Hans Hoffmann (b. about 1530)
What Plants Perceive
Rose, Heartsease, Sweet Pea, Lax-flowered Orchid
Jacques le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533–1588)
From an article by Stefany Anne Golberg for “The Smart Set” from Drexel University
Around 1900, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose began his investigations into the secret world of plants. He found that all plants, and all parts of plants, have a sensitive nervous system not unlike that of animals, and that their responses to external stimuli could be measured and recorded. Some plant reactions can be seen easily in sensitive plants like the Mimosa, which, when irritated, will react with the sudden shedding or shrinking of its leaves. But when Bose attached his magnifying device to plants from which it was more difficult to witness a response, such as vegetables, he was astounded to discover that they, too, became excited when vexed. All around us, Bose realized, the plants are communicating. We just don’t notice it.
Bose–physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist–is considered one of the fathers of radio science, alongside Tesla, Marconi, and Popov. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920 in the field of science. Perhaps it was his work in radio waves and electricity that inspired Bose’s investigations. The more responses Bose got from his plants, the more encouraged he became, and the more detailed his efforts became.
Over years of research, Bose found that plants were visibly reactive to all manner of stimuli: flashes of light, changes in temperature, plucking, pricking, screaming. Plants became numbed by drugs and drunk from alcohol. They became depressed when exposed to polluted air — even by the passing of a darkening cloud — and were more sensitive to electricity than either Hindus or Europeans. In short, what his work showed was that plants could feel pleasure and they could feel pain.
Bose discovered that an electric death spasm occurs in plants when they die, and that the actual moment of death in a plant could be accurately recorded.
It’s not surprising to learn that Bose — whose scientific inventions and work in radio waves were highly esteemed — struggled to gain proper respect in Western scientific circles for his work in plant biophysics.
But plant physiology has become a well-respected scientific pursuit. There are now plenty of scientists who, over the decades, have given further weight to Bose’s theories that plants may not be as different from animals as previously thought. Elizabeth Haswell, assistant professor of biology at Washington University in Saint Louis, along with colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, recently wrote a review article about mechanosensitive channels in plants for the journal Structure called “Mechanosensitive Channels: What Can They Do and How Do They Do It?” In it, Haswell writes about how she has been experimenting on Arabidopsis plants to understand plants’ responses to gravity, and touch, and us.
Studying matter as a physicist allowed Bose to make big claims about the fundamentals of life itself by adhering to simple demonstrations of action and reaction. If something looks like suffering, it’s suffering.
http://thesmartset.com/article/article11221101.aspx
http://tinyurl.com/82y8q36
Choices
Three Studies of a Tree Bullfinch, Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528)
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
for Drago Štambuk
by Tess Gallagher
Paradise Valley
John La Farge (1835 – 1910)
http://intergenerational.wordpress.com/ –This is a link to the blog of the very kind person who nominated the Secret Gardener for the Versatile Blogger Award.
I don’t fully understand what it is, but I was incredibly encouraged and sort of proud to be mentioned in lists made by other nominees whose blogs are wonderful, so it’s exciting to be included in such a worthy group. Also a bit excruciating because–as the form my blog takes probably makes clear–I avoid using my own words whenever possible. I have put off responding publicly as long as I could by entreating my correspondent to lay out the rules, the requirements, the whys & wherefores, the intentions, the history–and whatever else I could think might guide me narrowly & directly into the correct approach to my responsibilities as a nominee—but was left to the basics I’d already come across, and the common sense that I ought to have tucked away somewhere. I’ll reveal to ‘intergenerational’ seven probably pretty unamusing things about my unremarkable self - but what I really wish I knew how to do effectively is present 15 deserving blogs to SG readers, and I’m afraid I will simply emphasize the circular nature of this process, because the blogs I read are the ones which have appeared somewhere along the line (my links, for instance) already; because we have interests in common, because I admire them, and because they have been recognized more widely. However:
I have to begin with one -having to do with gardening only if you want to get mired in metaphors about cultivating the soul, and I am not accustomed to discussing the soul. But if I believed I had one–I’d want to learn to cultivate it so that it bloomed like hers:
http://roolily.wordpress.com/
For the beauty I need, but here applied in service of the scholarship I envy (but am too undisciplined to acquire)– a really exhilarating combination– and for their ability to clarify & put into context the accumulated information; enormously edifying & satisfying:
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/
http://streetsofsalem.com/
http://gardenhistorygirl.blogspot.com/
For the thrilling sense of somehow being in the midst of the art-creation process:
http://paintlater.wordpress.com/
To tell the truth -it isn’t the blog at all, but the radio show that I love. But as a doorway:
http://being.publicradio.org/index.shtml
Interiors–the paintings I always want to enter. And the books I found by chance in libraries and reveled in all alone–wondering why I’d never heard the authors’ names.
