====== The Secret Life of Plants ======
**The Secret Life of Plants: by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, 1973**
[[reading_notes]] by [[Cocky_Eek]] //in progress//
==== Introduction ====
---At the beginning of the twentieth century Viennese biologist Raoul Francé(1874-1943)put forth the idea, shocking to contemporary natural philosophers, that plants move their bodies as freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human, and
that the only reason we don't appreciate the fact is that plants do so at
a much slower pace than humans.
---No plant is without movement; he describes a summer day with thousands of polyplike
arms reaching from a peaceful arbor, trembling, quivering in their eagerness
for new support for the heavy stalk that grows behind them. When
the tendril, which sweeps a full circle in sixty-seven minutes, finds a
perch, within twenty seconds it starts to curve around the object, and
within the hour has wound itself so firmly it is hard to tear away. The
tendril then curls itself like a corkscrew and in so doing raises the vine
to itself.
---Plants, says Francé, are capable of intent- they can stretch toward, or
seek out, what they want in ways as mysterious as the most fantastic
creations of romance.
---the inhabitants of the pasture -or botane- appear to be **able to perceive and to
react to what is happening in their environment at a level of sophistication**
far surpassing that of humans.
---Some parasitical plants can recognize the slightest trace of the **odor of their
victim**, and will overcome all obstacles to crawl in its direction.
---Plants seem to know which ants will steal their nectar, closing when
these ants are about, opening only when there is enough dew on their
stems to keep the ants from climbing. The Acacia
actually enlists the protective services of certain ants which it rewards
with nectar in return for the ants' protection against other insects and
herbivorous mammals.
--- **The ingenuity of plants in devising forms of construction far exceeds
that of human engineers**. Man-made structures cannot match the supply
strength of the long hollow tubes that support fantastic weights against
terrific storms...
---the orchid Trichoceros parviflorus will grow its petals to imitate the female
of a species of fly so exactly that the male **attempts to mate with it** and
in so doing pollinates the orchid.... night-blossoming
flowers grow white the better to attract night moths and night-flying
butterflies, emitting a **stronger fragrance at dusk**, ....the carrion lily
develops the **smell of rotting meat** in areas where only flies abound, ....
flowers which rely on the wind cross-pollinate the species **do
not waste energy on making themselves beautiful**, fragrant or appealing
to insects, but remain relatively unattractive.
------the leaves
of the sunflower plant, **Silphium laciniatum, accurately indicate
the points of the compass**. Indian licorice, or Arbrus precatorius, is so
keenly sensitive to all forms of electrical and magnetic influences it is
used as a weather plant. Botanists who first experimented with it in
London's Kew Gardens found in it a means for **predicting cyclones,
hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.**
So accurate are alpine flowers about the seasons, they know when
spring is coming and bore their way up through lingering snowbanks,
**developing their own heat with which to melt the snow.**
France insists that plants are constantly observing and recording events
and phenomena of which man-trapped in his anthropocentric view of
the world, subjectively revealed to him through his five senses-knows
nothing.
Plants have beenfound to be able to distinguish between
sounds inaudible to the human ear and color wavelengths such as infra-
red and ultraviolet invisible to the human eye; they are specially sensitive
to X-rays and to the high frequency of television.
--- The most effective way to trigger in a human being a reaction strong
enough to make the galvanometer jump is to threaten his or her well-
being. Cleve Backster, America's foremost lie-detector decided to do just that to his plant; a Dracaena massangeana: he dunked a leaf
in the cup of hot coffee perennially in his hand. There
was no reaction to speak of on the meter. Backster studied the problem
several minutes, then conceived a worse threat: he would **burn the actual
leaf to which the electrodes** were attached. The instant he got the
picture of flame in his mind, and before he could move for a match,
there was a dramatic change in the tracing pattern on the graph in the
form of a prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. Backster had
not moved, either toward the plant or toward the recording machine.
