Life lessons from the Vegetal Kingdom

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution” – Albert Einstein

 

Plants can live without us, they have done it for billions of years before the Homo Sapiens appeared on the earth. Without plants, human beings are sentenced to extinction on a short time. The vegetal world itself covers more that 99,5% (estimates vary from 99,5% to 99,9%) of the biomass of the entire planet, reducing the animal kingdom, including human beings, to a miserable percentage.

The scientific world, developing branches like vegetal physiology or neurobiology, is full of studies that bring to light incredible discoveries, which cannot but change the vision we have of the plants.

“It has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings” wrote Charles Darwin in his autobiography, often describing them as extraordinary living beings. Few years later, his son Francis underlines the admiration for the vegetal kingdom by declaring, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on September 2, 1908, that plants have a primordial form of intelligence.

“… the idea that plants are passive, insensitive beings without any ability to communicate, behave and calculate – a completely incorrect vision of evolution – is still firmly rooted, even in the scientific community ” writes the famous Italian scientist Stefano Mancuso in the book “Brilliant Green”.  And in fact, at least some of us, have grown up with this belief. The verb vegetate has not a positive connotation and the way in which plants are sometimes treated is not very different from that reserved to objects.

What if plants were different and not necessarily inferior? If they had chosen to live anchored to the ground as their evolution strategy? The results of researches and experiments continue to give surprising answers to these provocations, revealing unexpected conclusions about how the vegetal kingdom has been able to evolve, adapting to different conditions.

If we define intelligence as the ability to solve the problems that life presents, calculating risks and foreseeing benefits, we can definitely associate this concept with plants, while reading old and recent results of several scientific studies. Through their roots, plants recognize minimal quantities of mineral salts hidden in many cubic meters of earth, carnivorous plants are able to carry out a digestive process that metabolizes the captured animal, producing enzymes that dissolve it and allowing the leaves to absorb the nutrients. Thanks to biogenic volatile organic compounds, many plants warn the neighbours or even distant parts of the same plant in real time of dangers in progress, in order to trigger defence mechanisms. They manage to produce chemical molecules capable of making their leaves indigestible or even poisonous for predators. Not to mention the strategies implemented to ensure pollination and seed transport.

Imagination and new perspectives are precious ingredients in understanding evolution and after reading some past and recent studies of great botanists, we will perhaps change our attitude the next time we walk along a tree-lined avenue or when we will seek peace in the solitude of a wood. To find out, who knows if and who knows when, that perhaps we are not so lonely when we walk in that wood that gives us peace and serenity.

 

SUGGESTED BOOK: “Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence”, Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola

 

Photo Credits: Stefano Butturini