Do plants have feelings?
A decade ago — in 2013 — Michael Pollan had a long article in The New Yorker which I’d found fascinating. Like most people, I’d never considered whether plants had feelings.
Besides, I wondered, how would I be able to eat ever again? I could give up meat, but plants? When someone I read pointed out that plants “ate sunlight” I found myself thinking about the long arc of evolution and how it had bent toward us all eating each other.
Pollan’s article was where I first learned about botanist Monica Gagliano and her mimosa paper. When Gagliano had reported that mimosa plants felt pain, she was, predictably, ridiculed.
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird had written a book in 1973 called The Secret Life of Plants, which had made similar claims (albeit without the evidence Gagliano had compiled). Their ideas were considered, well, loony. To be kind about it. I had heard of The Secret Life of Plants book back then, but had never picked it up, since it had been so universally panned.
In Pollan’s article, this paragraph stuck out for me:
On my way out of the lecture hall, I bumped into Fred Sack, a prominent botanist at the University of British Columbia. I asked him what he thought of Gagliano’s presentation. “Bullshit,” he replied. He explained that the word “learning” implied a brain and should be reserved for animals.
It was pretty clear what Gagliano was up against. She told Pollan that her mimosa paper had been rejected by ten journals: “None of the reviewers had problems with the data.” Instead, they balked at the language she used to describe the data. But she didn’t want to change it. “Unless we use the same language to describe the same behavior” — exhibited by plants and animals — “we can’t compare it,” she said.
“Plant scientists in general are incredibly conservative,” a plant scientist told Pollan. “We all think we want to hear novel ideas, but we don’t, not really.”
From time to time I feel vague worries about the houseplants that seem to keep proliferating on my windowsills. I don’t really want them, but feel bad about throwing them out. Sometimes I’d forget to water them, and feel somewhat guilty. I didn’t want more guilt. I didn’t want to know. Truth be told, I felt sorry for the jade plant and the aloe; I felt they belonged out in their desert. Desert plants, I’d noticed, did well as houseplants, since so many of our homes were dry and hot, at least in terms of how plants might feel about the environment. And then there was the forgetting-to-water, which most of us did.
I started wondering how it came to be that humans had plants in their houses, anyway. “Plants as decor,” I’d heard someone say, and the phrase struck me as entirely apt. We knew plants were “alive,” but we didn’t really consider them living things. Not like our dogs. Certainly not like us.
Plants shared nutrients, recognized kin, communicated with each other. They could count. They could feel it when they were touched. Corn could “summon wasps to attack caterpillars,” Gagliano had told a reporter; they were were “far more complex than most of us realized.”
“I want people to realize that the world is full of magic, but not as something only some people can do, or something that is outside of this world,” Gagliano had said. “No, it’s all here.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe, who directs the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed.”
She goes on,
Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak.
Kimmerer, echoing Pollan, writes that “potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity.”
Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might “speak” to one another, but now science has uncovered “compelling evidence that our elders were right — the trees are talking to one another,” she says. Trees were communicating through “hormone-like compounds” — specific chemical signals that one tree sent out when under “the stress of insect attack — gypsy moths gorging on its leaves or bark beetles under its skin.”
The tree sends out a distress call: “Hey, you guys over there? I’m under attack here. You might want to raise the drawbridge and arm yourselves for what is coming your way.” The downwind trees catch the drift, sensing those few molecules of alarm, the whiff of danger. This gives them time to manufacture defensive chemicals.
Susan Simard’s 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree recounted her journey as a research scientist at the British Columbia Ministry of Forests. Her research is helping us understand just how trees communicate with others around them, helping them grow and ward off animal, insect and fungal attacks. I learned from her book that a tree’s brain is in its roots, and it communicates with other plants via fungal hyphae, and that “mother trees” protect and nourish young trees around them.
But I daresay most people today still know nothing about any of this — or if they did, they’d consider it ridiculous.
