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The Secret Life Of Plants

The Secret Life Of Plants image
Parent Issue
Day
19
Month
April
Year
1974
OCR Text

The Secret Life of Plants

Ever so often, a book comes along that shakes you up, kind of changes your perspective on all the things you used to take for granted. If you have a certain skepticism for established patterns of thought, and are willing to have your ideas about living things thoroughly replanted and given back to you as a new and unfamiliar harvest, pick up “The Secret Life of Plants” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.

Plants are alive in ways humankind has only recently begun to comprehend. They recognize us. They know our thoughts. They know when we’re telling the truth; when we’re lying. They know.

Cleve Backster started out as a polygraph expert (lie-detection). In 1966 on a whim, he attached his polygraph to the “dracena” or dragon plant in his office, and watered it. The dry plant sucked up the water, and the machine, which measures minute changes in electrical resistance, recorded its reaction on a paper trace. But the polygraph did not act like Backster expected. There was no decrease in electrical resistance as one would expect from a moister plant. Instead, to Backster’s utter astonishment, the “dracena” cut a jagged trace which expert Backster immediately recognized as the reaction of a human to a pleasant emotion

Thus Backster stepped through the Looking Glass into the uncharted realm of plant consciousness. Another time, Backster gathered a group of people together and sent them into a room one at a time where a plant was wired to a polygraph. All but one person was told to stroke the plant, coo to it, and love it. The one other person was told to yell angrily at it, and to strike it. Later, when any of the plant’s “lovers” entered the room, the plant reacted by registering a smooth, mellow trace on the machine’s recorder. But when the “hater” walked in, the polygraph needle went berserk – the plant was terrified!

In another experiment, Backster asked people their ages in front of a plant hooked up to a polygraph. He asked each person ten times. They were instructed to tell the truth once, and to lie the other nine times, Backster himself knew none of their real ages. In every case, the plant distinguished between the person’s real age and lies. Plants know.

“The Secret Life of Plants” delivers you into an altered state of consciousness. Plants are not the “lesser form of life” we always thought them to be. Silent, immovable, seemingly “just plants,” they are in touch with their surroundings in ways we cannot even imagine. Their powers of perception extend far beyond their physical beings. They know things at great distances. One researcher hooked up his favorite houseplant to a polygraph at his home in Los Angeles just before embarking on an extended cross country trip. During his journey, which took him thousands of miles from his plant, he focused his thoughts on his plant, and loved it at carefully recorded, but random times. When he returned home, he checked the trace. His plant had reacted to his love instantaneously! All you folks out there planning vacations this summer, take along photographs of your plants and/or garden. Take them out regularly and love them. Really, it’ll help.

But, I’m a natural skeptic. Some of “The Secret Life of Plants” was too much even for my flipped-out head. I couldn’t simply read this book - I had to try it. I pulled two leaves off my favorite “coleus” plant. I spoke with one, loved it, and ignored the other. A day later the ignored leaf was a brittle shriveled brown. But, four weeks later, today, the favored leaf is still lying untouched, unwatered, on my bookshelf, supple and green.

Plants live in super-sensitive electrical and magnetic worlds. They relate to the earth’s magnetic field. They’ll grow better if you plant your seeds aligning their ends north and south. James Scribner, an electrical engineer, wired an ordinary flowerpot to a wall socket. Into the soil, he mixed zinc and copper particles, which, when wet, allowed a weak current to pass through the soil. Then he planted a butterbean in the pot. This kind of bean plant rarely grows to a height of more than two feet. Scribner’s grew to 22 feet, and produced 2 full bushels of beans. Talk about Jack and the beanstalk! And in the Soviet Union, seeds have been electrically stimulated since 1963 when electrified seeds produced 20% more corn, 15% more barley, 13% more peas and 10% more buckwheat.

“The Secret Life of Plants” also contains a great deal of information about nutrition, human and plant auras, and some fascinating stuff on plant alchemy. It turns out that plants can actually transmute chemical elements, conversions believed impossible by traditional chemistry. In fact, a whole lot of seemingly impossible things get going in this book.

Remember George Washington Carver and Luther Burbank from the murky depths of your fifth grade reader? Well, just wait till you read about what they were into! Burbank developed the spineless cactus by getting down on his hands and knees and telling his cacti: “You have nothing to fear. You don’t need your defensive thorns. I’ll protect you”

So gather your plants around you, or get some this spring, or take a pleasant amble through the Arb or the University’s Botanical Gardens (but don’t step on the grass) while reading “The Secret Life of Plants,” It’s as strange and mind-Bending and as mystifying a trip as any you’ve ever taken.

--Carla Rapaport and friends