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A dandelion growing through a crack in paving. © Image by Martina from Pixabay

Plant Synchronicity is a collaborative project between artists and researchers Flora Campbell, Elvina Crowe, and Dr Gabriela Pavarini, funded by the Arts, Health, and Ethics Collective 2024 Seed Fund. This blog was written by Elvina Crowe.

Introduction

Two workshop participants using the Plantwave device with a large fig tree.All the available spaces at our workshop at Phoenix Farm (White City, London) were filled after only a week of door-to-door canvassing around the immediate local area. Connection to nature is often best practised in one's local area, as relationships are more likely to be maintained. As the workshop took on a life of its own, the rain cleared and collective interest pooled around the device we were showcasing: the Plantwave.

This is a Raspberry Pi device developed by Data Garden that measures slight electrical variations in plants. With two nodes attached to two different leaves, the device senses the variations in water content of the plant – what could be considered activity levels – and converts these changes into a wave on a graph that is then translated into sound. These sounds are interacted with through an app offering many different channels of sound, like tuning into a radio station. Each plant or leaf creates unique patterns and melodies based on its individual electrical activity.

Our Plant SynchroniCity workshop invited participants to listen to ‘plant music’ as a way to reflect on the active presence, interactivity, and moral status of plants. With the Plantwave in hand and a love of plants uniting the group of many different ages and backgrounds, we shared our insights about plants, creativity, and politics.

Planty lives, our lives, and politics

Anthropomorphisation is perhaps a more familiar way to connect with plants than music, for example in children’s books. Many ancient traditions also animate plants. Allowing plants to have agency and personality opens up possibilities for more meaningful relationships with them.

Considering that plants can exhibit complex behaviours similar to those seen in animals, such as adaptation and responses to a changing environment, some theorists go as far as suggesting that plants might possess intelligence or consciousness (Khattar et al., 2022). However, this idea has been strongly criticised by others, and whether plants possess any form or definition of consciousness remains open. Traditional ecological knowledges honour the intrinsic networked intelligence of other non-human beings (Kimmerer, 2015; Todd, 2016), whilst scientists test hypotheses with their own metrics and definitions of consciousness – including awareness, for example (Mallatt et al., 2020; Trewavas, 2021).

This is an ongoing debate and there are few definite conclusions one can draw from the variety of cultural and personal relationships people have with plants. After all, science is just one lens to see through, one of many ways of describing the world. Public expertise and anecdotal experience are also important ways of seeing. Whatever it's like to be a plant, they sustain all multicellular life on Earth, and we should all be very grateful.

At the workshop, we first discussed human dependence on plants. Fun facts are a must, and our favourite was that one large tree provides enough oxygen for up to four people to breathe for one day. To survive in Earth’s atmosphere, let alone thrive, our bodies need plants. Yet, we argued, plants don’t seem to get nearly enough credit for the work they do to maintain human and ecosystem health (Ernwein et al., 2022).

One workshop participant mentioned that plants exist in abundance – they are always there, in the background, and so are easy to overlook. Another participant raised the economic role that plants play in society, as they are most often seen as ‘cash crops’ to be treated as a resource rather than living, responsive beings. She was quick to remind us of the economic links to colonialism, and the theft or abuse of plants as well as of the local peoples by British colonists. “What’s English about a cup of tea?”, she asked.

Her comment alludes to the political nature of human-plant relationships: there are all kinds of power dynamics at play. Urban landscapes, especially in our context of the UK, are another way to understand how (some) humans exert their power over (some) plants. With buildings, roads, pesticides, and plastics, human infrastructure dominates and toxicants swamp the horizon, preventing plants’ access to soil nutrients, space, drainage, and sunshine. Controlling plant life can of course be beneficial in some circumstances, but in cities, plants are often excluded for more superficial, aesthetic reasons, including attempts to meet ‘hygienic’ modern standards. Yet, plants aren’t dirty! They are clean – they detoxify our air and cool our streets (Schwaab et al., 2021).

Despite human hostility, plants are empowered, resilient beings that refuse to be marginalised. They will find a home in the tiniest nooks and crannies of walls and pavements, tumble out of gutters, establish themselves in abandoned industrial sites or along train tracks, or at the top of telephone poles, and happily engulf ruins. They live creatively whilst also providing habitats for pollinators and enabling humans to breathe healthily. They may not have eyes like animals, or a voice to sing or squawk, squeak or speak, nor many characteristics familiar to the charismatic animal kingdom. But, they do eat the sun and soil, seek out relationships with fungi, insects, and animals, and move, twist, caress, embrace, repel, avoid, and contort with their bodies. They are flexible, mobile, and travel – their seeds can fly over the tallest urban buildings and migrate thousands of miles. They are willing housemates (or planet Earth mates), and show their resilience in a multitude of ways that can be witnessed every day. They just work at a slightly slower pace to most of us humans.

Thank you plants, and sorry for not giving you enough credit.

Workshop participants in discussion.

Playing with the Plantwave

These power dynamics may seem subtle when compared with the international geopolitical kind that are accounted for in history books, protest, or the news. But continuing to consider plantlife as unimportant in the face of human struggles still perpetuates wider systems of marginalisation. So, how can we give plants more political power?

