“Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward consciousness…”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In the last century or so, we have made considerable progress in recognizing and interpreting the intelligence of all plants. Before scientists formulated their research, poets and naturalists had fathomed features of this intelligence. The most notable of contributions were made by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and by Charles Darwin in his later books (written between 1862 and 1880).
More recently, diligent and passionate biologists, chemists, and experts from other disciplines have used technology for contemporary experiments that reveal a spectrum of plant consciousness. Previously believed to be “immobile and insensitive,” plants have been shown to exemplify similar, and sometimes greater, sense perception than animals. There is a lot of intelligent life working within the make-up of flora and much of it occurs in their roots.
Previously believed to be “immobile and insensitive,” plants have been shown to exemplify similar, and sometimes greater, sense perception than animals.
Each plant lives, breathes, and communicates and is “endowed with personality and the attributes of soul.” Darwin likened plants’ sentient ability to brains of lower animals. Plants are able “to transmit messages through the length of the plant body” as well as to young shoots in their vicinity. The messages, and sometimes nutrients, are shared with neighboring plants, including those of different plant species. Research scientist Cleve Backster has suggested that plant sentience operates not only at a cellular level but also at the molecular, atomic, and possibly “even the subatomic” levels.
The widely held perception that plants are primitive for being static has also been refuted by those who have patiently taken the time to observe them. Plants move at certain times of the day, they “turn in the dark, ready to face the morning sun” as their tendrils reach for the security of trellises or trunks of trees (sometimes taking just an hour to curl themselves around a stationary object). Darwin noted that plants display this slow and subtle power of movement when it is to their advantage. A different type of mobility has been shown by researchers of climate change. In South American jungles, certain species of trees that thrive in cooler conditions have begun to migrate to higher terrains. Similar movements are now evident in the Alps, with the tree line of pine and hardwoods moving up mountainsides to places once covered by ice.
The whole vegetal world responds and vibrates to the scalar (gravitational) and vector (electromagnetic) fields that operate within our planet and solar system. Green plants, being our planet’s early manifested life, provide essential food to all living beings because of their ability to capture energy from the sun and utilize it to power all life processes. As receptacles for energy, plants communicate through vibrations, and these vibrations provide clues to their emotional states and sustaining intelligence. Not only is the host plant conscious, but its individual leaves have their own independent consciousness. For example, leaves detached from a mother plant, especially if threatened, torn up, or shredded, display high levels of anxiety.
Utilizing polygraphs, cardiographs, and encephalographs, scientists have proven a complex plant intelligence that determines levels of stress and emotions, as well as ESP (extrasensory perception) and fear of dying. These emotions are pertinent not only to the plant or leaf itself but also to living matter in its vicinity. Once when Cleve Backster cut his finger and dabbed it with iodine, “the plant that was being monitored on the polygraph immediately reacted, apparently to the death of some cells in Backster’s finger.”
In The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird document the research done on all aspects of consciousness in plant life. Experiments showed that plants respond to a positive and caring environment and are deeply disturbed by noise and harsh music. They become lonely when taken away from other plants in a greenhouse. Plants can also decipher positive and negative thoughts and attitudes. Researchers found that plants pass information among themselves and warn each other against predators and potential harms. For instance, when an insect begins munching on one plant’s leaf, it warns its sister plants, who immediately secrete chemicals to make their taste less appetizing.
The widely held perception that plants are primitive for being static has also been refuted by those who have patiently taken the time to observe them.
Research has also been done on plant consciousness through audible testing using electrodes. One incident involving tests on a cabbage showed that when cabbages not used for testing were being destroyed at random by the scientist, the cabbage hooked up to the machines indicated screaming or crying in a very high-pitched tone. Similar findings emerged in a Russian experiment when a leaf, after witnessing a live shrimp being dropped into boiling water, expressed high levels of stress and frantic behavior.
This example illustrates that plants’ feelings are not reserved for just their own kind. Speculations have arisen about the possibilities that plants’ cellular consciousness is aware of cellular death beyond their immediate environment. From the experiments conducted this could well be the case. It makes possible the fact that uncontrolled felling of a rain forest could stress all green matter wherever it happened to grow. What such an idea suggests is that “some sort of cellular consciousness must be common to all life.”
Much of what has been discovered through scientific research, Indigenous people have known for ages. A Malaysian tribe called Chewong does not place a partition between human and nonhuman consciousness. The Chewong believe that what differentiates humans from animals and plant life is our differing perception of reality, that an “animal ‘worldview’ circumscribed by the limitations of its brain and central nervous system…is every bit as valid and complete as that of humans.” They use the term “different conscious beings” in reference to wildlife. Quoting anthropologist Signe Howell, authors Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki claimed that “as far as members of a particular species are concerned, the world that they view is the true one.”
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From The Green Soul: Returning to Our Sacred Belonging in Nature by Lucinda M. Vardey. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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