It’s okay to talk to your plants!

When nothing works and they look sickly and unhappy, just talk to your plants, and they will respond!

Even when short of inorganic fertiliser, but you have some decayed leaves and stuff to feed them, just drop them closer to base, and they will respond. But, if you care to talk to them, their response would be visibly positive.When doing my Master’s degree at Mississippi State University in 1976, we the graduate students had to conduct field testing of the theories taught in class to evaluate their validity and quantify the plant response in the form of quantity of seed produced, their quality, etc. during the summer season, followed by the defence thesis writing in the winter months. If one would mess up the field experiments, the next planting season would be a year away, and then your money would run out and return home minus the degree. The implications would be many and all foreign students had to be extra careful, unlike the American students.

Our field supervisor was Prof. Howard Potts, a burly American with a very kind heart. Towards the end of the season, one day, Prof. Potts burst into the laboratory room and blurted out, “Sarath, what have you done to your plants?” I was shocked. I said, “I haven’t done anything wrong to them, but they looked okay”. “That’s the point”, he said. “How come they look so much better than other students’ plants who planted the same kind with the same inputs?”. I replied, “I talk to my plants”. He looked confused, shook his head in disbelief and left.

Now, five decades later, neuroscientists have quantified the electrical signals in each of the 50 trillion cells in our bodies including our braincells which work in unison and share them with the live universe. It is one coherent circuit. Therefore, when one is angry, the whole world feels it. When you talk lovingly to plants, they feel the impulse and convey to their own cells the external positivity and respond beautifully. Professor Potts who is not living anymore would still understand what I meant because, I believe that we are still connected, spiritually at least!

I am pleased that I am not alone anymore in this world, talking to plants. In a 2022 simple experiment carried out by the Royal Horticultural Society in New York city, they recorded 10 people, including both men and women, reading from either literary or scientific works. Each recording was played through a set of headphones that was attached to each tomato plant’s pot (that is, one tomato plant per person). The same tomato variety was used, same soil, same care regimen, etc. They also included two plants that were not read to as a control.

At the end of the month, the plants that had been attached to female voices grew an average of an inch taller than those attached to a male voice. The overall winning tomato listened to Sarah Darwin, (somehow, her first name resonates closer to mine) the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Her plant grew approximately two inches taller than the rest.

So, the take home is; let’s be nice and pleasant to plants to make our living environment a “heaven on earth” for us!

Sarath Lakshman Weerasena M.Sc. (Mississippi State University), Ph.D. (Cornell)
Former Director General of Agriculture