I started reading the "SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS' the other day. And what an eye-opener it is.
I have long teased vegan friends that nothing about nourishment is merciful. You eat plants, you tear them up by the roots in order to ingest, you are destroying a whole culture.
Turns out--it's not so much a teasing as a truth.
Plants are sentient beings. Roots may be comparable to brains. They can sense, they can feel, they can think, they can plan. The only culture which fails to acknowledge this universal truth is the Christian one. Some believe that stories about pixies and fairies are actually about plants. They move. Not very fast, but is it their fault that they are so deliberate that our attention spans fail to capture them? Experiments have been done where plants react to human emotions. One of the experiments involved a psychologist coming in to a room with a plant. The plant wilted immediately and stayed that way for two weeks. When asked what he was thinking, the psychologist replied, "My philodendron is nicer than that one." Philodendrons seem to be the plant of choice for these experiments. Kind of like the rhesus monkey of the horticulture kingdom.
As regular readers of this column know, I have a zombie garden. I bought a Wandering Jew a few weeks ago and it promptly went into decline. A friend's daughter thought it had root rot, and it did. The local florist cleaned it up and repotted it. It perked up and then promptly went into decline again.
So, after reading the first two chapters of PLANTS, I thought, let me pay more attention to this fragile Jew. It's a wanderer. Let us ramble together. I took my Jew for a walk in the park, carrying the small pot through the UES. I talked to it--"Let's go visit your cousins. Let's take a picture of you with your cousins (See above). Eventually, I grew impatient. "Don't embarrass me out here in public. Stop drooping. Look how nicely your cousins are blooming. Why can't you be more like them." It's hard to stay positive as a single plant parent.
Anyway, WJ has a pretty Three Stooges sense of humor. I put it on the sill to soak up the sun (the hour/day I get). WJ is next to the tomatoes. I picked one up and said, "Hope this doesn't offend you if I slice it up for lunch." Then I moved and promptly stubbed my R little toe. Hmmm.
Anyway, the above photo represents night one. I will try to take a picture every day for a week and see if it perks up. Or goes promptly down the dumper.