage, the basil, the lemon grass and the lavendar.
And, when each speaks to me I answer them all!
Comment by Mrs D. — July 20, 2010 @ 1:11 pm
Beautiful! The University of Betty’s garden … and salvation from the madness of political cynicism. “All of that may very well be true,” said Candide to Dr. Pangloss, “but come, let us cultivate our garden.”
Comment by Al — July 20, 2010 @ 4:03 pm
Thank you, Al. Thank you.
Comment by Mrs D. — July 23, 2010 @ 11:38 pm
Here is a truly beautiful piece on gardens that ran today,July 24, 2010, in the Sunday NYT’s.
Garden Time
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
“By the calendar, summer is only a third gone. But there has been something headlong about this summer, something other than the heat. Perhaps it’s simply that what I’m seeing at the farm is the accumulation of all its past summers, as if shade could pile up, like leaves, under the sugar maples and hickories year after year.
In the wild land around the farm, there is constant change, yet it feels timeless. The beeches and hemlocks along the creek look the same. The ship-rock that always seems to be sinking in the middle pasture hasn’t sunk an inch in all this time. This is a rabbit year, but these look like the identical rabbits I saw a few years ago.
None of this is true in the garden. You can plant for shape, color, scent, whatever you like. But unless you confine yourself completely to annuals, you’re cultivating your consciousness of time. Every garden leaves the traces of its origin in the gardener, which means that it’s hard to look at even the maturest beds and borders without remembering the digging and planting and waiting it took to bring them to this point.
What surprises me is the way this garden, chaotic as it is, leads to all the other gardens I’ve worked in. I look at the bee balm glowing just beyond the Korean fir, and I remember myself on hands and knees in the soil at another farm not far from here 18 years ago. The sequence goes back, through California to Iowa, to the dense, straight rows of vegetables growing in the backyards of our small town.
The garden is particular to this time and place. Yesterday, coming through the conifers, which now over-tower me, Ethel the border terrier and I spotted an indigo bunting. It flushed from the shade of a striped-bark maple and landed on a hemlock bough. It looked as though a bluebird had been distilled into some purer essence, and as it sang, the passing of time carried away every note.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25sun4.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
Comment by Mrs D. — July 25, 2010 @ 9:45 am