**Could the plant have been reading his mind**? [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Backster]]
//
related libarynth topics://
* [[plant perception]]
* [[groworld HPI ii]]
* [[plant_tricks]]
-------------------------------
==== ESP, extrasensory perception ====
---
---Marcel Vogel (1917–1991)found that some of the philodendrons he, like Backster attached to his galvanometer,
responded faster, others more slowly, some very distinctly, others less
distinctly, and that not only plants but their **individual leaves had their
own unique personality and individuality**. Leaves with a large electrical
resistance were especially difficult to work with; **fleshy leaves with a high
water content were the best**. Plants appeared to go through phases of
activity and inactivity, full of response at certain times of the day or days
of the month, "sluggish" or "morose" at other times.
To make sure that none of these recording effects was the result of
faulty electroding, Vogel developed a mucilaginous substance composed
of a **solution of agar, with a thickener of karri gum, and salt**. This paste
he brushed onto the leaves before gently applying carefully polished
one-by-one-and-a-half-inch stainless-steel electrodes. When the agar
jelly hardened around the edges of the electronic pickups, it sealed their
faces into a moist interior, virtually eliminating all the variability in
signal output caused by pressure on leaves when clamped between ordi-
nary electrodes.
---1972 related notes: "As an example, while working in the laboratory with leaves of a plant attached to a galvanometer by electrodes, Bob accidentally yawned, and this was markedly recorded on the machine's graph. They then both began yawning, with similar results on the graph."
"People have various levels of consciousness, many of them hidden, and through the use of highly sensitive plants that soon will be developed these levels could be measured.'This could, for example, be especially **useful in career selection** as you could tell if a psychologist has the ability to help people, a lawyer is good at law, a politician at politics, or artist at art. Many brilliant people or geniuses going unnoticed could be discovered.
" If that seems rather far out, an electronics engineer not too long ago was able to build sophisticated equipment to mentally trigger a device through a plant at considerable distance. In one experiment he set a philodendron on a laboratory bench 2 1/2 miles from his home, and sent a strong emotion to the plant. When the plant **received his telepathic message**, it triggered a radio signal that turned on the ignition of a car in the laboratory parking lot, starting the motor." //source:// [[http://www.ebdir.net/enlighten/]]
---the pen recorder
oscillating wildly on the chart. This led to speculation that talking of sex
could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy such as the
"orgone" discovered and described by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and that the
ancient fertility rites in which humans had **sexual intercourse in freshly
seeded fields might indeed have stimulated plants to grow**.
---electronics engineer L. George Lawrence believed that biological radiations transmitted by living things are best received
by a biological medium. biological-type sensors
are needed in order to intercept biological signals, applies particularly to
communications from outer space. As he puts it: "Standard electronics
are next to worthless here, since 'bio-signals' apparently reside outside
of the known electromagnetic spectrum."
---1969. Lawrence; Four main questions, were starting to attract serious
attention: **Could plants be integrated with electronic readouts to form
major data sensors and transducers? Could they be trained to respond
to the presence of selected objects and images? Were their alleged
supersensory perceptions verifiable? Of the 350,000 plant species known
to science, which were the most promising from the electronic point of
view**? //Pg 56// "There are certain qualities here," he wrote,
"which do not enter into normal experimental situations. According to
those experimenting in this area, it is necessary to have a 'green thumb'
and, most important, a genuine love for plants." //Pg 57//
----------------------
==== Latest Soviet Discoveries ====
---film by Panishkin "Are Plants Sentient?"
---biologist Karamanov published "**The Application of Automation and Cybernetics to Plant Husbandry.**" He builded a.o. microthermistors, weight tensiometers, to register the temperature of plants, the flow rate of fluid in their stems
and leaves, the intensity of their transpiration, their growth rates, and
characteristics of their radiation. He picked up detailed information on when and how much a plant wants to drink, whether it craves
more nourishment or is too hot or cold.
