Botanical brains

Don’t you love it when a book makes sense of things which happen in real life? I’ve just read What a Plant Knows by the scientist Daniel Chamovitz. Not only does he know quite a lot about plants, he’s able to write about them in a way accessible to a non-specialist for whom A-level biology is a long distant memory.

In turn he considers that what we think of as the human senses of smell, hearing, memory, touch and knowing where we are, as they might be attributed to plants. By drawing on a long history of botanic experiments he shows that pea tendrils can remember when they’ve been touched, plant cells work out which way is up, even in space. He explains the working of well-known phenomena like a venus fly trap closing round its prey. Or how leaves warn their neighbours to protect themselves from dangerous foes which are nearby. Hence I often see one plant in a row riddled with insect damage whilst the rest of the crop is fine.  

The book also made sense of a recent mountain walk on a route I know few people use regularly. All around was high bracken yet the ‘path’ was clear of this growth, along the route the grass was short as if a stream of feet had trampled it. This is a familiar scene, one beautifully harnessed by Richard Long’s art. With my new understanding of how plants respond to touch I realised that all it takes is a few brief sweeps past to cause plants to stop growing in a certain direction so the path stays clear of bracken.

Looking at the chemical reactions behind such actions it becomes clear that plants aren’t so very different from us. They receive messages from other plants by smelling certain chemicals in the air. Their cells initiate complex reactions in response to external events. This shouldn’t really come as any surprise- after all we’ve evolved from common ancestors, and human functioning also has to rely on flows of chemicals and electricity.

Chamovitz concludes that despite their sensory skill, we shouldn’t fool ourselves that plants are like people. Fundamentally, they don’t care what we think of them. But I agree with Jane Bennett that anthropomorphism can be useful- it encourages us to think of humans as a bit more like plants. If we start to think that plants have senses it reminds us we humans are not so different from the rest of the world. 

Read Full Post »

Plants out of place

If anyone can convince even the most pristine of gardeners that weeds ain’t so bad then it would surely be Richard Mabey. His recent ‘defense of nature’s most unloved plants’ makes perfect sense and is another fine example of his ability to bring the world to life [1]. The book begins with an effort to pin down exactly what makes a weed a weed. There’s no botanical distinction so he agrees with the definition I’ve often heard from gardeners: they are simply plants in the wrong place. This is of course a nod to Mary Douglas’ equally firm hit on the nailhead of dirt as “matter out of place”. But he expands this to show how the passing of time and habits continually redraws the boundary of a plant’s proper place. Once, all wildflowers had equal chance of being used for medicinal or mythical purpose instead of being divided by a line of virtuousness into useful and worthless.

Himalayan balsam. One of the enemies?

 

 

As a work of socionatural history Mabey gives biographies of several weed species and their global travels. Remarkably he traces the arrival of certain plants almost to the day, time, grid reference and inside leg measurement of the man in who’s trouser turn up the seed travelled. I love the stories behind plants named for their supposed effect or as descriptions of their appearance. So pansy comes from the French pensé due to the flower’s resemblance to a meditative face, and is known as hearts-ease for its role as tokens of love. This resonates with the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s recent writing on peoples who name animals with descriptions of their behaviour traits. This storying helps people to understand the world so knowing names is part of the skill of making one’s way [2]. It feels as if recalling the tales behind common plant names might help us to know our gardens a little better.

 

What Weeds demonstrates is that the activities through which humans have sought to dampen down nature’s wildest tendencies have worked quite efficiently to encourage weeds. Agriculture has unintentionally played a Darwinian hand as threshing machines favour weeds with seed of comparable size to wheat; hoeing encourages plants which respond to a good bashing. Numerous other examples show how “weeds thrive in the company of humans”.  In which case weeding may not only be futile, but also counter-productive.

