Plant Blindness

Some people go through life seeing birds. “There’s a juvenile fork-tailed flycatcher!” they’ll say pointing to a brown speck of a bird high in the canopy. My spouse, on the other hand, sees pulleys and levers and electrical things everywhere. Me, I walk the earth noticing dogs, cats, goats, and any warm-blooded thing susceptible to my overtures. You may pay special attention to trucks or bugs or bats, but if you’re like most of us, you suffer from what botanists call plant blindness, the habit of perceiving the vegetable kingdom as a green blur in the background of our lives.

If you want to get over that affliction in a hurry, read Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters. Not only will you begin to see plants as you have never seen the before, but you may start to feel that plants are, in their own unfathomable way, keeping an eye on you, perhaps listening to you. Contemporary botanists, often risking their reputations and careers, are exploring the sentience and intelligence of plants.

But scientists as well as poets long ago intuited that there was far more to plants than their green silence. Here is Alexander Humboldt, quoted by Schlanger: “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul…Everything is interaction and reciprocal.” And here is Baudelaire, in Correspondances, a poem that haunted me like tinnitus while I was reading Schlanger’s book:

“Nature is a temple where living pillars / At times allow confused word s to come forth…” (La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers  /  Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles…) 

Schlanger’s book is full of entrancing stories, such as the one about the corn plant and the caterpillar. A caterpillar bites a corn plant leaf. The plant, from the DNA in the caterpillar’s saliva, determines the caterpillar’s species. It (she/he/they) then emits a chemical vapor designed to attract the one species of wasp that preys on the attacking caterpillar. The wasp promptly appears, stings the caterpillar, sucks up its viscera, and lays her eggs in its remains while the corn plant, I expect, breathes a sigh of relief.

Then there is Boquila, a plant found in Chile, that for self protection changes the shape of its leaves to match the leaves of other plants in its vicinity without touching them. Does this mean that Boquila can see? Perhaps Boquila, which like you and me is surrounded by a cloud of microbes, senses the microbial clouds of other plants and is thus able to copy them.

This brings Schlanger to the point that most speaks to me: “What if ‘ourselves’ is a shifting composite, impossible to separate from the roiling microbial masses within and around us?”

Clouds of microbes, morphing and changing selves, immersion, compenetration, mutual interfusion. Is what lies outside my skin separate and distinct from what is inside it? I sit writing next to my big fiddleleaf ficus and wonder, are we mutually interfused? Looking up, I see the veins on the underside of her leaves, as thick as the veins inside my wrists. When I pat her, she rustles like parchment. What are her impressions on this golden autumn afternoon?

I have always had a relationship of sorts with my plants. They respond in obvious ways to my care, and I like to watch them thrive. Once, when I euthanized a big Ti plant because it was too much trouble to melt snow for it in the winter (it couldn’t tolerate tap water), I felt guilty for days. But now things have become complicated, because of the cat Telemann. Our microbial clouds are definitely commingled, which makes me feel obliged to make him happy. For this we have several rituals: the brushing ritual, the sitting-on-my chest-while-I-try-to-read-in-bed ritual, the nose bump ritual. But the most important is the spider plant ritual.

Every morning, after breakfast, I clip a couple of inches off one of the two spider plants that I keep especially for Telemann to eat, sort of the way the Maasai bleed their cattle, though not enough to kill them, and drink their blood. How do the plants, not to  mention the cows, feel about this? Do they recoil in horror when I enter the room? The botanist Jack Schultz says that the scent of cut grass is the chemical equivalent of a plant’s scream. What desperate signals are the spider plants sending me that I am too obtuse to notice?

Am I justified in causing pain to one organism to give pleasure to another? And having read Schlanger’s book, how can I avoid seeing a massacre in every bowl of salad? To a serious plant pro-lifer, eating the merest walnut must constitute infanticide….

There is no answer to these quandaries. Knowledge breeds compassion, responsibility and, inevitably, suffering (compassion, from Latin compati, to suffer with). But there is compensation in the knowledge that we humans no longer stand aloof and alone on the pinnacle of Nature. Instead, we swim companionably in “a microcosmic sea of shifting identity and form” with all the other creatures—furry, green, feathered, scaly, visible, and invisible—with whom we share the Earth.