--He showed that an ordinary bean plant had acquired the equivalent of "hands" to signal an instrumental brain how much light it needed. When the brain sent "hands" signals, "they had only to press a switch, and the plant was thus
afforded the capability of independently establishing the optimal length
of its 'day' and 'night.' " Later, the same bean plant, having acquired
the equivalent of "legs," was **able instrumentally to signal whenever it
wanted water.** "Showing itself to be a fully rational being, it did not guzzle the water indiscriminately but limited
itself to a two-minute drink each hour, thus regulating its water need
with the help of an artificial mechanism. Pg 67
---Beans, potatoes, wheat, and crowfoot
after proper "instruction" seemed to have the capability of remembering the frequency of Hashes from a xenon-hydrogen lamp. The plants
repeated the pulsations with "exceptional accuracy," and since crowfoot was able to repeat a given frequency after a pause as long as eighteen hours it was possible to speak of "**Long-term” memory in plants**.
The scientists next went on, to condition a
philodendron to recognize when a piece of mineralized rock was put
beside it. Using the system developed by Pavlov with dogs, whereby he
discovered the "conditioned reflex," the Kazakh scientists simultaneously "punished" a philodendron with an electrical shock each time a
mineralized ore was placed next to it. They reported that, after condi-
tioning, the same plant, anticipating the hurtful shock, would get "emotionally upset" whenever the block of ore was put beside it. Further-
more, said the Kazakh scientists, the plant could distinguish between
mineralized ore and a similar piece of barren rock containing no minerals, a feat which might indicate that plants will one day be used in
**geological prospecting.** Pg 69
---V.n. Pushkin, psychological scientist surmised that **a hypnotized person should be able
to send emotions to a plant more directly** and spontaneously than a
person in a normal state. Hypnotizing a young girl by the name of
Tanya, who was described by Pushkin as of "lively temperament and
spontaneous emotionality," they first implanted in her the notion that
she was one of the most beautiful women in the world, then the notion
that she was freezing in harsh raw weather. At each change in the girl's
mood the plant, which was attached to an encephalograph, responded
with an appropriate pattern on the graph. "We were able," says Pushkin "to get an electrical reaction as many times as we worked, even to
the most arbitrary commands.”
---Pushkin and Fetisov decided to see whether **the plant could detect
a lie**, as Backster had claimed. It was suggested to Tanya that she thinks of a number from 1 to 10. At the same time she was told she would never
reveal the number, even if pressed to do so. When the researchers
counted slowly from I to 10, pausing after each digit to inquire whether
it was the one she had thought of, each time Tanya responded with a
decisive "No!" Though the psychologists could not see any difference
in her answers, the plant gave a specific and clear reaction to her internal
state when the number 5 was counted. It was the number which Tanya
had selected and promised not to reveal. Pg 71
---plants have memory. They are able
to gather impressions and retain them over long periods. We had a man
molest, even torture, a geranium for several days in a row. He pinched
it, tore it, pricked its leaves with a needle, dripped acid on its living tissues,
burned it with a lighted match, and cut its roots. Another man took
tender care of the same geranium, watered it, worked its soil, sprayed it
with fresh water, supported its heavy branches, and treated its burns and
wounds. When we e1ectroded our instruments to the plant, what do you
think? No sooner did **the torturer come near the plant than the recorder
of the instrument began to go wild**. **The plant didn't just get "nervous";
it was afraid, it was horrified.** If it could have, it would have either thrown
itself out the window or attacked its torturer. Hardly had this inquisitor
left and the good man taken his place near the plant than the geranium
was appeased, its impulses died down, the recorder traced out smooth-
one might almost say tender-lines on the graph. Pg 73
---In addition to a plant's ability to recognize friend and foe, Soviet
researchers also noted that one plant supplied with water can somehow
share it with a deprived neighbor. In one institute of research a cornstalk
planted in a glass container was denied water for several weeks. Yet it
did not die; it remained as healthy as other cornstalks planted in normal
conditions nearby. In some way, **water was transferred from healthy plants to the "prisoner" in the jar**. Yet they have
no idea how this was accomplished. Pg 73
---As fantastic as this may seem, a kind of plant-to-plant transfer has
been taking place in England in experiments begun in 1972 by Dr.
