Do Plants Have Something to Say?

One scientist is definitely listening.

Monica Gagliano, all ears in Central Park.

Credit Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times

By Ellie Shechet
• Published Aug. 26, 2019Updated Aug. 28, 2019

Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and
shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has
ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once
accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina, an ancient wind
instrument, in a redwood forest. “Oryngham,” she says, means “thank you” in plant
language. These interactions have taken place in dreams, visions, songs and
telekinetic interactions, sometimes with the help of shamans or ayahuasca.

This has all gone on around the same time as Dr. Gagliano’s scientific research,
which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior and signaling. Currently
at the University of Sydney in Australia, she has published a number of studies that
support the view that plants are, to some extent, intelligent. Her experiments
suggest that they can learn behaviors and remember them. Her work also suggests
that plants can “hear” running water and even produce clicking noises, perhaps to
communicate.

Plants have directly shaped her experiments and career path. In 2012, she says, an
oak tree assured her that a risky grant application — proposing research on sound
communication in plants — would be successful. “You are here to tell our stories,”
the tree told her.

“These experiences are not like, ‘Oh you’re a weirdo, this is happening just to you,’”
Dr. Gagliano said. Learning from plants, she said, is a long-documented ceremonial
practice (if not one typically endorsed by scientists).

“This is part of the repertoire of human experiences,” she said. “We’ve been doing
this forever and ever, and are still doing this.”

Dr. Gagliano knows that these claims, based on subjective experiences and not
scientific evidence, can easily be read as delusional. She also knows that this could
damage her scientific career — plant scientists in particular really hate this sort of
thing. Back in 1973, an explosively popular book, “The Secret Life of Plants,” made
pseudoscientific claims about plants, including that they enjoy classical music and
can read human minds. The book was firmly discredited, but the maelstrom made
many institutions and researchers reasonably wary of bold statements about
botanical aptitude.

Regardless, last year Dr. Gagliano published a heady and meandering memoir
about the conversations with plants that inspired her peer-reviewed work,
titled “Thus Spoke the Plant.” She believes, like many scientists and
environmentalists do, that in order to save the planet we have to understand
ourselves as part of the natural world.

It’s just that she also believes the plants themselves can speak to this point.

“I want people to realize that the world is full of magic, but not as something only
some people can do, or something that is outside of this world,” she said. “No, it’s
all here.”

As environmental collapse looms, we’ve never known so much about life on earth —
how extraordinary and intricate it all is, and how loose the boundary where “it”
ends and “we” begin.

Language, for example, doesn’t seem to be limited to humans. Prairie dogs use
adjectives (lots of them) and Alston’s singing mice, a species found in Central
America, chirp “politely.” Ravens have demonstrated advanced planning, another
blow to human exceptionalism, by bartering for food and selecting the best tools for
future use.

The list goes on. Leaf-cutter ants not only invented farming a couple million years
before we did, but they have their own landfills — and garbagemen. Even slime
molds can be said to make “decisions,” and are so good at determining the most
efficient route between resources that researchers have suggested we use them to
help design highways.

But it may be plants whose capacities are the most head-rattling, if only because we
tend to view them as décor. Plants can do a lot of things we can’t. Trees can clone
themselves into 80,000-year-old superorganisms. Corn can summon wasps to
attack caterpillars. But research suggests we also have some things in common.
Plants share nutrients and recognize kin. They communicate with each other. They
can count. They can feel you touching them.

So we know that plants respond to their environments in sophisticated, complex

ways — “far more complex than most of us realized a few years ago,”
said Ted Farmer, a botanist at University of Lausanne in Switzerland and one of the
first to defend the concept of inter-plant communication.
Dr. Farmer is among those still “very” uncomfortable describing plants, which lack
neurons, as “intelligent.” But now it’s “consciousness” — another word without a
firm definition — that’s really raising hackles in the scientific community.

A group of biologists published a paper this summer with the matter-of-fact title
“Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness.” The authors warned against
anthropomorphism, and argued that proponents of plant consciousness have
“consistently glossed over” the unique capacities of the brain. Though her book
went unremarked upon, Dr. Gagliano’s experiments and statements ascribing
feelings and subjectivity to plants were among those critiqued, and she was
categorized witheringly within “a new wave of Romantic biology.”

Versions of this debate have been simmering for years. In 2013, Michael Pollan
wrote about Dr. Gagliano presenting the results of an experiment to an incredulous
audience.

