Jacopo Ligozzi (1547 – 1627)
Opium Poppy
This observation of complex behaviour in plants would seem to be impossible given the fact that plants don’t have the diversification of their bodies and biology into sensory organs, nervous systems, and brains, but the facts remain.
“Plants certainly have the capacity to feel mechanical loads,” said plant biologist Frank Telewski, who was not involved in the research. “They can respond to gravity, wind, ice or an abundance of fruit.”
Now, researchers at the University of Missouri, in a collaboration that brings together audio and chemical analysis, have proven that plants hear sounds.
“Previous research has investigated how plants respond to acoustic energy, including music,” said Heidi Appel, senior research scientist in the Division of Plant Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and the Bond Life Sciences Center at MU.
When pure tones are played, some experiments have seen changes in plant growth, germination or gene expression. For instance, one recent study showed that young roots of corn will grow toward an auditory source playing continuous tones and even responded better to certain frequencies.
“However, our work is the first example of how plants respond to an ecologically relevant vibration. We found that feeding sounds of caterpillars attacking plants signal changes in the plant cells’ metabolism, creating more defensive chemicals that can repel attacks from caterpillars.”
It is similar to how our own immune systems work — an initial experience with insects or bacteria can help plants defend themselves better in future attacks by the same predator. So while a mustard plant might not respond the first time it encounters a hungry caterpillar, the next time it will.
A deeper investigation could lead to advances in agriculture and natural crop resistance — and we could avoid harmful pesticides.
“What is remarkable is that the plants exposed to different vibrations, including those made by a gentle wind or different insect sounds that share some acoustic features with caterpillar feeding vibrations did not increase their chemical defenses,” Cocroft said. “This indicates that the plants are able to distinguish feeding vibrations from other common sources of environmental vibration.”
“Both animal and vegetable has in common a billion years of evolution. Just why we insist on believing that only certain animal life found sentience a useful evolutionary path is beyond me. This thing we like to think of as our unique sentience is in fact not at all unique rather it is just the opposite.
We are not alone.”
Russ George
http://russgeorge.net/2014/07/01/plants-hear-sounds/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/can-plants-hear-study-finds-that-vibrations-prompt-some-to-boost-their-defenses/2014/07/06/8b2455ca-02e8-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html
Herbal Intelligence
What Plants Perceive
The Knowledge of Vegetables
Trees Cry Out
Artist: Passmore, Deborah Griscom, 1840-1911
Scientific name: Prunus persica
Common name: peaches
1905
Influence of Pre-cooling on Peaches. Specimen #1 – 34318 – Hard ripe Early Crawford peach delivered at New York in sound condition by precooling and ordinary icing. Specimen #2 – 34318 – Early Crawford peach from California picked green and shipped to New York under ordinary icing in the usual way.
The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection is in the National Agricultural Library (NAL). As a historic botanical resource, it documents new fruit and nut varieties, and specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The collection spans the years 1886 to 1942. The majority of the paintings were created between 1894 and 1916. The plant specimens represented by these artworks originated in 29 countries and 51 states and territories in the U.S. There are 7,497 watercolor paintings, 87 line drawings, and 79 wax models created by approximately 21 artists.
Lithographs of the watercolor paintings were created to illustrate USDA bulletins, yearbooks, and other publications distributed to growers and gardeners across America.
Hugo Marie de Vries ForMemRS (February, 1848 – May, 1935)
The Seed Shop
Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry –
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.
In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century’s streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.
Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.
Muriel Stuart Irwin (1885 — 1967)
from
OR,
IN WHICH
The most Ornamental Foreign Plants, cultivated in the Open Ground, the Greenhouse, and the Stove, are accurately represented in their natural Colours.
TO WHICH ARE ADDED,
Their Names, Class, Order, Generic and Specific Characters, according to the celebrated Linnæus; their Places of Growth, and Times of Flowering:
TOGETHER WITH
THE MOST APPROVED METHODS OF CULTURE.
A WORK
Intended for the Use of such Ladies, Gentlemen, and Gardeners, as wish to become scientifically acquainted with the Plants they cultivate.
Author of the Flora Londinensis.
Image courtesy of Frantic Gallery
Macoto Murayama diagrams flowers. He buys his specimens from flower stands or collects them from the roadside. Murayama carefully dissects each flower, removing its petals, anther, stigma and ovaries with a scalpel. He studies the separate parts of the flower under a magnifying glass and then sketches and photographs them.
Using 3D computer graphics software, the artist then creates models of the full blossom as well as of the stigma, sepals and other parts of the bloom. He cleans up his composition and adds measurements and annotations so that, in the end, he has created nothing short of a botanical blueprint.
1682
“For several months in the winter of 1816-1817, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld vied with his friends, brothers Ferdinand and Friedrich Olivier, in making precise drawings of dried leaves.”
National Gallery of Art
Thanks to http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html & http://gardenhistorygirl.blogspot.com/2012/01/portraits-of-dried-leaves-by-friends.html