A. R. Bailey. Two plants in an artificially lit greenhouse in which temper-
ature, humidity, and light were carefully controlled were suffering from
lack of water. Bailey and his collaborator measured the voltages gene-
rated between two parts of both plants. When one plant was watered
from the outside through plastic tubes, the other plant reacted. As Bailey
told the British Society of Dowsers: "There was no electrical connection
between them, no physical connection whatsoever, but **somehow one
plant picked up what was going on with the other."** Pg 74
---research of the American Nobel Prize winner Melvin Calvin in photo·
synthesis, wherein he discovered that **plant chlorophyll under the influence of the sun's rays can give up electrons to a semiconductor such as
zincoxide**. Melvin and his co-workers created a "green photoelement,"
which produced a current of approximately 0.1 microamperes per square
centimeter. After several minutes, the plant
chlorophyll becomes desensitized or "exhausted," but its life could be
extended by the addition of** hydroquinone to the salt solution which acts
as an electrolyte**. The chlorophyll seems to act as a kind of electron
pump passing electrons from the hydroquinone to the semiconductor.
Calvin has calculated that a chlorophyll photoelement with an area
of ten square meters could yield a kilowatt of power. He has theorized
that in the next quarter century such photoelements could be manufac·
tured on an industrial scale and would be a hundred times cheaper than
silicone solar batteries now being experimented with. Pg 76
//
related topic// [[luminous:phoef]]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
==== Pioneers of Plant Mysteries ====
---the Bengali Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose in 1899 betook himself to his greengrocer and purchased a bag
of carrots and turnips, which, of all vegetables, appeared to him the most
stolidly nonsentient, and found them to be highly sensitive. When he
chloroformed plants, Bose discovered that they were as successfully
anesthetized as animals, and that when the narcotic vapor was blown
away by fresh air like animals they revived. **Using chloroform to tranquilize a huge pine tree,** Bose was able to uproot it and transplant it without
the usually fatal shock of such operations. Pg 87
---Since Bose knew that in plants there was respiration without gills or lungs,
digestion without a stomach, and movements without muscles, it
seemed plausible to him that there could be the same kind of excitation
as in higher animals but without a complicated nervous system.
Bose concluded that the only way to find out about the unseen
changes which take place in plants and **tell if they were excited or
depressed** would be to measure visually their responses to what he
called "definite testing blows" or shocks. "In order to succeed in this, we have to discover some compulsive force which will make
the plant give an answering signal. Secondly, we have to supply the
means for an automatic conversion of these signals into an intelligent
script. And, last of all, we have ourselves to learn the nature of these
hieroglyphics." Pg 92
---Bose was able to show how the skins
of lizards, tortoises, and frogs as well as those of grapes, tomatoes behaved similarly. He found that the vegetal
digestive organs in insectivorous plants, from the tentacle of a sundew
to the hair-lined flap of a pitcher plant, were analogous to animal stom-
achs. He discovered close parallels between the response to light in
leaves and in the retinas of animal eyes. With his magnifier he proved
that plants become as fatigued by continuous stimulation as animal
muscles, whether they were **hypersensitive mimosas or undemonstrative
radishes**.
---Working with the **Desmodium gyrans, a species whose continuously
oscillating leaves recall the motion of semaphore flags** and led to its
common appellation, telegraph plant, Bose found that the poison which
could stop its automatic ceaseless pulsation would also stop an animal
heart and that the antidote for this poison could bring both organisms
back to life. Pg 92
In Desmodium gyrans, or the telegraph plant, Bose found that if the
cut end of a detached leaflet was dipped in water in a bent glass tube
it r**ecovered from the shock of its amputation and began to pulsate anew**.
Was this not like an excised animal heart which can be kept beating in
Ringer's solution? Just as the heart stops beating when blood pressure
is lowered and starts again when pressure is raised, Bose found the same
was true for the pulsation of the Desmodium when the sap pressure was
increased or decreased.
