Comments on: Do Plants Think?

By: Mrs D.

Mrs D. — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:45:01 +0000

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

By: Mrs D.

Mrs D. — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:38:26 +0000

Thank you, Al. Thank you.

By: Al

Al — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:03:28 +0000

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.”

By: Mrs D.

Mrs D. — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:11:44 +0000

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!

By: Al

Al — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:11:19 +0000

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.