Personality of plants

by Royal Dixon; Franklyn Everett Fitch

Have the plants souls and spirits? No man who has carefully and conscientiously studied them can wholly deny it. They exhibit a pluck, a determination, a moral perseverance which awaken all our admiration. Where we are weak, they are strong. Where men would lie down and die, they go steadily forward. When a plant perishes in the struggle for existence, it is because the odds have been too great. To make the most of heredity and environment is an axiomatic rule in plantdom.

Man’s mind has developed at the expense of man’s body. The plants always maintain an admirable balance between the two. There are degenerates and unscrupulous individuals among them, but they never forget that their first duty is to themselves. Self-culture is with them a passion. Whoever heard of a plant over-eating or over-drinking or giving way to any of those indulgent vices which are the bane of the human world? They have their faults, but they are sources of strength rather than weakness.

In relation to its companions of the vegetable realm, the Murderer Liana is a double-dyed villain, yet it is only practicing in an open and frank way, the food-getting methods, which all life, by its very nature, is forced to adopt. To live by the destruction of others is the sad lot of both the smallest plant and the most highly developed animal.

Aside from the peculiarly human susceptibility to self-indulgence, it is hard to find a single spiritual trait not exhibited by some member of the plant kingdom.

Love? There is no higher devotion than that shown by the water plant called Vallisneria. The female flowers reach the surface of the water at the end of long, tapering, spiral-like stalks, but the males are compelled to remain far down near the bottom. At the flowering season, the males, responding to the universal mating instinct, deliberately break themselves from their stalks and rise to the surface to be near their loves for a little while. All too soon, however, they are carried away by unruly currents to an untimely death, leaving behind them, in their pollen, the principle from which another generation of their species shall arise. They have presented themselves a living sacrifice on the altar of love.

Courage? Think of all the hardy trees which dwell in the high and cold places of the earth—places that are so exposed and desolate that the trees and plants find it necessary to contract themselves into the smallest possible compass, often living largely underground. On the other hand, think of the death-defying Cacti which live in infernos of the desert heat and dryness and yet put forth flowers of joy.

Faith? Hope? What sustains the perennials through long, bleak winters and makes them sure of the promise of spring? When the Alpine flowers are so positive that spring has really come that they push their inquiring heads up through the snow which still covers the mountains, they are showing a superhuman faith, literally risking death in order that they may get a strong and early start in life.

Charity? When trees like the Oak and the Maple allow a whole multitude of lesser plants to dwell in the snugness of their shadows, they are showing forth some of the kindly qualities of plantdom. If they chose to they could discourage lowly neighbours after the manner of the monopolistic Beech or the aristocratic Pine.

Name a human sin or virtue, good quality or bad, and one does not have to search far in the plant world for its counterpart. Along with kindness, mercy, gratitude, submissiveness, and parental love we also find cruelty, hard-heartedness, ingratitude, arrogance and neglect of offspring. Even at that, the credit side always exceeds the debit and no plant is guilty of self-destruction. It must be borne in mind, that what we call sin and malignity are to them legitimate courses of action.

If plants have every property of the human soul, why have men been so slow to admit their kinship with the trees and the flowers? Life, law and love are divine and bind man to all creation. He is spiritually as well as physically related to the plants. In the past, he has endeavoured to set himself apart from Nature and look down upon her as upon another world. Because he has a brain, he has imagined that anything which has none cannot possibly possess an intelligence and an inner life. To uphold this theory he has shut his eyes to a thousand denying facts.