--- One day Bose found
that when all motion stopped in his plant, it suddenly shuddered in a
way reminiscent of the death spasm in animals. To determine exactly
the critical temperature at which death occurred, he invented a **morograph, or death recorder.** While many plants met their end at sixty
degrees centigrade, individual plants exhibited variations depending on
their previous histories and ages. If their power of resistance was artificially depressed by fatigue, or poison, the death spasm would take place
with temperatures as low as twenty-three degrees Centigrade. At death,
the plant threw off a huge electrical force. **Five hundred green peas
could develop five hundred volts,** said Bose, **enough to fulminate a cook
but for the fact that peas are seldom connected in series.**
Though it had been thought that plants liked unlimited quantities of
carbon dioxide, Bose found that too much of this gas could suffocate
them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen.
Like human beings, **plants became intoxicated when given shots of
whiskey or gin,** swayed like any barroom drunkard, passed out, and
eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover. These findings
together with hundreds of other data were published in two massive
volumes in 1906 and 1907. Pg 94
Boses invention the Crescograph not only produced a ten-thousand-fold magnification of movement,
far beyond the powers of the strongest microscope, but could automatically record the rate of growth of plants and their changes in a period
as short as a minute.
Bose showed the remarkable fact that in countless plants, **growth proceeds in rhythmic pulses.** each pulse exhibiting' a
rapid uplift and then a slower partial recoil of about a fourth the distance
gained. The pulses in Calcutta averaged about three per minute. By
watching the progress of the movement on the chart Bose found that **growth in some plants could be retarded and even
halted by merely touching them, and that in others rough handling
stimulated growth, especially if they were sluggish and morose.** Pg 99
---The roots of plants are called "geotropic," because they burrow into
the soil. Leaves turn to light because they are "heliotropic" or "phototropic." Roots questing water are described as "hydrotropic," and those
bending against the flow of a stream "rheatropic." The tendril's touch
is known as its "thigmotropism." Pg 99. //
related libarynth topic: // [[plant movement]]
---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy:
“Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant
world? The question is not one of speculation but of actual demonstration
by some method that is unimpeachable. This means that we should
abandon all our preconceptions, most of which are afterward found to be
absolutely groundless and contrary to facts. The final appeal must be
made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless **it bears
the plant's own signature.**
---------------
==== The Metamorphosis of Plants ====
---Why botany, a potentially fascinating subject dealing with plants, living
and extinct, their uses, classification, anatomy, physiology, geographical
distribution, should have been from the beginning reduced to** a dull
taxonomy, an endless Latin dirge**, in which progress is measured more
by the number of corpses cataloged than by the number of blossoms
cherished, is perhaps the greatest mystery in the study of plant life. Pg 104
**The pollen of most plants has a highly inflammable character**; when
thrown on a red-hot surface it will ignite as quickly as gunpowder.
Artificial lightning was formerly produced on the theatrical stage by
throwing the pollen grains of the Lycopodium or club mosses onto a hot
shovel. In many plants the pollen diffuses an odor bearing the most
striking resemblance to the seminal emission of animals and man.
The spermatozoa of certain mosses carried in the morning dew in search of females, is guided by its taste for malic acid toward the delicate cups at the bottom of
which lie moss eggs to be fertilized. **The spermatozoa of ferns**, on the
other hand, liking sugar, **find their females in pools of sweetened water**. Pg 107
---For years Goethe had been distressed by the limitations involved in a merely analytical and
intellectual approach to the plant world, typified by **the cataloging mind
of the eighteenth century**, and of a theory of physics, then triumphant,
which submitted the world to blind laws of mechanics, to a "jeu de
rouages et de ressorts sans vie."
-------------------
==== Plants Will Grow to Please ====
---Gustav Theodor Fechner (1839): “Was it not one of the ultimate purposes of the human bodies to serve vegetal life, surrounding it by emitting carbon dioxide for the plants to breathe, and manuring them with human bodies after death? Did not flowers and
trees finally consume man and, by combining his remains together with raw earth, water, air, and sunlight, transform and transmute human bodies into the most glorious forms and
colors?