 The book is more than a bio-biography as it has a mission in mind. Mabey concludes that weeds are pretty useful reminders of how impotent we can be. Japanese knotweed capable of growing through concrete and spawning a multimillion pound control-industry must surely be the supreme example of ‘things acting back’. He hopes that weeds might then jolt us out of “our ceaseless attempts to draw boundaries between nature and culture, wildness and domestication”. It’s us not the weeds that are the problem.

 [1] Mabey, R. 2010 Weeds. In defense of nature’s most unloved plants (Harper Collins)

[2] Ingold, T. 2011 Being Alive Essays on movement, knowledge and description (Routledge)

Read Full Post »

Radical gardening

This pleasingly digestible book provides a rattle through the history and politics of various gardening activities which tend to the alternative. George McKay offers a counter-balance to the wealth of accounts of more staid horticultural practices and countless histories of grand, formal gardens of the rich and powerful. His radical places include Hyde Park’s speakers corner, Garden Cities which became home to simple lifers, squats and communes of the 70s and more. We see the history of allotments and community gardens as fights against capitalism and land ownership. Punks, hippies, eco warriors and suffragettes are all there.

Some of this will be familiar to those interested in gardening or politics. But there are wild cards like the little told story of peace gardens, nicely allied with the symbolic power of a single flower –the poppy. Nor does McKay shy away from those of less palatable politics, telling how the Nazis and latterly the BNP adopted gardening rhetoric and practices to reinforce their nationalism. The organic movement is also fingered for having racists and fascists in its ranks. And as he points out, it is difficult to see organic food as radical when it is now largely the preserve of the privileged.

Whilst he clearly lauds a rag-tag mob of revolutionaries with dirt under their nails seeking to make the world better, his is not a blind idealisation of the transformative power of gardening. He concludes that it’s not always a radical activity, and that not everyone who picks up a spade becomes an activist.

Apart from the liberal use of flinch inducing garden related puns – I offer his term counter-horticulture by way of evidence – the frustration with the book is that in seeking to cover so much it skirts over some. A wide and varied range of marginalised groups who have used gardening to assert a position form a rather unnatural collective in one chapter. This results in a particularly clunky segue between the story of a campaign against homophobic violence to the history of gardeners with disabilities. Bringing so much together sometimes lurches the reader across history with narrative flow lost to thematic convenience.

Cramming so many histories into one relatively short book also means certain issues worthy of greater consideration are glossed. So for example it is unclear exactly what or who constitutes the organic movement whose radicalism he deconstructs. Nor are counter arguments always given due airing. A preference for planting native species is left associated with far right nationalism without considering an alternative conservationist discourse motivated by a need to retain genetic diversity much more than a will for protected boundaries.

Reading the book left me better informed of some counter-culture and garden history, but with two major questions. Firstly, what does he, and by extension we, mean by radical? He employs the term loosely to encompass both the mass of allotment gardeners and hippies poking flowers down the barrel of guns. This makes for a varied read, but left me wondering how much all these people really have in common. Considering the allotment holders backed by law, perhaps only interested in whose runner bean crop is the most prolific one wonders just how radical are all these gardeners?

This leads to the second question- is it still possible for today’s gardeners to be radical? When the slogan ‘grow your own’ has gone from a promoting the joy of home-grown cannabis to garden products in B&Q… When allotments pepper reality TV and life-style magazines…This is something I’ve been mulling over since earlier this year I saw an advert from a city council for their guerrilla gardening activities, inviting local people to do some gardening on council owned land. Surely this was more a cheap maintenance session than strike against ‘the man’?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe we shouldn’t expect gardening to be radical, beyond the touch of consumerism or government objectives. But I wonder if there is a risk that by being adopted by the mainstream, community gardening and the like lose the edginess which has brought support and in some ways been key to past successes.

I think it definitely does matter is if any activity is promoted as something it isn’t, because then you attract support under false pretences risking disappointment, disillusionment and discredit. To be clear, this is not what I think George McKay has done. But reading his book made me worry that the current surge of support for getting everyone gardening risks an almighty backlash. The lesson McKay might offer then, is to dose your idealism with a chaser of realism.

Read Full Post »