Turns out there’s someone in London who’s been putting them together for years now:
http://thepersephonepost.blogspot.com/
Pictures. Color: Delicious. - Lovely talk about it: More delicious:
http://venetianred.net/about/
How to really, truly get things done in the garden–the right way.
http://www.rootsimple.com/p/about.html
Travel where I wish I could travel, noticing what I’d notice, but chronicled by a garden artist:
http://juliafoggterrain.wordpress.com/
And what bliss is this? Thanks to Streets of Salem blogroll I was introduced to someone whose studies encompass current passions– the 17th century, early science, philosophy–and the original and enduring love- literature:
http://airswatersplaces.wordpress.com/about/
The miracle & marvels of the brain:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy
A geologist/ environmental scientist/ teacher, and someone clever enough to live in a spectacularly beautiful spot on this earth,
unpacks, unfolds, and spreads in front of us each day of the voyage of The Beagle as recorded by Darwin–in real time:
http://beagleproject.wordpress.com/
And, because if you are a woman –or even a half-decent human being– she is on your side:
http://lispeerysview.blogspot.com/
This has been hard. And I’m not much out and about–not even virtually.
So I am going to reserve one spot for another discovery; perhaps it will prompt one.
Thanks to all of you for existing – in such a realm as this might be,
and for acknowledging the existence of the Secret Gardener–such as it is.
Nothing To Save
Pietro Visconte’s World Map 1321, from Marino Samuolo’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis
There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.
D.H. Lawrence
Tuft of Cowslips
Albrecht Dürer 1526 / AD
The primrose, as every one knows, flowers a little earlier in the spring than the cowslip, and inhabits slightly different stations and districts. The primrose generally grows on banks or in woods, whilst the cowslip is found in more open places.
The cowslip is habitually visited during the day by the larger humble-bees (namely Bombus muscorum and hortorum), and at night by moths, as I have seen in the case of Cucullia. The primrose is never visited (and I speak after many years’ observation) by the larger humble-bees, and only rarely by the smaller kinds; hence its fertilisation must depend almost exclusively on moths.
Charles Darwin
The cowslip is habitually visited during the day by the larger humble-bees (namely Bombus muscorum and hortorum), and at night by moths, as I have seen in the case of Cucullia. The primrose is never visited (and I speak after many years’ observation) by the larger humble-bees, and only rarely by the smaller kinds; hence its fertilisation must depend almost exclusively on moths.
Charles Darwin
Stork
Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528)
Painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist.
Storks have no syrinx and are mute.
They use soaring, gliding flight, which requires thermal air currents, to conserve energy. Photographs of storks by Ottomar Anschütz inspired the design of Otto Lilienthal’s experimental gliders of the late 19th century.
Their nests sometimes grow to more than six feet in diameter and ten feet in depth.
Storks were thought to be monogamous which is partly true. They may change mates after migrations, and may migrate without a mate. They tend to be attached to nesting places as much as partners.
Their size, serial monogamy, and faithfulness to an established nesting site contribute to the prominence of storks in culture and in mythology.
W.
Trees In The Garden
Antonio del Pollaiolo (1429/1433 – 1498), Apollo and Daphne
Ah in the thunder air
how still the trees are!
how still the trees are!
And the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent
hardly looses even a last breath of perfume.
And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!
And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.
Lichtental
D.H. Lawrence