----------
==== Tuned to the Music of the Spheres ====
//The Harmonics of plants//
---In 1950 T. C. Singh, head of the department of botany at Annamalai University ,
began wondering whether sound, properly prescribed, could spur field crops to greater yields. From 1960 to 1963 he piped the "Charukesi raga" on a **gramophone via a loud-
speaker to paddy rice growing in
the fields** of seven villages on the Bay of Bengal, and got harvests ranging consistently from
25 to 60 percent higher than the regional average. He also was able
musically to provoke peanuts and chewing tobacco into producing nearly
50 percent more than normal. Singh further reported that merely by
dancing the "Bharata-Natyam," India's most ancient dance style, with-
out musical accompaniment and executed by **girls without trinkets on their ankles, the growth of Michaelmas daisies, marigolds, and petunias
was very much accelerated**, causing them to flower as much as a fort-
night earlier than controls, presumably because of the rhythm of the
footwork transmitted through the earth.
---
In the mid-1960s two researchers at Canada's University of Ottawa, Mary
Measures and Pearl Weinberger were conversant that ultrasonic frequencies markedly affect the germination and growth of
barley, sunflower, spruce, Jack pine, Siberian pea tree, and other seeds
and seedlings However, the very
frequencies which stimulated some plant species inhibited others. They wondered whether specific audible frequencies in
the sonic range would be as effective as music in enhancing the growth
of wheat.
In a series of experiments lasting more than four years, the two
biologists exposed the grains and seedlings of spring Marquis and winter
Rideau wheat to high-frequency vibrations. They found that, depending
on how long the wheat seeds had been vernalized, **the plants responded
best to a frequency of 5,000 cycles a second**.
---1973 Dr. Weinberger said **basic farm equipment of the future will include an oscillator** for production
of sound waves and a speaker." He set up large-scale tests to determine the practicability of their idea.
they discovered that experimental "pink" noise, which, at 20 to 20,000 cycles per second and 100 decibels, sounds to the ear about the **same as the noise received 100 feet
away from a 727 jet plane** about to take off, caused turnips to sprout much faster than those left silently in the ground. Pg 152
---Allotting one chamber for a control group, Mrs. Dorothy Retallack, a Danish professional organist and mezzo soprano in 1968 used the
same plants, as in the first experiment,
setting them in identical soil and affording them equal amounts of water
on schedule. Trying to pinpoint the musical note most conducive to
survival, each day she tried an **F note, played unremittingly for eight
hours in one chamber** and three hours intermittently in another. In the
first chamber her plants were **stone dead within two weeks**. In the
second chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in
silence.
---The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the two musical forms: those
exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and other eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century European scores g**rew toward the transistor
radio**, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other
squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb
the slippery walls of their glass cage. Pg 154
The plants gave positive evidence of **liking Bach, since they leaned
an unprecedented thirty-five degrees toward the preludes**. But even this
affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their
straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent
more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees,
**the nearest one almost embracing the speaker**.
--------------------------
==== Plants and Electromagnetism ====
---Just as plants respond to the wavelengths of music, so also are they
continually being **affected by wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum**, from earth, moon, planets, cosmos and from a proliferation of
man-made devices; only it remains to be established exactly which are
beneficial and which are harmful. Pg 163
---1747, Jean Antoine Nollet, a French abbot and physics tutor, was informed by a German physicist in Wittenberg that
water, which normally issued drop by drop from a capillary tube, would
run out in a constant stream if the tube was electrified. Nollet put several plants in metallic pots next to a conductor and was intrigued to note that the rate of their transpiration
increased. In a long series of experiments, Nollet carefully weighed **not
only daffodils but sparrows, pigeons, and cats** and found they **lost weight
faster if electrified**.
