On Plant Communication

By Rosemary Dzus

Paraphrasing Stephen Harrod Buhner’s writing in his book, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, he proposes that we humans determine which sensory stimuli we take into account and pay attention to based on our learned template, which includes our family dynamic, our education, and our culture. 1 In the West, this tends to mean a reductionist, mechanistic approach to the way we live in the world.  This has encouraged us to block many intrinsic meanings of what we encounter; only the form, and the act of naming and analyzing the form has relevance.   Thus, we miss other important details of our surroundings. 

 Let’s look at some fairly recent examples of this from the world of science.  For a very long time, it was assumed by ornithologists that birds had no sense of smell.   But, over the past twenty years, researchers like Dr. Danielle Whittakerhave challenged that perception, with work that's provided insight into the olfactory aspects of bird life.  Dr. Whittaker has found that scent can play a significant role in the lives of birds, from predator detection to mate choice.2

 Why didn’t someone figure this out before the early 21st century, since the study of birds has been around since the mid-eighteenth century?  This blind spot was due at least in part because John James Audubon, one of the pioneers of American ornithology, and the author and illustrator of the iconic book The Birds of America, did some experiments that convinced him that vultures did not use a sense of smell to track down carrion.  It seems that ornithologists simply extrapolated that “fact” to the entire avian world, and that was that; the notion that birds could smell was removed from the typical ornithologist’s template.

 In another example, scientists are now discovering that there are many species which vocalize although it’s been assumed in the past that they did not.  These species include sea turtles, who vocalize to each other while still in the egg, apparently to synchronize their hatching time.   Other examples of unexpected sound makers include lungfish and Caecilians (legless amphibians).  It’s hypothesized that sound making may have been around for as long as 400 million years, possibly starting with a common ancestor.  The scientist who made these observations in the field, Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, says “We tend to pay attention to things that are obvious to us.”  In other words, science is human biased, and we tend to not notice what we don’t expect. 3

 Shifting to the field of botany, a scientist named Suzanne Simard has been working in the field for more than 30 years, proving through her experiments that trees can communicate with each other, and that mother trees can recognize their offspring, and give them more nutrients than those that are not their progeny, as well as allowing them more growing room.   The communication method by which nutrients, water, defense signals and hormones move between trees is via a dense web of mycelium, or fungal threads that colonize the roots of all  trees and plants in a forest. The mushrooms that we see in the forest are the fruiting bodies of  the mycelium.  What is below ground, then, is a densely packed web of communication lines, sometimes hundreds of kilometres worth beneath a single footstep, within and between plant communities. 4

 What other possibilities in communication are out there but are not part of what we expect?  If we take the notion of human bias against something that is not expected, and combine that with the idea that through our upbringing we were almost certainly told to ignore some things and pay attention to others, what else might be out there that we have been taught to ignore?   

 Sometimes, we hear about, or experience events that cannot be explained through current scientific understanding.  There are people who say that they can communicate with animals, and some even make a living from this skill.  Another example is communication with plants, which reaches even farther into the unexpected and unexplored. 

 Perhaps you have had trees speak to you. Perhaps you have been led to a place and found exactly the plant that you were thinking of or seeking.  Perhaps you have finally come to think that plants can communicate with us, and are trying to tell us things. 

 After many years of receiving information and messages from plants, I have finally come to acknowledge these events as intentional communications rather than acts of my imagination or some kind of highly unusual occurrence.  This has opened up a whole new way of looking at the world.  What if, as we’ve been told by mystics throughout history, we are all one, we are all part of the same energy and communication with plants is simply a manifestation of this?  What if plants, beyond communicating with each other,  have important things to say to us?

 What if, as W.B. Yeats said, “The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper”?

 Footnotes:

 1 p. 64. Buhner, Stephen Harrod.  Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception, Into the Dreaming of Earth. Bear and Company. Rochester, Vermont. 2014.

 2 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jun-18-black-death-origins-chicken-domestication-the-life-of-a-mastodon-and-more-1.6492059

 3 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/nov-12-rocket-debris-falling-to-earth-non-compostable-plastic-animal-vocalization-and-more-1.6646412

 4  https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other?language=en