We have had a very dry spell here for weeks, so I have been watering the garden a lot and thinking about and talking to the beauty of life in front of my eyes - just like any gardener and plant lover does and in line with the Royal Botanic Garden of Sydney!
Talking to plants - or maybe just observing them during watering - helps understand their life and requirements.
And so far, I thought, that that was the reason for the "green thumb" some people have.
Our gardener Paul, however, drew my attention to an essay in the New Yorker some time ago: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant about the amazing and still quite unresearched communication between plants. Just because they have a sedentary and slow life style, it does not mean they are "stupid" or less well evolved than animals. On the contrary, someone so well adapted to be able to harvest food and energy from a tiny single plot of land by using water and light only ( and some minerals from the ground), and grow to amazing sizes, deserves more recognition and attention and will surely have evolved a communication system to optimize adaptation to varying circumstances.
Which leads me back to my past life as a researcher of Streptomyces, a "sedentary" soil bacterium with fungus-like mycelial growth. These bacteria produce a great variety of secondary metabolites, very complex molecules, many of medicinal value, among them several different classes of antibiotics. Research in that field has been reduced in the past decades, because we thought, we had found enough substances to treat any bacterial illness, but the occurence of multiple resistences has lead to a rethink. Recently, research has been going back to searching for new natural antibacterial agents.
Why would plants produce such elaborate molecules and go to the length of evolving them - just for the protection of the self ? Why not for communication and harvesting information from other species? Their senses may be different, some recipient "organs" not yet identified, but some researches go as far as predicting a plant "nervous" system. Some plant species have been shown to react to stress by other plants in the neighbourhood. Several hundred different complex molecules, mostly unidentified, have been found .... But does that mean, that plants might even feel "pain"? What kind of harm do we do by cutting down plants, harvesting or even eating? And what does that mean for all the vegetarians? Certainly, living plants have a right to live as well?
Since reading that article, I certainly go about gardening with a renewed view of plants' lives. But somewhere up or down the food-chain, we cannot always "be nice". The animals, that we are, have to inflict pain on other living creatures now and then to sustain life. Anyway, my garden walks this week produced a couple of image overlays and other compositions. As the sky was overcast, colours and contrasts were perfect for some macro work.
Detail of Allium giganteum
The Rose "Abraham Darby" with an overlay of flowers from Cotinus coggygria "Royal Purple"
A columbine (Aquilegia) with Centranthus ruber
more Aquilegia compositions
where is the bee?
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