We think finding the answer might lie in giving plants more attention. In the academic discipline of multispecies studies, ideas of ‘arts of attentiveness’ and ‘arts of noticing’ have emerged as methods for understanding nonhuman beings, like plants, more intimately (Van Dooren et al., 2016; Tsing, 2021). By slowing down and ‘passionately immersing’ ourselves in plants’ lifeworlds through our senses, we can harness the creative power of our natural imaginations, and balance the power dynamic by becoming kin with plants. By ‘learning to be affected’ by plants, mutual respect and trust can grow into reciprocal, caring relationships, where power is sought with, rather than over.

In this instance, we immersed ourselves using our hearing sense, with the help of the Plantwave device. At the workshop, we listened to an old jasmine vine that had established itself on the wooden pergola at the farm before listening to a young bramble, then an unnamed, tiny ‘weed’ that was bravely growing in the clearing. Participants were encouraged to use chalk and pens to draw or write in the notebooks we supplied, in response to the plant music. There was a whole range of sounds (and drawings), including long sustained piercing notes, vibrational, fading wobbles punctuated with deep drops in the ocean of sound, then discordant riffs and runs up a melodic scale, fast, and then slow. It was surprising.

After our collective listening party, and a few casual comments, each person shared their experience with the group. Many expressed preferring the gentle pace and soothing feel of the music that was conducted by the weed rather than that of the jasmine or bramble. Some commented on how similar the three plants' song s were despite the significant physical difference between each of them. Participants wanted to know whether different species had a distinct ‘soundprint’, or whether other factors such as heat, air pressure, or time of day were more significant for the kinds of sounds produced. And what about listening to different parts of the plants – the stem, or the roots? Participants also commented on the sci-fi nature of the sounds, as for them the ambient music conjured up images of contemporary dancers, space odysseys, or ‘deep work’ Spotify playlists. A recurring comment was about remembering that the electronic music was being conducted by a plant. The sounds and rhythm, via human-designed computers, software, and speakers, was in fact being directed by the water activity levels of a real plant. A comparison with wind chimes was made by one of the participants – in the case of windchimes, it’s not the wind producing the music, it’s the human-made chimes, but the chimes won't sound without the wind.

This relates to the theme of communication and language, which gave rise to some of the most touching, and deeply ethical – even existential – questions. One participant found the experience inspiring, and wondered whether with the advent of plant music, humans were one step closer to communicating directly with plants (but what about some Indigenous societies that have been communicating with plants for millennia? What about the skills one may presume that wise women – witches and healers – once had on these British Isles?). She recounted how, when trimming the vines in her garden earlier in the year, she felt empathy for the plants, and after a thought that perhaps she hurt them by trimming, she felt a sense of “did I just hear you? Did I do you wrong? You are so beautiful – I am so proud of you!” and then she wondered, “Are you proud of me? Would you want to talk to me? What would we say?”, and the psychic dialogue continued. Another participant mentioned that plants do communicate, just not in a ‘language’ that we expect, or understand. For example, daffodils pop out in spring, to signal to us the changing of the seasons. Someone else cited his desire to speak to his houseplants as a reason for attending the workshop.

In the theory of mind, one accepts that going inside the consciousness of another person is impossible, yet as social beings we will, empathically, still attempt to. Another profound comment made by a participant was that with the Plantwave it seems we are trying to access the “secret little lives” of plants, and that this is not unusual – humans each also have their secret little lives, as do animals and insects, and all beings. “That’s all we’re really trying to do, to understand and connect to each other, and that includes plants.” Another participant had a slightly more critical take on the human mediation of this plant music. Plants have their own genuine form of communication amongst one another – for example, involving the release of pheromone-like chemicals – that is not mediated by humans. Talking politically then, the same participant argued that when plants rely on humans to have a ‘voice’ (as they are with Plantwave), this is not really a solution to the human-plant power dynamic problem, because the power still lies with the humans to give them a voice. Instead, he suggested, we could raise people who are more cognisant of plants and their fundamental significance to existence in the first place.

Conclusion

As these discussions came to a natural close, the early autumn chill set in with an orange sky. Other imaginative group reflections included a whole garden orchestra, humans making music with the plants, and “what if the plants aren’t singing, they’re screaming?”. Feedback about the workshop was overwhelmingly positive, as people told us they felt comfortable and safe to say exactly what they wanted to say, and that what we were doing was “world-changing”.

To conclude, we would like to reflect on human abilities to communicate with and understand the language of other species. Often we turn to anthropomorphism to animate other beings. Is this dangerous, or is it all we have? We can imagine how plants might genuinely communicate with one another and other species, and share this with others. We can study plant communication all we like with exacting science. But can we ever really get away from projecting our own experience onto them? Do we need to stop doing that, or are we not so different after all? More questions than ever are emerging, so perhaps we meet plants somewhere in the middle, between their form of communication and ours.


Plant Synchronicity is the debut of the arts initiative ‘Atmosphere Circus’ (atmoscircus@gmail.com) instigated by Flora Campbell and Elvie Crowe. Having both researched plant agency and environmental politics, they are combining their skills and knowledge with the performing and creative arts, to develop workshops which provide opportunities for public engagement with these topics. Get in touch to find out more.