When we walk through a forest, a park, or just a garden, we admire the beauty of the trees and plants, but we do not realise how little we know about the mysterious world of plants.
Plants supply us with oxygen, which they emit abundantly and clear the air of carbon dioxide, which they absorb through their leaves and turn into ‘food’. It is for this reason that the growth of a forest is more profuse after a bush fire, because of its ample supply of carbon dioxide, which the fire left behind. Its emissions of oxygen are quite noticeable when we breathe in the fresh air of the Park or Forest.
Plants, like our vegetables, are rich in vitamins and minerals, maintaining human and animal health, and have great healing powers in the form of herbs. Chinese herbs, for instance, are famous for their potential as healing agents and medicines. Even tea and coffee comes from plants.
Plants also use most of our waste to their advantage. That is why we feed them to compost, which the plants convert into food for themselves, becoming lusher and healthier as a result.
Perhaps we already know all this, but there is another side to plants, which is virtually still unknown, namely that plants, in a primitive sort of way, also ‘think’. Plants do not have a brain, but they do, like ourselves, have a ‘spirit body’, which is to our subconscious mind, with which a simple form of thinking is possible. It can never be proven but becomes very real and believable when we reason about the function of a plant. For instance, how it draws its water and nourishment from the soil and ‘directs’ it into its branches and leaves;
How it finds its food when it discovers an opening in our sewers, and they get blocked by the presence of tree’s roots; how it ‘knows’ the seasons of the year, i.e. when to blossom, when to bear fruit and when to shed its leaves.
All this not an accident, but presupposes a degree of ‘thinking’. There simply is no other explanation.
Plants have a sophisticated ‘sex life’. There are male and female plants and the bees, and other insects propagate their species by carrying the pollen of their blossoms from one to another, thus ensuring their fertility. Birds, who eat part or all of their fruit, guarantee the reproduction of each plant through the elimination of their seeds. Plants also respond to the soothing rhythms of music, and the plant grows better and bears lusher and larger fruit when exposed to music, than those without it. It has been verified or ‘proven’ under actual research conditions.
Does this make us think of the presence of some primitive form of emotion?
We do not know. But we do know of the beneficial, therapeutic properties of plants and it is not going too far to assume that science will prove some day that the presence of trees and other plants is a vital part of our ecology and essential to human and animal life on earth.
Y. A. Eden