Reading · Field notes from the wild

My latest piece for BBC Wildlife is in the June issue, pages 86–87, with the online version linked here.

The question they handed me: do plants have personalities?

6 year old me sat straight up.

When I was young, I already knew the answer was yes. The manzanita tree and white sage out in the hills were my friends. Instead of imaginary friends, I told them about my inner thoughts and had gut instincts about their health. The plants and I were obviously in conversation.

Then, everyone spent the next two decades trying to talk me out of it.

I got a masters, bachelors and graduate degree in basically nature connection and learned rule #1: do not anthropomorphize.

Which is fair because projecting human feelings onto a fern is just us hogging the mirror again. But, somewhere the rule got stretched into something colder: that the connection itself wasn’t real.

So, you can imagine how it felt to research this piece and watch the science arrive, late and a little sheepish, at the windowsill. Individual plants grow differently, compete, gamble, clock who’s living next to them, respond to scent and light and the insects crossing their leaves. They are paying attention, but the researchers won’t say personality. Which is fine, but its important to note that they’re describing awareness, strategy, a self that responds to the world, in the careful language of people trained not to sound like a 6 year old.

Do plants have personalities?

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