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October 25, 2024
Plants are the very definition of creative becoming: they are in constant motion, albeit slow motion, probing the air and soil in a relentless quest for a livable future.
Yet no one I met—not a single botanist—was anything less than agape with wonder at what they were learning that plants are capable of.
A paradigm can’t ask questions about something it doesn’t see as existing in the first place. The resistance by scientists to scientific discovery is a known fact; it serves as a bulwark against quackery. But it also often misses or delays actual discoveries.
They named themselves the Society for Plant Neurobiology. František Baluška, a cell biologist at the University of Bonn, Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, a plant biologist at the University of Washington, Eric D. Brenner, a molecular biologist at the New York Botanical Garden, and Stefano Mancuso, a plant physiologist at the University of Florence,
The Society for Plant Neurobiology eventually backed away from their provocative name; they became the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior.
journalist Michael Pollan once put it, there may be no wizard behind the curtain.
seemingly missing from the digital record; Richard (“Rick”) Karban, a plant and insect ecologist at the University of California–Davis, had to mail a photocopy of it to my house.
Things in plant biology were tense. David Rhoades would have to tread lightly.
One key problem inclines the whole thing toward debate: there is no agreed-upon definition for what counts as communication, not even in animals.
of its leaves to be less nutritious. The idea that a plant would actively defend itself, though, was heretical to the whole premise of how scientists thought plants worked. Plants were not supposed to be that active, or have such dramatic and strategic reactions. Rhoades found few supporters for his hypothesis.
The outdoors are a messy place to do science; lab work is clean, controlled, specific. Baldwin and Schultz placed pairs of sugar maple seedlings inside the sterility of a growth chamber.
Baldwin and Schultz noted that they were the second in line to notice this phenomena, acknowledging Rhoades in their paper. They even went so far as to use the word communication in their work (Rhoades never used the c-word, choosing to dance around it). The mainstream press understandably seized on the wording, printing headlines about “talking trees” in national newspapers.
Jack Schultz spent decades as a major contributor to the field of communication between plants and insects, and was known to say that the scent of cut grass is the chemical equivalent of a plant’s scream.
Rhoades reminded me of Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar and father of genetics, who tried to replicate his beautiful pea-crossing studies in hawkweeds. It never seemed to work; he died frustrated and defeated, believing his life’s work to be irreproducible and therefore meaningless. Of course it was anything but that. What he didn’t know was that hawkweeds have a strange proclivity: they can produce seeds at random without pollination. In other words, they periodically clone themselves instead of reproducing through plant sex, confounding the whole process of studying genetic crossing.
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Other botanists across the spectrum of belief respect Karban mightily, even when they themselves are not the type to entertain ideas of plants doing much of anything with intention. But when they talk about Karban, they use words like “rigorous,” and tell me I should go watch him work.
So I feel like it’s really not fair to get rid of it,” she says. “But I don’t let it spread as much as it would. I artificially maintain a balance, it’s true. That
Monica Gagliano et al., “Tuned in: Plant Roots Use Sound to Locate Water,” Oecologia 184, no. 1 (2017): 151–60.
