PLANTS, BEYOND THEIR HEALING POWERS, ARE SO MUCH MORE

PLANTS, FAR MORE THAN SIMPLE VEGETABLES

The great animated film Avatar (2009), in which director James Cameron’s limitless imagination created a new world, inhabited by beings at times fascinating, at times frightening. But what certainly strikes most the viewer with a soft spot for plants is the incredible fantasy flora designed specifically for this film.

To create it, Cameron didn’t just imagine: he requested specifically botanical consultancy from the University of California. Bioluminescent flowers, huge trees with anomalous proportions, carnivorous plants of immense ferocity: all in a forest full of life and uncontrollable vigor, where mighty branches, vines and vegetation are the places and roads traveled every day by the curious blue inhabitants of Pandora.

And here comes the best part: the plants of Avatar are not just part of the environment: they are the very soul of the planet. And it must be said that the most recent discoveries by researchers — of Earth, this time — are not going in a very different direction… There is more, much more.

In a holistic vision of reality, the film places plants as protagonists: connected to one another, the trees form a Network that communicates and exchanges information, giving life to an “intelligence” that controls the balance among the organisms that populate Pandora.

A fantasy!? Maybe, but not quite…! Perhaps Avatar, in its own way, was ahead of science. At least that is what you might think reading about the research discovering that plants do have senses, and how, and moreover that they communicate.

You will find confirmation in Verde Brillante (Brilliant Green), the surprising book by Stefano Mancuso, or also in What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz — subtitle: A Field Guide to the Senses. You can easily find both online on Amazon.

In their pages you will discover that plant communication takes place through signals — plants use the means they have, of course, so communication doesn’t happen verbally — which plants exchange mainly through their roots, whose final tip takes on the function of a small “distributed” brain, capable not only of “guiding” toward food or moving away from danger or getting around obstacles, but even of cooperating with insects, fungi and soil microbes or of defending themselves from them.

Surprise… the tree of life from the film Pandora really exists…

Another study found that, as they grow, if the crowns of two trees meet, in some cases they intertwine, in others they move apart: as if even among plants there were friends and enemies. Soulmates and opposite souls.

Just think: research has shown that the various species can use chemical signals carried by the air to communicate and that they know, for example, when a “neighboring” plant is suffering and can “ask for help” from insects which, laboratory tests have shown, can be of help.

Plants, in short, would be able to create a true BioNetwork, not so different from Eywa, the life force of Pandora.

In short, after reading all this, watching Avatar again will have a decidedly different effect on you!

But even when you walk up to a plant, I am sure you will respect it in a different way.