The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

by Zoë Schlanger

Baldwin and Schultz placed pairs of sugar maple seedlings inside the sterility of a growth chamber. The seedlings shared the same air but didn’t touch. Then the researchers ripped the leaves of one and measured the response in the other. Within thirty-six hours, the untouched maple seedling loaded up its leaves with tannin. In other words, despite not experiencing damage itself, the untouched maple went to work making itself extremely unpalatable. 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. They were generally chastised by peers for using such human language for plants, but in contrast to Rhoades, to say their careers recovered would be an understatement. Today Baldwin is one of the most successful and prolific individuals working on plant behavior. He has a large team of graduate students and postdocs working out how tobacco plants, in effect, communicate, defend themselves, and choose which other tobacco plants to have sex with. 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. Both say the...