July 18, 2024

When we honor the wisdom of Ériu, walking the land,
living her rhythms, and knowing her patterns…

I could wile away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain

When Dorothy met Scarecrow, he was desperate for a brain. As he pointed in two opposite directions for her to take, Dorothy asked him to make up his mind. “That’s the trouble. I can’t make my mind. I haven’t got a brain. Only straw.” Of course he soon devises an ingenious way to rescue Cowardly Lion from the poppy field and determines that building a raft would be the best way to cross a river. By the end of the story he is recognized as the wisest man in all of Oz. As I reflect on this story, it’s not lost on me that he was created entirely from plants.

Throughout history, there has been speculation on the intelligence and consciousness of plants. Most with perhaps more philosophical credibility than L. Frank Baum who authored The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In ancient Greek philosophy, almost as soon as a “soul” came to differentiate animate from inanimate things, plants were included among the soul-havers. Empedocles gave plants souls in his accounting of the world, and referred to them as animals, precisely because they were animate—alive. Theophrastus, the successor to Aristotle, was completely willing to take the plant seriously as an autonomous being with desires and the will to satisfy them.

Those speculations didn’t take hold. Neither did the many other voices through history that have posited the same theories. Most were ridiculed, demeaned and ostracized for their views until science caught up with their ideas and proved them to be true. 

Look at what plants do.They take information from the outside world. They process. They make decisions.  They take everything into account and transform it into a reaction. And this to me is the basic definition of intelligence. 

Tilo Henning
Berlin Botanic Garden

Intelligence. Consciousness. Communication. The inherent challenge is surrendering our human centric notions of these constructs. As Emanuele Coccia observed, to ask humankind what being in the world means limits our ability to truly see and know the world around us. It limits our ability to see the patterns and the rhythms. Schenger’s book, The Light Eaters, shifts that limited perspective. 

Researchers at Tel Aviv University found
that the beach evening primrose
would increase the sweetness of its nectar
within three minutes of being exposed
to an audio recording of honeybee flight.

I understand Schenger’s choice to share the insights and findings she gathered in distinct chapters focused on plant consciousness, communication. hearing, seeing, feeling, and social life. Yet in the highlights of those findings, those distinctions are blurry. And in that, there is the invitation to even deeper understanding.

Maybe Baum got it right. Maybe we need to consider an entirely different reality to understand the depth and complexities of plant patterns and rhythms. Maybe we need to wander in otherworld and liminal landscapes. Maybe Scarecrow was a huge clue.

Beannacht,
Judith