Sometimes, through sentimental attachment, whole peoples elect certain flowers to represent them before the world. Thus the United States has chosen the Goldenrod for its national floral emblem, while the Rose of England, the Thistle of Scotland, the Shamrock of Ireland, and the Leek of Wales act in the same capacity for the British Isles.
Man paid a high compliment to the mystic veneration in which he holds the plant world when he, in his primitive beliefs, invariably conceived of heaven as some terrestrial paradise of luxurious vegetation. The Persians had their Mount Caucasus; the Arabians dreamed about an Elysium in the Desert of Arden; the Greeks and Romans had bright mental pictures of the Gardens of Hesperides; and the Celts hoped to spend their postmortem existence on an enchanted isle of wondrous beauty.
Such beliefs have fallen into disuse, but man is still a long way off from a solution of the various mystic phenomena of the plant world. Botanists should leave off indexing and classifying plants for a while and endeavour to discover the subtle and fascinating laws of their psychic existence.
CHAPTER XIII
Plant Intelligence
“The Marigold goes to bed with the sun,
And with him rises weeping.”—Shakespeare
It is no new thing to believe in the existence of intelligence among plants. As far back as Aristotle, various great minds in the earth’s history have ascribed definite, thinking acts to our floral and vegetable friends. Not a few have seen unmistakable evidences of soul in plantdom. Even the most skeptical have become aware of many things they cannot explain in purely mechanistic terms.
We are still living in an age which has deified human wisdom. Man has built up vast systems of knowledge and law, all based on his own deep-rooted convictions. He approaches every subject with apriori beliefs and presumptions. He is slow to acknowledge thinking powers to his companion creatures of a terrestrial universe.
ALLIES OF THE DESERT ARM THEMSELVES WITH PRICKLES AND THORNS AGAINST THEIR ANIMAL ENEMIES
To a person on a country road, the wayside trees and flowers are too often mere happenings or creations. Their ways are so quiet and undemonstrative, that, if he has never been taught differently, he rarely thinks of classifying them as independent, free-acting beings. The fact that they are anchored to the soil seems to remove them from the realm of self-willed creation. Yet why should it? Are fishes not doomed to pass all their days in the chemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen we call water? Does not the delicate Canary die if the air surrounding it goes below a certain temperature?