The trees can hear you if you talk to them!

Plants can fall in love, feel loneliness, scream with pain and communicate. They are complex organisms, possessing the likeness of muscles and nerves, having memory and even musical abilities.

“Trees are the Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
- Rabindranath Tagore

Plants can see
Experiments conducted by some biologists are simple and can easily be reproduced in the laboratory. The result is always the same: plants are able to see, taste, smell, touch and hear. Moreover, they can communicate, suffer, remember and analyze.

Scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles have found that plants are able to determine the duration of daylight hours by means of special receptors and, depending on this, establish the optimal flowering time. They react to the excess of the sun: dangerous ultraviolet radiation encourages them to reproduce sun-blocking substances in their bodies.

Music lovers
Japanese specialists conducted an original experiment. They recorded the electrical oscillations generated by various plants, uploaded them into a computer and transformed them into sounds. Based on these records, an electronic symphony was born, an original song of the green plantations, performed in one of the parks in Okinawa. And not only people can listen to it... Experiments with the influence of music on garden crops were conducted many times, and each time the conclusion was the same: they hear and react.

In general, such experiments have been held regularly since the 1960s. The American psychiatrist John Meyes assembled a collection of flowering plants in his greenhouse to play them different melodies. He became convinced that the musical preferences of flowers were very different. Cyclamens loved jazz, mimosas and hyacinths preferred Tchaikovsky, and primroses and phloxes adored Wagner.

The way they feel
Carnivorous plants, such as the Venus flytrap, need sensory organs to feel the touch of an insect and instantly react. The role of such an organ in the flytrap is performed by the three very sensitive hairs in the center of each leaf. It snaps shut only if the contact occurs again within approximately twenty seconds after the first one. Thin hairs on the leaf edges create a fine lattice. If the insect is too small and not worthy for the predator, it is given the opportunity to get out of the trap.

Other plants also have organs of sense. For example, Mimosa pudica folds its leaves inward from the lightest touch. Bindweeds also have to "touch and feel" everything in all directions before they find a suitable support and wrap themselves around it.

​Friends or foes?
Knowing all of the above-mentioned facts, who can doubt the rightness of the ancients who believed that everything on Earth is alive? Herbs, trees, insects, and animals are parts of one big and interdependent organism. When an axe cuts a tree, it hurts everyone. Perhaps other trees help the affected one to heal its wound. However, what if there are too many wounds, the immunity is weakened and enemies are countless? It is only in our, human, power to transform from enemies to the best, closest friends of plants and every other living being on our beautiful planet. Go, talk to the trees, and they definitely will hear you!