The Romance of Plant Life

George Elliot

G.В F. Scott Elliot

The Romance of Plant Life / Interesting Descriptions of the Strange and Curious in the Plant World

CHAPTER I

THE ACTIVITY OF VEGETABLES

Plants which move – Sensitive Plant – A tourist from Neptune – The World's and the British harvest – Working of green leaves – Power of sunshine – Work done by an acre of plants – Coltsfoot, dandelion, pansies, in sunshine and in cold – Woodsorrel and crocus – Foxglove – Leaves and light – Adventures of a carbon atom – The sap – Cabbages and oaks requiring water – Traveller's tree – The water in trees – An oasis in Greece – The associate life of its trees and flowers.

WHEN we remember either the general appearance or the way in which a cabbage or a turnip appears to exist, it does not seem possible to call them active. It is difficult to imagine anything less lively than an ordinary vegetable. They seem to us the very model of dullness, stupidity, and slowness; they cannot move even from one field to the next; they are "fast rooted in the soil"; "they languidly adjust their vapid vegetable loves" like Tennyson's Oak.

In fact one usually speaks of vegetating when anybody is living a particularly dull, unexciting kind of life in one particular place.

And it even seems as if the books, which are supposed to give us the best information about the study of plants, and which are not very attractive little books, quite agree with the ordinary views of the subject.

For one finds in them that plants differ from animals in being "incapable of motion." This, of course, just means that an animal, or rather most animals, can walk, swim, or fly about, whilst plants have roots and do not move from one spot to another. But it is not true to say that plants cannot move, for most plants grow, which means that they move, and in some few cases, we find that plants behave very much in the same way as animals do when they are touched or excited in any way.

We shall have to speak about tendrils, roots, and insect-catching plants later on. But it is perhaps the Sensitive Plant which shows most distinctly that it can shrink back or shrink together when it is bruised or roughly handled.

It will be described in its place, but just to show that this plant can move of its own accord, it is only necessary to hold a lighted or burning match about an inch or so below the end of a long leaf. If one does this then all the little leaflets begin to fold up, and finally the main stalk droops; soon afterwards other leaves higher up the stalk begin to be affected in the same way, and fall limply down one after the other. It is supposed that this movement frightens a grazing animal, who will imagine there is something uncanny about the plant and leave it alone. There are many respects in which this reaction of the Sensitive Plant resembles that found in animals. It does not take place if the plant is chloroformed or treated with ether; the leaves also get "fatigued" if too often handled, and refuse to rise up again.

There are, however, only a very few plants in which an immediate, visible answer to a stimulus can be detected. But all plants are at work; they have periods of rest which correspond to our sleep, but during their ordinary working hours they never slacken off, but continue vigorously active.

The life of man is so short that it is difficult to realize all that is being done by the world of plants. It is necessary to get beyond our human ideas of time. That is most conveniently done by considering how our plant world would strike an inhabitant of the planet Neptune. Our theoretical Neptunian would be accustomed to a year of 60,127 days (164 of our years); we will suppose that three of our years are a Neptunian week, and that ten of our days are about three-quarters of a Neptunian hour, whilst two earth-hours would be a minute to him.

If such a being were to observe our earth, he would be astonished at the rapidity of our vegetable world. The buds would seem to him to swell visibly; in the course of an hour or