THE POWER OF PLANTS
Rex Burress
I was out again before sunrise watering plants in expectation of another near 100+ July day. Plants have power but first they must have water. Power springs loose a certain savvy that some call intelligence!
One of the garden plants I keep supplied with Calwater is a clump of succulents. They are growing out of a tub Jo had put there, totally trapped and dependent on human intervention, especially in the long hot summer. They don't provide much other than some fat, green leaves, but I guide the hose stream to them everyday, aiming at a round space at the base of the dense foliage.
Now this is the tickler--the plant keeps that space open, as if to encourage me to give it the life saving water! Succulent leaves densely cover all the rest of the bushel-shaped cluster, but does not fill the round passage, as if in expectation of the stream of salvation! I muse that it is a sign of realization--a kind of thinking--or at least great sensitivity, and I fancy the appeal is aimed at me! The action seems akin to an open vagina beckoning for a flow of fluid to enter the passageway.
Then I was rewarded for the water! Thrusting its way up through the leaves came a slick shaft of a Naked Lady plant, Amaryllis belladonna, strikingly leafless, but bursting open at the terminus with a glorious cluster of vivid pink blossoms! I had forgotten the bulb had been planted there, and it hadn't appeared for a couple years. It was as if the succulent had encouraged it to bloom gallantly for the water man!
As lovely as the belladonna lady is, there is a sinister cloak hanging over her allurement—she has the potential to be deadly poisonous! She has her roots in the Solanaceae family that features 2,700 species, many with serious toxins, including the Deadly Nightshade, Atropa belladonna, native to Northern Africa and Europe, but naturalized in North America. The drops the ophthalmologist puts in your eyes for examination is an extract from deadly nightshade. Although the shiny black berries appear innocent and edible—beware! “The dosage makes a plant useful or deadly.”
Another example of backyard “plant intelligence” is the way foxtail grass keeps a low profile in lifting their spiny seed heads. Out in the fields, competing with other grasses for sunlight and seed dispersal, the barbed seed stalks can be thrust two or three feet high, but where the mowing machine keeps things clipped low, the bristly business clings close to the ground to escape beheading! Plants are adaptable to changing conditions for survival. Those groping grape vine and trumpet tentacles press outward/upward for a purpose—existence! Intelligence may not be there as we with brains define it, but some sort of super sensitivity guides their growth.
We see the raw power of plants breaking up through cracks in asphalt and concrete following the eagerness of roots to complete the journey from soil to sunlight. “They roll the concrete over it and try to keep it back, but the concrete gets tired of what it has to do,/And it breaks and it buckles,/And the grass grows through...” so sang Pete Seeger in “God Bless the Grass.” Fragile mushrooms have that same dormant power to break through obstacles in order to rise and spread its spores.
Long debated, the 'intelligence' of plants falls more into plant neurobiology and the 'nerve' perception that helps guide plant growth.
“Plants have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives...integrate it and then behave in an appropriate way to response. And they do this without brains as in the animal kingdom.”--Michael Pollan