When I told my wife that I was worried about the damson tree, that it may be harbouring thoughts and messages, not all of them kind, she was very understanding.

More than that, she came at the problem of how to communicate with the tree (or at least listen to it) from an angle that my over-complex data-centric sensor-based perspective had prevented me from seeing.

How noisy the subterranean world of the tree must be, she said. And it’s true. The world of plants must be *horrendously* noisy. Just think of this sound – of growing rhubarb – and times it by a million:

Think of the compote tree constantly being bombarded with rumbles and vibrations, tumults and quakes. Think of water trickling and gurgling underground. And the beetles and worms, the slugs and the nematodes and the ants all busy scratching and scraping, boring and writhing. And the creaks and the cracklings of other roots, other plants swelling and popping, quite literally ‘rooting’ around for moisture and nutrients.

All this the tree can sense, and all the time it’s sending out its own root signals, its sighs, its secret messages, its cries for help.

Some quick research about the actual ‘sound’ of plants has led me to some very interesting places. For example, this:

“When South African botanist Lyall Watson claimed in his 1973 bestseller Supernature that plants had emotions and that these could register on a lie detector, scientists scoffed and branded it hippie nonsense. But new research has revealed that plants appear to react to sounds and may even make clicking noises to communicate with each other. Scientists in Australia, Britain and Italy have collaborated to show that the roots of young plants emit and react to particular sounds.”

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120406103841958

Amusingly, artist Luke Jerram has even gone as far as to co-ordinate this apparent cacophony of plant noise into a plant orchestra, and someone in Japan has been doing experiments on how to make plants ‘sing’.

Even more wonderfully, there is infobreath:

“In InfoBreath, the participant is presented with a cybernetic flower arcing from a frosted pane of glass. Rigged with a breath sensor and connected to Carnivore, an internet packet sniffer, the flower is cued in to the wireless network flowing in the space immediately surrounding it. Breathing on the plant triggers a flurry of text that makes visible the wireless internet traffic passing through the air around the viewer. The plant absorbs this information, analyzing the bytes of data for those aspects that seem more ‘alive,’ or human-generated, and releases those packets in a form comprehensible to humans.”

So now we know that plants do make noise, can be taught to sing (or scream?) by touching them and almost certainly talk to each other. Oh, and from this research into sound, we can also pretty firmly assert that plants also have *feelings* and can even distinguish between plants of their own kind and complete strangers. See http://www.viewzone.com/plants.html

So thank you to my wife for setting me on this path. And thank you to my friend Alison who subsequently told me it was common knowledge that acacias in Africa talk to each other to warn about incoming giraffes and can even change their chemisty as a result of these warnings in order to taste more disgusting!

At least the trees haven’t learned yet to run away. Although, that may become a reality sooner than you might think. Enter the Robotic Action Plant!:

https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js

There is so much to ponder here.