Darlings, I thought we’d start the new year with a recommended read. File this one under truth is stranger than fiction: The Light Eaters, by Zoe Schlanger. With all that’s going on—and about to come—it can be easy to give into the human-centered doom and gloom. But, I think some time with other, possibly smarter, forms of life might be restorative. Think of it as bloomscrolling.
While it is a science book, it’s also a reporter’s journey into a world that we interact with (and depend on) every day but rarely notice. At least not the whole story. There’s a whole world of beings communicating with each other—and possibly with us—if we can learn to listen. Just who are all these noisy beings chatting away. Why, plants, darling. We might think of vegetables as—well, vegetables—as in inert and passive, when they would seem to be anything but.
Our tour guide into this world of plant intelligence is a reporter who left the rough and tumble chaos of newsrooms and the climate beat to pursue her newfound passion for plants. Amidst the reporting on the looming catastrophe, she developed an interest in botany that soon consumed her so much she decided to dedicate her life to telling a different story. The story of plants, a story chock full of astounding developments in botanical research going on every day and poised to totally transform how we see the world and ourselves.
Simple, unassuming plants, which humans relegated to food or decoration, are proving to be more multi-faceted than we could imagine. Take the the utilitarian and utterly boring corn plant. It is so exquisitely tuned into itself and its world that it can sense a caterpillar chowing down on its leaves. It can’t move or swat it away like animals such as ourselves would do. Rather, it releases chemicals into the air that attract wasps that will kill the caterpillar for it—in a particularly slow and gruesome way that just happens to benefit the wasp tremendously. Tomatoes and certain trees can inject more tannin into their leaves when they feel something snacking on them. At first it just tastes bad, but they keep pumping more and more until their leaves become poisonous. These responses are everywhere botanists choose to investigate.
Yes, this is evolution—adaptations developed over millions of years. But the adaptation here is a capacity to respond to the environment. The word “intelligence,” as we read again and again in this book, is too loaded a way to describe this capacity for many people. At least, in our current understanding and usages of the word. But if the foxglove fits…
Between their chemical signals filling the air (in our hubris, we call them scents and think they’re for us!) and electrical signals pulsing through their roots in the ground, we are surround by symphonies of subtle, intelligent communications that put our fancy language skills to shame. Moving beyond communication, she dives into thorny questions like can plants see? Feel? Hear? Remember? Recognize family? The answers would seem to be a highly qualified yes to each. Not the ways we do all these things, rather they do it in their own plant ways.
Maybe Little Shop of Horrors isn’t so far-fetched after all. Better water your plants, darlings. Don’t want them holding a grudge. Who know what they might get up to.
And why this botanical digression in what’s supposed to be a newsletter about art? It will come as no surprise, that I’m drawn to drawing flowers—always have been. Could it be more than just aesthetics? Are they calling to me? Am I sensing a deeper connection in some way? Flowers are a marvel of adaptation, of seeming excess that’s actually finely tuned survival by manipulating us animals with their beauty. Who’s using who, I wonder.
Plenty of artists are similarly drawn to floral subjects or elements in their work. But it’s a botanist, quoted in the book, who describes what I feel most beautifully:
She developed her affinity for plant companionship [early]. She came to think of plants as quietly capable, doing what must be done and doing it well, without fuss, all from the confines of their little pots. They gave her a sense that everything was being well handled. Nothing about that has changed for her. “I like being around them,” she says. “They have this serene competence.”
And it’s this beautiful, serene competence that makes them such compelling subjects. They aren’t decoration or background, they’re characters in the story. And clearly, with languages of their own, the flowers have stories to tell—we just have to listen in.