Talking to your plants is not as strange an idea as you think

SOME people talk to their house plants and, even if you don’t, you would probably describe a geranium that’s wilting as ‘not looking happy’. 

The constitution of Switzerland requires ‘account to be taken of the dignity of living beings, when handling animals, plants and other organisms’. In 2008, the Swiss government established an ethics committee to define and protect the dignity of plants. Is this all rubbish?

Not entirely. Science shows that the differences between plants and animals are not as vast as was previously believed. The findings are summed up in a book I’m reading, What A Plant Knows, by Daniel Chamovitz. Dr Chamovitz is an academic from Tel Aviv University and the science in his book is impeccable.

Although the plant and animal kingdoms separated two billion years ago, they had already developed many genes in common, which survive today in you and in your geranium. So, to get back to that geranium, the bad news is that it can’t hear what’s being said because plants are deaf. However, they do have senses of ‘vision’, ‘smell’ and ‘touch’ and possess some ability to remember. So, if you are close to a geranium when you’re talking, it will be ‘aware’ of your shadow and the warm, moist, carbon dioxide-laden breath coming from your lungs. It’s also capable of remembering these sensations the next time you approach it.

This might seem like bad news for vegetarians and vegans whose dietary choices are an ethical desire to avoid causing distress to other living organisms. But, reassuringly, plants do not feel pain, because they don’t have a brain or a nervous system. Although they collect information in similar ways to us, they process it quite differently.

The study of how they do is called plant neurobiology. It’s a comparatively new science and quite controversial. In fact its very name caused so much controversy among some members of the scientific community that, in 2009, the Society for Plant Neurobiology changed its name to the more acceptable Society of Plant Signalling and Behaviour. Even this name is fairly radical, because ‘behaviour’ is not a term most conventional biologists use in connection with plants.

What all this amounts to is that science is slowly changing its opinion of the cognitive ability of plants. ‘Cognitive ability’ isn’t quite the right phrase, but that’s part of the problem.

We don’t actually have the vocabulary we need to accurately describe some of the new ideas and the new findings that are emerging.

In the meantime, we probably need to think twice before we ridicule someone who talks to a pot plant, and approach the vegetable garden with a little more respect.