That study is likely her most widely known. In it, she sought to discover whether
plants, like animals, could demonstrate a basic type of learning called
“habituation.”

The Mimosa pudica — you may know it as the “sensitive plant” — contracts its
leaves when touched. So, in the experiment, potted mimosas were dropped a few
harmless inches onto foam. At first, the leaves closed up immediately. But over
time, they stopped reacting.

It wasn’t that they were fatigued, Dr. Gagliano wrote, because, when the pots were
shaken, the leaves closed up again. And when the dropping test was repeated a
month later, their leaves remained unruffled.

The plants had “learned” that the drop wasn’t a threat, Dr. Gagliano argued. The
plants remembered.

And subsequent research has suggested that plants may indeed be capable of some
type of memory. But Dr. Gagliano’s conclusion didn’t go over well at the time. Her
framing of the data didn’t help. She insists that she doesn’t use metaphors in her
work, and that “learning” is the best description we have for what took place, even
if we don’t know how the plants are doing it.

This experiment was “a remarkable piece of work,” Mr. Pollan said in an interview.
“Humans do tend to underestimate plants, and she’s one of a small group of
scientists who are trying to change that story.”

“Monica is a brilliant young woman, and she’s been a major idea generator in the
field of plant sensory biology,” said Heidi Appel, a scientist who found that rock
cress produce more defensive chemicals when exposed to the stressful sound of a
caterpillar chewing. “We’re investigating things I don’t think we would have
otherwise.”
But, in Dr. Gagliano’s memoir, Dr. Appel said, “there’s a commingling of science
and spiritual experiences that I feel are best disentangled.”

“I think it’s important to separate out what you can prove and what might be true
in a more subjective way,” Mr. Pollan said. “And I don’t know where you draw the
line, exactly.”

I met Dr. Gagliano at an outdoor cafe in San Francisco, next to a pot filled with
bright, chubby succulents. I found myself watching it, wondering if its inhabitants
were aware that we were debating their awareness.

Dr. Gagliano grew up in northern Italy and is a marine ecologist by training. She
spent her early career studying Ambon damselfish at the Great Barrier Reef.

After months underwater observing the little fish, Dr. Gagliano said she started to
suspect that they understood a lot more than she’d thought — including that she
was going to dissect them. A professional crisis ensued.

Plants were inching their way into her life. As Dr. Gagliano tells it, she’d been
volunteering at an herbalist’s clinic, and had begun using ayahuasca, a
hallucinogenic brew that induces visions and emotional insights (and often
nausea). She says that one day, sober, she was walking around her garden and
heard, in her head, a plant suggest that she start studying plants.

In 2010, she traveled to Peru for the first time to work with a plant shaman called
Don M.

To communicate with plants, Dr. Gagliano followed the dieta, or the shamanic
method in the indigenous Amazonian tradition by which a human establishes a
dialogue with a plant. The rules can vary, but it usually involves following a diet (no
salt, alcohol, sugar or sex; some animal products may also be prohibited,
depending on the culture) and drinking a plant concoction (sometimes
hallucinogenic, sometimes not) in isolation for days, weeks or months. An icaro, or
medicine song, is said to be shared by the plant, as well as visions and dreams, and
the plant’s healing knowledge becomes a part of the human. It’s not fun, she
warned.

Dr. Gagliano worked with multiple plant shamans, or vegetalistas, in Peru. There
she bathed in the foul-smelling pulp of an Ayahuma tree, which then designed a
scientific experiment for her, instructing her to “train young plants in a maze and
give them freedom of choice.” The Ayahuma also helped her diagram a
2017 study investigating pea plants’ use of sound to detect water.

In the memoir, she wrote that she also traveled to California to work with a health
care professional who conducts vision quest ceremonies (that’s when the oak tree
spoke to her). She visited “the Diviner,” a man trained by the Dagara people
of Ghana and Burkina Faso to channel nature spirits.
At a certain point, Dr. Gagliano began going solo, “working with” plants like basil in
her own veggie patch.

“Did you ever wonder if you were going insane?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she said, and laughed. “I still do.” But she believes she should be free
to talk openly about these experiences.

“Maybe we should admit that we hardly understand who we are, we hardly

understand where we are at, we know very little compared to what there is to
know,” she said. “To be open to explore and learn, I think that is the sign of
wisdom, not of madness. And maybe wisdom and madness do look very similar, at
some point.”

