Category — Science (weird & less weird)

You probably think I’m going to talk about your stress. Nope. I’m going to talk about plant stress. But you can extrapolate if you want: humans need a bit of stress, too, or we wouldn’t stand upright.

What seems to be important, in humans and in plants, is the right kind of stress. I’ve talked about bad kinds of stress, like what happens to plants that get watered, then  suffer from drought.

How do we create good plant stress?

Squeeze your grapes. Wine grapes, that is. But you’ve got to do it right. Mark and Rie Ishii Matthews, at the University of California, did a study on wine grapes that were stinted on water, making smaller, dryer grapes. These grapes made wine which was more aromatic and flavorful, and had a better appearance. The wine was worth more, too, which made the growers happy.

Whack off your vines.  Most vines put on a much better display if they’re severely pinched out or pruned early in life. Grapes would be only one example; most perennial flowering vines also benefit from being whacked. Instead of putting their energy into one long trailer, suddenly they have several branches, all potential rivers of flowers and fruit. Don’t forget that many tomatoes are vines, too. And some non-vine plants – such as chrysanthemums – also do well under this treatment.

Beat and shoot your trees. In the southeast U.S., farmers flail their pecan trees to make a better yield. This echos an old English custom, wassailing. On about the 17th of January (Twelfth Night on the old calendar, one of those post-winter-solstice holidays) farmers gather in the apple orchard with shotguns and other noisemakers. They pour libations of cider on the roots, and put cider-soaked pieces of toast in the branches. Sometimes a child is put in the branches of the chosen tree and fed some of the cider toast. Then guns are discharged through the branches, tin cans and trays are beaten, and a song is sung to the apple tree, encouraging it to bear.

There are records of similar rituals for other fruit-bearing trees, but for most of history, apple trees were the main source of alcohol, making them vitally important, and their rituals seem to have been more recorded. Some of the wassailing traditions include beating the trees, just like the southeastern pecan farmers.

Robert Stone’s 1989  book,  The Secret Life of Your Cells, got me thinking about this. Stone says that, in the grapes experiment, the researchers intended good when they turned off the water, and the plants sensed that. Having known scientific researchers, I think they were just as likely to be thinking about what they were having for lunch or if they could fit a trip to the gas station in before they got home, but OK. Let’s ride with this theory.

Certainly the farmers who beat their apple trees are looking to encourage, and not harm. Yet how many stories have we heard of plants who were threatened with death if they didn’t shape up – and they shaped up? How many of us have experienced plants thriving where they have no business to? A miniature citrus that thrives in a shady spot, but dies when moved to a sunny one; Ruth Stout’s gardenia, which flourished where it wasn’t supposed to.

Are these plants stressed, and liking it? Or are they just perverse? Is it the same thing?

Peter Henderson’s 1874 gardening book, Practical Floriculture, is an idea-provoking read that leaves me wondering where he got his manic amounts of energy. One of the things he seemed to enjoy most was experimenting with new technologies, and pooh-poohing old superstions.

One piece of dogma he refutes is the notion of using only soft water or rain water for plants, very popular then, and still recommended now. This is problematic for those of us whose water is full of minerals, and whose rain is only available for part of the year.  The other dictum about watering that Henderson refutes, is that most plants prefer warm water (bulbs don’t; they’re late-winter/early-spring creatures, adapted to cold).

Fortunately for a lot of us, Henderson dispels both these myths. He describes a greenhouse in Jersey City where he grew plants with cold, hard well water, and a greenhouse in Bergen (also in New Jersey) where he gave plants rainwater captured from the roof and stored in cisterns. “…yet we have never been able to see that our plants have been any better grown or healthier in one place than another.”

I will say from my own observation that rainwater (from the sky, as nature provides it) does seem to me to make plants grow more lushly and greenly. It could be because of nitrogen in the water, or it could just be that the time of year it rains here is the time when things are cool and moist and much more likely to be lush.

Whether municipal water poses more of a problem would be harder to say. In 1874, they didn’t use chlorine in their water supply, and there were plusses and minuses to that. Chlorine is used because it’s toxic to every form of organic life. Since people recommend that you let water sit and evaporate chlorine before filling a fish tank, it’s probably not all that great for plants either (or us), but then neither are typhoid fever and all the other great things you get from water gone bad.

As for the temperature of the water, Henderson explains, a simple thermometer test combined with observation takes care of that. He measured his greenhouse soil at 80 degrees; theory had it that the water was supposed to be the same temperature. Henderson begs to differ. “If we pour a pint of water at 40 degrees [about 4.4 degrees C] into the soil, the temperature will not be 40 degrees, but above the mean between 40 and 80 degrees [about 27 degrees C], or about 60 degrees [around 15.5 degrees C]. Now if the soil remained for any length of time at 60 degrees, it might be claimed to be injurious, but it does not.” In ten minutes, the soil temperature is back to normal, or almost.

“It is the duration of extremes of temperature that does the mischief; place a plant of Coleus in a temperature of 33 degrees (just above freezing in Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, and it will be almost certain to die, while it would remain as many minutes without injury. Let a dash of sun raise the temperature of your hot-bed to 100 degrees [ 38C], or over, for 10 minutes, and it will not seriously injure the contents, but an hour of this temperature might destroy the whole.”

He likens this to drinking ice water; the temperature is radically different from our body’s,  but most stomachs are up to the task of bringing the water up to body temperature pretty quickly, so even though having our insides at ice-temperatures is dangerous, it would take a heck of a lot of ice water for that to happen.

So for those who worry about such esoterica: worry no longer. And for those who are worried by people who worry about such esoterica: you’ve now got the perfect answer. Science and history have proven it: we can retire from excessive water snobbery, and all that heating and storing of water that I’m sure somebody did. Me, I’m just glad that science and history are providing a rationalization for sloth.

I’ve studied a lot of herbs and plants that are used for healing.

But I’ve always secretly known that all plants heal, that it restores my energy and turns my life around just to be with them, especially in the woods.

Turns out that my feeling that all plants heal is now a scientific fact. Or at least on its way to being one.

Besides generously providing us with that stuff of human life, oxygen, being surrounded by plants – any plants – seems to help people heal faster. A study at Kansas State University put plants in the recovery rooms of half their appendectomy patients. The patients in the rooms with plants healed faster.

In three days, “plant” patients had kicked their pain meds, while “sterile” patients were still on moderate doses. The plant-surrounded patients also had less fatigue and anxiety, lower heart rates and blood pressure.

For some of us, this one’s a no-brainer: I’ve always felt the sterile, all-artificial-materials environment of hospitals was a very hard place to heal. And any gardener or nature-lover has felt the healing powers of plants: it’s why we hang out with them, after all.

Older traditions of healing work on the assumption that plants have spirits and personalities; we can communicate with them for healing. I’m convinced that this, and not lucky guesswork, is the way human beings found the plants to stock our larders and medicine cabinets. But while I’m sure you get more benefits from a skilled understanding of how to communicate with plants, it seems that even total novices and unconscious people can take in their healing personalities.

I’m glad science is catching up with folk tradition.

Next post: Revelations from down under: Catmint grows native Californian sticky monkeyflower in Australia. Don’t miss this transhemispheric post.