The language of plants

insect track. Raewyn Turner, 2009

(see Ernie Kroeger’s ‘Wild Writing’ http://www.gallery44.org/exhibitions/wildwriting.htm)

What happens when we mow the lawns? The grass sends out ‘I’m wounded’ signals such as methyl jasmonates and hexanol derivatives, those classic grassy smells.

Plants when under attack by pest insects and diseases give off signalling compounds such as methyl salicylate, which other plants can detect and prepare themselves against the impending challenge.  Under attack from herbivores, such as caterpillars, different plants give off characteristic blends of terpeniods that are learned by parasitic wasps that home in on the caterpillars to lay their ‘Alien-like’ embryos.

Can we train ourselves to detect the faint chemical signals such as methyl salicylate, methyl jasmonates, hexanol and terpeniods, that are the language of plant communication?  Would this ability to eavesdrop on plant’s physical condition give us an awareness of their deeper states of being e.g. fear of attack?  If we breed plants for differences in their chemical composition we will impact on their ability to communicate or how they interact with other organisms?

Insects have learnt to listen in on plant to plant conversation.  Herbivorous insects increase their levels of enzymes that help neutralise plant-produced toxins when they smell the plant signalling compounds such as methyl salicyate and methyl jasmonate Everyone seems to be listening in on everyone else.  Did we as humans once have this ability and have now lost it?

In his book Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that plants manipulate animals and humans for their survival. But only now are we learning how to manipulate them.  Plants don’t go anywhere but have learnt to produce many anti-feeding compounds and toxins against pests and pathogens.  We’ve been hitting pest and pathogens with blunt instruments – pesticides – rather than helping the plants to defend themselves.  A newer technology involves spraying elicitor proteins that make the plants alert and ready for attach by pathogens (e.g. harpin technology).

In Visual Analogy Stafford writes: “The analogical universe, like our membraned body, is knit together. It resembles a Mobius strip, a continuous one-sided surface, investigated by topology, the mathematical study of geometric forms that do not change despite bending or stretching”……..mobius strip as a way of connecting the inside with the outside.

The diagram alongside the Mobius strip is how I see the winding, coiling  between inside and outside, the way my Italian grandmother used to wind wool from a skein into a ball—back and forth, side to side, depending on whether you were standing on your head or sitting on a chair in her kitchen, filled with the aroma of burning coal and licorice.

I subsequently used the Mobius and coiling diagrams to redraw Richard’s diagram of the signal transduction pathways, tracing the passage of the olfactory molecule from the outside to the inside.