As a white woman on a journey through sampled bits of sacred rituals, Dr. Gagliano
speaks thoughtfully and often about the legacies of colonialism, capitalism and
exploitative New Age trends, which certainly includes the rise in ayahuasca
retreats. A term like “shaman” can now bring to mind its plunder by an unpopular
modern archetype — the personal-growth-obsessed wellness devotee, dreamily
trailing sage in circles around her unvaccinated children.

But Dr. Gagliano’s journey, her supporters say, is rooted in a desire to challenge
dominant assumptions.

“I have been working with the idea of plant intelligence for many years,” said Luis
Eduardo Luna, an anthropologist and ayahuasca researcher in Brazil who has
collaborated with Dr. Gagliano. Back in 1984, he published a paper in the Journal
of Ethnopharmacology detailing the concept of plants as teachers in the Peruvian
Amazon.

Dr. Luna said he was excited to hear these ideas expressed by a scientist, rather
than someone in the humanities.

“Perhaps we are living in a much more interesting universe, perhaps we are living
in a planet full of intelligent life,” Dr. Luna said. “I think it’s very important that we
recover, somehow, this idea of the sacrality of nature, in the terrible situation in
which we are today.”

“I’m really interested in the notion of plants as teachers, what we can learn from
them as models,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, an author, botanist and SUNY
professor, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “And that comes from
my work with indigenous knowledge, because that is a fundamental assumption of
indigenous environmental philosophy.”

Dr. Kimmerer doesn’t see Dr. Gagliano’s experiences as mystical processes so much
as poorly understood ones.
 “Some of the medicines that people have made are sophisticated biochemistry over
a fire,” Dr. Kimmerer said. “You think, how in the world did people learn this? And
the answer is almost always, ‘The plants told us how to do this.’ This is not a matter
necessarily of walking in the woods and being tapped on the shoulder, but
indigenous cultures have sophisticated protocols that are research protocols, in a
sense, for learning from the plants. They involve fasting, ceremonial practices that
bring one to a state of such openness to the conversations of other beings that you
can hear them.”

“Have you ever had an experience like that?” I asked.

“I have,” she said, preferring to leave it mostly at that. “Suffice it to say, I have had
experiences of intense focus and attention with plants where I came away knowing
something that I didn’t know before, and it’s quite incredible. You feel like, ‘Wow,
where did that come from?’”

The problem with talking about these experiences, Dr. Kimmerer said, is that they
“are grounded in a cultural context that is so different from Western science that
they are easily dismissed.”

Reality has become rather strange lately. Tech billionaires are trying to colonize the
moon. U.F.O.s appear to exist, in some capacity. Parents in conspiracy-minded
Facebook groups are poisoning their autistic children with bleach. Reality TV has
fused with politics. The future of the planet looks remarkably grim. (Or maybe
we’re in a simulation.)

Dr. Gagliano’s more subjective claims may feed, in an unnatural time, a spiking
hunger for naturally sourced answers. People are looking for “wisdom from
nature,” Mr. Pollan said, when describing the rising interest in psychedelic
compounds like ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms. The booming wellness
industry is certainly packed with all things “natural” and “plant-based.” The novel
that won the most recent Pulitzer Prize was inspired by a giant redwood that
produced a “religious conversion”; caring for houseplants seems to be a
national obsession.

Given this context, it’s logical that critique over her approach hasn’t stopped Dr.
Gagliano from finding an audience. She spoke about plant intelligence at last
year’s Bioneers Conference, and was invited to speak at last year’s Science and
Nonduality conference, along with Deepak Chopra and Paul Stamets, a respected
mycologist who believes that mushrooms are trying to communicate with humans
through their hallucinogenic properties.

This summer, Dr. Gagliano sat on a sold-out panel called “Intelligence Without
Brains” at the World Science Festival. There I eavesdropped on a woman excitedly
explaining Mr. Pollan’s recent book on psychedelic therapy to her mom. Why had
they come?
“We’re plant ladies!” said one, beaming. “There’s a lot about plants that we don’t
know that might end up saving us, in some regard.”

Dr. Gagliano spoke about plants with pointed familiarity. In her telling, they
became jaunty little characters; she used pronouns like “he” and “they” — never
“it.”

At the festival, a young woman asked Dr. Gagliano how her scientific work had
changed her understanding of the world.

“The main difference is that I used to live in a world of objects, and now I live in a
world of subjects,” she said. There were murmurs of approval. “And so, I am never
alone.”