Personality of plants

by Royal Dixon; Franklyn Everett Fitch

A more remarkable case is that of a tropical Monstera, which, coming into life on top of a greenhouse, sent canny and vigorous roots directly down to certain water tanks on the ground.

Isolated instances of plant intelligence might be mere coincidences if it were not for the fact that they multiply greatly the further one investigates. The common Potentillas and Brambles show remarkable sagacity in searching out hidden veins of soil among the rocks where they grow. Nothing is more ingenious than the way in which Hyacinths, Primroses and Irises smother competitive seedlings by putting forth large, low-lying leaves to cut off the light of neighbours.

Plants are great inventors, and by continual experimentation have perfected thousands of ingenious devices to help them in their life struggles. Many of these have to do with the all-important processes of reproduction and cross-fertilization. The elaborate organs which oftentimes force visiting insects to aid the flowers in their love-making are conclusive proofs of directing intelligence. If, as is generally believed, vegetable life preceded animal life on this planet, then the plants must have developed these special reproductive organs in which insects act as the fertilizing agents as direct attempts to benefit the race by cross-breeding.

While cross-fertilization is vitally necessary for the maintenance of a vigorous and hardy stock, inbreeding either between flowers of the same plant or even between the organs of a single bi-sexual flower is often practiced. In the love-making of the Grass of Parnassus and the Love in the Mist (Nigella), we have a very pretty and intelligent act. The flowers are unisexual and, as the females usually grow on much longer stalks than the males, the latter would not have much chance of showering their pollen on their consorts, if it were not for the fact that, at the proper season, without outside stimulation, the “tall females bend down to their dwarf husbands.” This surely is as intelligent and conscious as the mating of animals.

The carnivorous plants act with uncanny wisdom. The insect-devouring Sundews pay no attention to pebbles, bits of metal, or other foreign substances placed on their leaves, but are quick enough to sense the nourishment to be derived from a piece of meat. Laboratory specimens have been observed to actually reach out toward Flies pinned on cards near them. So highstrung are these sensitive organisms that they can be partially paralyzed if certain spots on their leaves are pricked.

Many people have no hesitancy in ascribing considerable intelligence to the higher animals; why do they balk at making the same concession to plants? If you concede intelligence to a single animal, you concede some measure of brain-power to all animals down to the one-celled Amoeba, and so must grant the same favour to the plant world. Plants and animals, besides having many habits in common, in their simplest forms are often indistinguishable. Both reduce themselves to single-celled masses of protoplasm. The Myxomycetes are both so plant-like and at the same time so animal-like that their classification “depends rather on the general philosophical position of the observer than on facts.” Possibly they are both animal and plant at the same time—a sort of “missing link” connecting the two kingdoms of life.

Anent the same question Edward Step says, “Modern thought denies consciousness to plants, though Huxley was bold enough to say that every plant is an animal enclosed in a wooden box; and science has demonstrated that there is no distinction between the protoplasm of animals and plants, and that if we get down to the very simplest forms in which life manifests itself we can call them animals or plants indifferently.”

When one considers the rooted, plant-like life of Mollusks and Hermit Crabs, and then the active, animal-like life of the free-swimming Moss spores and the wind-borne Fungi, he is tempted to wonder if, after all, this talk of plants and animals, is not just another of man’s arbitrary classifications, which may be superceded in time by some other system of nomenclature.

Of only one thing are we sure, and that is that all life is one—an expression of the intelligence and power which pervades the universe.

Many readers may vaguely feel and believe these facts and yet not be certain that plants are individually and personally intelligent; long training makes them still feel that the many admittedly clever and ingenious acts recorded every day in plantdom are but the indications of some external mind or force working through Nature. The plants act in certain ways because they have no choice in the matter; they are passive tools in the hands of such craftsmen as “instinct,” “heredity,” and “environment.” The answer to this is that you can ascribe an exactly similar fatalistic interpretation to every human thought, word or deed. What you consider the freest decision of will you made today can be shown conclusively to be the result of a long train of acts and influences which stretches back to Adam. It would have been impossible for you to have acted differently.