Conversations With Plants

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     I was just finishing my morning coffee when my potted rose clicked a message to me. “A little more water, please.” Sure enough, the unopened buds were drooping, and a smidgin of stress was creeping up from the roots.

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     Roses do that, you know. So do peonies and daffodils and larkspur. The “clicking” language of plants is considerably varied, complex, and by the way, is not audible to humans. So, I was kidding about my rose: it was speaking at a frequency of about 60 kilohertz, and I couldn’t hear it. The human sound range maxes out at about 20 kHz. Even so, I talk to them.

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     Plants have complex languages, and they communicate with others of their kind and with other species in order to keep harmony. And not just in sounds, but in vibrations and electrical frequencies and chemical scents and touch as well. It depends on who’s listening—or who needs to listen.

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     So, what do they say? Mushrooms communicate through electrical signals—“electrical spikes”—from their underground roots (called hyphae). Some have vocabularies of up to 50 “words”. They tell each other lots of different things—where to move for the nearest food, unsavory areas to avoid, even when to poke new mushrooms above ground to reproduce. But they don’t exchange baseball scores or limericks: They’re serious plants, after all!

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     Many plants speak in chemicals. The ponderosa pine negotiates with the notorious pine bark beetle, secreting odors preventing destructive visits to its limbs and needles. But a different chemical (these are called “terpenes”, from which comes “turpentine”) is secreted in the lower ten feet of the trunk. These say, “Hey, come on in and feast!” The beetle responds, laying eggs in the lower limbs which hatch into larvae, which destroy these limbs, removing the fire danger to the tree. These terpenes smell differently from those higher up: put your nose against the trunk of a ponderosa and instead of noxious turpentine you will detect butterscotch! The beetles love butterscotch! They dance and sing and make love over it! The tree is happy, too.

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     I’m trying hard to learn my rose’s language, still. It couldn’t care less about learning mine.

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Ron Wetherington