---Italian physicist, Giuseppe Toaldo reported that in a row of jasmine bushes the two which were next to a lightning conductor grew thirty feet tall whereas all the
others attained only four feet. Pg 168
---Bertholon, had a gardener stand on a slab of insulating material and sprinkle vegetables from
an electrified watering can. He reported that his salads grew to an
extraordinary size. He also invented what he called an **"electrovegetometer"** to collect atmospheric electricity by means ot an antenna, and pass
it through plants growing in a field. "This instrument is
applicable to all kinds of vegetal production, everywhere, in all weather.”
--As it had been known that sharp points
were especially attractive to atmospheric electricity, Finish scientist Lemstrom reasoned
that "**the sharp points of plants acted like lightning rods to collect
atmospheric electricity** and facilitate the exchange of charges of the air
and the ground." Pg 175
---London Journal of the Horticultural Society published the "**Influence of Electricity on Vegetation**" by an agronomist, Edward Solly, who, suspended wires in the air over
garden plots, and, tried burying them under the soil. But of
Solly's seventy experiments with various grains, vegetables, and flowers,
only nineteen were of any benefit, and nearly as many were harmful.
The conflicting results of these researchers made it obvious that the
amount, quality, and duration of electrical stimulation was of crucial
importance to each form of vegetal life. Pg 174
---Lemstrom connected a series of flowers in metal pots to a static generator by an overhead network of wires sixteen inches above them and a
pole set into the soil as a ground. Other pots he "left to nature." After
eight weeks, the electrified plants, showed gains in weight of nearly 50
percent over their electrically deprived neighbors. When he transferred
his apparatus into a garden he not only more than doubled the yield of
strawberries but found them to be much sweeter; his harvest from barley
plants increased by one-third. He reported his success in 1902 in a book //Electro Cultur// The English translation of Lemstrom's book, entitled //**Electricity in
Agriculture and Horticulture**//. Pg 176
---------------------------
==== Force Fields, Humans and Plants ====
--- engineers, unlike
researchers in pure science, are less concerned with why or how something works than with whether it will work. This attitude can free them
from the shackles of theory, which in the history of science has often
caused pedants to disregard the brilliant new findings of geniuses be-
cause there was no theoretical basis to support them. pg 178
---Dr. George Starr White, pubished //Cosmoelectric Culture//, discovered that metals like iron and tin could facilitate
plant growth if bright pieces were dangled from fruit trees.Where Hay attached metallic **Christmas tree
balls to tomato plants**, they would bear their fruits earlier than normal. pg 180
---electronic engineer James Lee Scribner believes that: it is the electron that is responsible before the photosynthesis can take
place, for it is the electron that magnetizes the chlorophyll in the plant
cell that makes it possible for the photon to assert itself and become a
part of the plant in the form of solar energy. It is also this magnetism that
draws the molecules of oxygen into the ever expanding chlorophyll cells
of the plant, and so we must assume that moisture is in no way integrated into the plant through any absorption process whatsoever, for the integration of moisture is purely an electronic one. The so-called root pressure
(moisture droplets) appearing on plant surfaces is not root pressure at all,
but an abundance of electrons working with the rather excessive water
energy in the bed. pg 181
---Because, of all living things, they seemed the most enduring and the
least moble, Burr charted the life fields of trees over nearly two decades.
He found that recordings related not only to the lunar cycle and to
sunspots, whIch flare up at intervals with many years between them, but
revealed cycles recurring every three and six months that were beyond
his explanabon. His conclusions seemed to make less suspect the long-
mocked practices of generations of gardeners who claimed that their
**crops** should be **planted according to the phases of the moon**.pg 197
---To try to establish the cosmic origin of energy, Lakhovsky decided
to dispense with his device to produce artificial rays
and tap natural energy from space. In January, 1925, he picked one of
a series of geraniums previously inoculated with cancer and surrounded
it with a circular copper spiral thirty centimeters in diameter, its two
unjoined ends fixed in an ebonite support. After several weeks he found
that whereas all the control geraniums inoculated with cancer had died
and dried up, the plant ringed with the copper spiral was not only
radiantly healthy but had grown twice as high as uninoculated controls.
