Does Nature Love?
While carbon is a building block of life, love may be the organizing force.
When friends visit my garden, I usually offer them a cup of tea with freshly picked herbs. Their first sips usually inspire comments like, “yum, this tastes so vibrant,” or “wow, these flavors are bright.”
While part of the delight is because the herbs are fresh, I like to think their flavor is also an expression of the plant’s love. My plant friends express themselves in a broad range of scents, shapes, and colors.
I love the plants growing in my yard. I sing to them (I don’t have a great singing voice, which may be more cruel than kind). I miss them when they go dormant in the winter and celebrate them when they return in the spring.
Do my plants love me back? I think so.
Ecologist Suzanne Simard’s research is helping us understand how trees in the forest use fungal networks to communicate with each other, warn each other of danger, and nurture their kin. Nurturing kin sounds like love to me.
My plants and I are not close kin on a long evolutionary path, but we live together now. I love them and think they love me as well.
