July 19, 2024
When we honor the wisdom of Ériu, walking the land,
living her rhythms, and knowing her patterns...
I remember the smell of it. Yes. There were bright fluorescent lights and Petri dishes and microscopes. But what I remember the most about my dad's lab was the smell of chemicals used for splicing and germinating the seeds destined for the university greenhouses. The lab graciously hosted one of my high school science class experiments but it was clear to everyone that I was not destined to follow in my father's footsteps.
It wasn't the harsh lights or the smell. I've just never gravitated to the hard rigor of objectivity. I much prefer a subjective world of emotion and myth and storytelling. And what captures my imagination in Schlanger's book are the stories scientists are bold enough to create and share from the rigors of their scientific experimentation and clinical data. For it is those stories, those daring interpretations of the data, that so resonate with what I know about the rhythms and patterns of the natural world; a knowing that becomes more nuanced and deeply rooted through those stories.
Published in 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was widely acclaimed by the general public for exploring plant communication and relationship with sound. However the scientific community strongly rejected it as pseudoscientific and research funding to explore these relationships dried up for decades. Finally, new research is emerging. Here are brief overviews of some of those findings.
One. One study found that playing Arabidopsis, small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard, a series of tones for three hours per day over ten days increased its ability to fight off a harmful fungal infection.
Two. Another found that playing some tones to rice for an hour improved the plants' ability to survive drought conditions.
Three. Researchers who played tones at different frequencies to alfalfa sprouts for two hours saw that they increased the plants' content of vitamin C, increasing their nutritional value.
Four. The pea seedlings in Monica Gagliano's lab at the University of Western Australia looked like they were wearing giant plastic pants. The curly top of each young shoot peeked out from the top of its own PVC tube that was forked at the bottom into two legs. Gagliano was testing the peas' ability to hear the movement of water. Specifically, she was testing which direction the pea seedling roots would decide to grow.
By placing a tray of soil and water under one of the legs, she had already determined the roots would detect the moisture gradient in the soil and grow towards the water. Then she placed a sealed plastic tube with continuously running water under one of the legs. There was no way for the plant to detect moisture. Only the sound of running water was available as a cue. Nearly every pea plant grew its roots toward the sound of the running water.
If all this seems a bit fantastical, I can see the cosmic eye rolls, it's only because we have become so estranged from the natural world. It's ours to again awaken to the mystical depth and complexity of it. It's ours to embrace the sound sensations.
Beannacht,
Judith
No comments:
Post a Comment