Scientists from around the world are claiming that plants cannot just sense,
but communicate, learn and remember.
In an experiment in Australia, plants appeared to learn to associate a sound with a food source,
just as Pavlov's dogs linked the sound of a bell with dinner.
In Israel they've found that plants communicated a message from one to another,
and that the information was then used to survive drought.
In British Columbia and the UK researchers have shown that trees pass information
and nutrients to each other through an underground fungal network.
This happens more with closely related trees or seedlings than with strangers.
And in California it turns out that sagebrush shrubs have 'regional dialects' in communicating...
(Food for thought, from the BBC website.)
1 comment:
Anyone who has done any gardening for several years understands the uncanny intelligence of plants, their adaptations, their often preferring death to adaptation, their thriving in place, i.e., in their niches), their gratuitous offerings of grace, taste, and beauty, their rewarding us with their presence and their intuitive understanding of our appreciation. I had some cherry tomatoes from a year before, whose seeds from dead tomatoes were in the earth, use the high stalks of some flowering spearmint to climb into the branches of a ponderosa lemon and make their way half way up the tree (at least shoulder height) to come out from the leaves midway and fruit in abundance. The thorns on the lemon tree branches protected the cherry tomatoes from being eaten by the birds, who loved them, when they were much lower in the ground.
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