How much do we actually know about plants? While I was working at The Crystal Castle in Byron Bay we used to run workshops where a group of resident plants were hooked up to devices that allowed the plants to communicate through sound. The device made tonal sounds similar to a piano note ascending and descending and the plants would communicate to the device and essentially talk through playing notes. The interesting part of watching them do this was watching them copy each other, harmonise and seemingly converse backwards and forwards to each other through music. It was obvious that certain plants talked to each other more than others and there were pairings and favourites among the group. Everyone who watched it was absolutely stunned at the intelligence shown.
A professor of forest ecology Suzanne Simard, discovered that trees are connected through fungal webs below the ground. Her work inspired the breathtaking forests that captured our imaginations in the film Avatar. Suzanne’s book ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ delves deeply into the connectivity of forests and how they communicate with each other, in far more superior ways than we first thought. Trees share water, nutrients, carbon, phosphorous, information about their stress factors, whether they’re in shade or sun and whether they are related to each other. These fungal pathways are similar to telephone lines, so the forest trees are literally all talking to each other using these networks.
Suzanne identified the ‘mother trees’, who were instrumental in spreading these fungal networks by infecting seedlings that grow out of the forest floor, similar to the way we are ‘infected’ or baptised by our human mother’s microbiome when we travel down the birth canal.
So to summarise, plants communicate to each other via information super highways in the ground. They talk about food, sunlight, pests and disease and share resources, it’s basically a sewing circle in there. The question I would like to ask is ‘what else do we not know yet about plants? What else will surface in the next twenty years that may change our behavior towards both plants and animals?’.
(sources Rinna Diamantakos, Climate and Environment News 2021)
