Voices of the Garden: The Secret Language of Plants

A meditation on learning how plants communicate

I’m increasingly amazed by the research coming out surrounding plant communication, intelligence, and their aliveness. A recent study showed that plants emit ultrasonic sounds when they are stressed and the researchers could clearly identify which sound correlated with different stressors. “We’re running out of water! Be conscientious!” one plant shouted to its neighbors. “Prepare to be trimmed, I just had a few branches cut!” another warned. Plants clearly can speak. We just need to learn how to listen. 

Part of the problem is that plants are communicating through methods that might be partially beyond what we can ordinarily comprehend and notice. The sounds mentioned above were ultrasonic—something we cannot hear. Another method of plant communication occurs below ground through entangled root systems. A further way plants speak to both each other and animals or insects is through Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). VOCs are small molecules that can be released into the air as gasses. Plants use these to warn neighbors of predators and send general state information to their neighbors. 

The fact that we can’t easily sense these are part of the reason plants are generally understood not to be conscious, intelligent, or communicative in any major way. A secondary bias against plants comes from their apparent lack of movement or reaction on our timescale. We’ve all seen the time-lapse videos of plants either growing from seedling to adult or of a plant moving around. These resonate more because they are sped up enough to allow for apparent real-time movement and adjustments. (Although it’s akin to expecting a human being or an animal to grow as quickly as the eye can perceive.) This is part of the reason humans have generally been drawn to animals rather than plants and why Aristotle and many subsequent natural scientists relegated plants to the lowest form of life—a mistake that is still being rectified. 

The signaling the plants are doing when communicating with their neighbors are those things that we can’t clearly sense—the ultrasonic sounds, the VOCs, and the electrical signals. Each of these seem to require specialized instruments to be able to measure and really understand that a plant is working both on rapid and slow timescales. This poses a difficulty to the average person trying to make sense of, understand, and interact with their every-day waking world. It feels akin to trying to utilize the knowledge of quarks in your day to day life. Something you think exists, maybe can even conceptualize, but ultimately appears as something you can’t have any direct experience with. The same goes for plants. So how do we bridge that gap? 

This is where I think a recognition of plant intelligence or even spirits might be useful. In the same way that we can train our brain to sense stimuli we otherwise wouldn’t have the capability for without some feedback, I think we can learn to “hear” plants. The very concept of a plant’s intelligence or spirit can be the feedback mechanism—if not already literally true. 

Imagine walking up to your tomato plant with this perspective. You ask it how it’s doing today. As you’re asking the question you notice there’s a caterpillar chowing down on the leaves of the tomato plant. As you notice this you hear in your mind “Not great today. I really could use someone getting rid of this caterpillar.” Did you really hear the plant speak? Or did you just notice the caterpillar and create that sensation within your mind. Good news! It doesn’t matter! It is both answers and let me tell you why. 

When the caterpillar is munching on the tomato plant, it begins releasing VOCs and/or ultrasonic pulses to warn its neighbors that a predator is nearby. As you walked up to the plant, even though you didn’t consciously smell or hear anything, the VOCs were still in the air and you inhaled them or “heard” the sound. The information doesn’t register to you but now it is correlated together. Your subconscious creates the connection between the two. 

Now, let’s say this happens a few dozen times. Each time you have this interaction with the plant, you hear it crying for help in your mind as your body processes the signals. Now, it’s tightly correlated enough that perhaps you walk out there one day and hear in your mind, “Help! Something’s eating me!” This time you hadn’t even had the chance to see anything on your tomato plant yet. Your body just knew how to process the information. Just as your body can learn to sense emotions of your partner without thinking about it, it can learn to communicate with plants.¹ 

This can be true with all the other forms of subtle plant communications as well. You learn when a plant needs to be watered before it shows any clear, visible signs of it. You learn when a plant needs to be repotted, pruned, etc. All of this experiential knowledge comes from consistently interacting with a plant—consciously or unconsciously. This doesn’t have to come as a heard voice in your head, it could become correlated with an emotion, a bodily feeling, etc.

I think part of the difficulty lies in the lack of framework surrounding plants being intelligent or communicating. Assuming that you’re hearing a plant in your mind, or feeling a certain emotion when you’re consciously interacting with a plant seems “crazy” or “childish” for many. Or perhaps this is just relegated to harmless imagination. 

Fortunately, there’s the amassing scientific research to support the intelligence of plants more generally. Plants have shown the capability of learning in a variety of situations beyond just learning the water, sun, and weather habits of its location. One study showed that upon being dropped repeatedly with no harm the Mimosa pudica, which initially recoiled, began to stop reacting to the fall. This behavior was sustained even after periods of not being dropped. The plant learned that a certain behavior was harmless over time. To me this echoes the gardener who repeatedly might stroke a tree in their yard or nearby as they speak to it and fertilize it. The plant eventually could come to learn that the stroking signals fertilizer and prepares for it. This is just basic associative learning, yet opens the possibility of a stronger and more clear relationship between plants and humans. It would not surprise me if this was eventually “proven” by some research study to be a possibility. 

As for myself, I’m very much a proponent of plants being alive, conscious, and can very communicate. I would even go so far as to say that they contain a “spirit” in the same way humans have some sort of “spirit” or vital force to them. I talk to my plants, I sing to my plants, I ask them how they are doing, and what I can do for them. And they talk back. One of the earliest practices of mine that helped me move past the cultural blinders I had regarding plants was just instinctively singing Bob Marley’s “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” as I repotted or transplanted them. This is anecdotal of course (all the best things are) but I realized then (and they still do now) that they bounced back from the transplanting shock way faster than when I didn’t talk or sing to them. I still practice this and notice that when I forget, because I’m in a hurry or my mind is elsewhere, the plants struggle more often than not. 

Beyond any metaphysical claim as to whether or not plants are conscious, the practice of speaking to my plants as I work with them is an incredibly grounding experience. It’s meditative to me and strengthens my connections to the surroundings around me which, as I noted in a previous post, is stellar for staving off feelings of atomization and depression.

In short, go talk to plants. See if they talk back. 

I’d love to hear of anyone else’s experiences with plants or if they’ve tried anything like I laid out here. If so, how did it work?

1. To be clear, I don’t have the requisite knowledge to say whether or not this thought-experiment is plausible. To me it seems reasonable, but that is largely because I already have a stake in this believing that plants can and do communicate with humans.