For a while the idea of talking to your houseplants gained an audience. As living things, both plants and animals exist at a vibrational level, and establishing a resonance between you and your Begonia may be possible from a quantum perspective. I’ve been talking to my plants for more than fifty years; it’s another thing to listen.
Plants and trees have a lot to say, if you pay attention. Plants preceded animals on Earth by perhaps a billion years. It’s a plant world and they know a lot about living. Faced with survival in nearly every imaginable environment, it’s likely that animal life evolved from plants. Mitochondria are the energy organelles of cellular life, and they first developed within the plant world; we animals purloined them.
The challenge of survival unites us, and although plants are older than animals, together we inhabit a global living system billions of years old. We not only share this planet but share ways in which we survive. We all breathe, require water, and consume nutrients produced by other living things. We have adjusted to the force of gravity and solar radiation. It’s only logical that plants can teach us.
Take bamboo, for example. I raised seven species of bamboo in my garden for nearly 30 years, including a timber bamboo that grew nine inches a day and reached forty-five feet tall. When the wind blew hard, sometimes very hard, the bamboo would bend radically, springing back to upright between gusts; it never broke. In this way, bamboo teaches how the combined qualities of strength and flexibility contribute to survival.
The Black Walnut in my garden was a majestic giant of considerable age. Ninety-five feet tall, right in the center of the lot, its branches reached far across the fifty-foot width of the garden. A resting place for crows and roosting Turkey Buzzards, when producing nuts it provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the neighborhood squirrels. With a diameter of nearly five feet, the giant’s trunk looked like the leg of a Brontosaurus. And all this while standing on one leg, teaching about balance and grace. Every time I get into Tree Pose while practicing Yoga, I think of and visualize that tree.
That trees communicate with each other is now accepted. Using chemicals released into the air, they warn other plants about injury-causing insects. Through microbial mycelium networks, they pass information to each other below ground. Plants communicate something constantly but understanding it is a matter of receptivity. As animals, we can only detect so much, but as people, we can also observe and predict.
Is our thirst for knowledge born of thirst? Water is life at the cellular level, as far as we know, another thing we share with plants. Animals depend upon plants, but the opposite is not necessarily the case. Photosynthesis means plants can survive on water, air, and sunlight alone. Although we have formed some symbiotic relationships with plants, even at the bacteriological level, animal life is dependent upon plants. We need them or we’ll perish.
The basic teaching here is about cooperation. Through cooperation we animals endure; if we don’t cooperate well the plant world will go on fine without us. It’s watched billions of years of animals come and go; we’re just the latest.
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