These spectacular results led Lakhovsky into a complex theory as to how the geranium had been able to pick up from the vast field of waves
in the external atmosphere the **exact frequencies which enabled its cells
to oscillate normally and so powerfully that the cancer-afflicted cells
were destroyed.** pg 185
---Other first and second colonies of cells, separated by the quartz glass,
both perished when only the first colony was murdered with chemical
poisons or lethal radiation and the second left unexposed. What killed
the second colony in each case?
Since **ordinary glass does not permit ultraviolet rays to pass but quartz
glass does**, it seemed to the Soviet scientists that here was a key to the
mystery. They recalled that **Gurwitsch had theorized that onion cells
could emit ultraviolet rays**, and they resurrected his ideas from the limbo
to which they had been consigned in the 1930s. They found that when life processes in the tissue cultures remained
//normal//, the ultraviolet glow, invisible to the human eye but detectable
as oscillations on the tape, remained stable. As soon as the affected
colony began to battle against its infection, the radiation intensified.
Reports on this work in Moscow newspapers disclosed that, however
fantastic it might seem, the **ultraviolet radiation from the afflicted cells
//carried information// encoded in the fluctuation in intensity which was
somehow received by the second colony**.
Since the second colony seemed in each case to die in exactly the same
way as the first, the Soviets realized that it was as dangerous for healthy
cells to be exposed to the transmitted signal of dying cells as it was for
them to be exposed to viruses, poisons, and lethal radiation. It appeared
that the second colony upon receiving the alarm signal from the dying
first colony began to mobilize for resistance and its very "restructuring for war" against a nonexistent enemy proved as fatal as if it had
it had indeed been attacked. pg 189-199
------------------------
==== The Mystery of Plant and Human Auras ====
---Inyushin had written up his research
into the Kirlians' work in 1968 in a book-long scientific paper: //The
Biologlcal Essence of the Kirlian Effect//. Though Kirlian himself had
maintained that the strange energy in his pictures was caused by "changinng the nonelectrical properties of bodies into electrical properties which
are transferred to film," Inyushin and his collaborators went several steps
further. They declared that the **bioluminescence visible in Kirlian pictures** was caused not by the electrical state of the organism but by a
**"biological plasma body"** which seemed to be only a new word for the
"etheric" or "astral" body of the ancients. pg 203
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography]] (Kirlian technique is used in the industry to scan vegetables if they are fresh or not.
--- Viktor Adamenko and other Soviet scientists had been able to determine that the **"bioplasma"**
not only undergoes a drastic shift when placed in a magnetic field but
is concentrated at hundreds of points in the human body which seem
to **correspond to the ancient Chinese system of acupuncture points.**pg 205
---If there is a change in the
universe and environment, say the parapsychologists, a resonance is
produced in the vital energy of the human body which in turn affects
the physical body. It is **through his bioplasmic body** that parapsycholo-
gists believe **a man can be in direct contact with a living plant.** pg 206
---The mystery of the link between human emotional or psycic states
and emanations radiating from the fingertips is deepened by Moss,s
finding that pictures done with Kirlian techniques of both her own and Kendall Johnson's
fingers differ from day to day and hour to hour.
Since the photos of leaves change with variations in parameters, Moss
conjectures that "**at whatever frequency we take a picture, we are resonating, or vibrating at the same frequency,** with one particular aspect of
the material; thus, not a whole picture, but different pieces of information are picked up." [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography]] pg 208
---Kirlian photos of faith healers reveal a smaller glow after healing, while
those healed have greater emanations, indicating some sort of energy
flow from the hands of the healer into the body of the patient, giving
substance to **Galvani's and Mesmer's theory of "animal magnetism."**
--------------------
==== Chemicals, Plants and Man ====
---**Pfeiffer** had developed in his
native Switzerland a "**sensitivity crystallization method"** to test finer
dynamic forces and qualities in plants, animals, and humans than had
thus far been detectable in laboratories. Dr. Steiner asked Pfeiffer to find a reagent which would reveal"etheric formative forces" in living matter. After months of tests with Glauber's salt, or sodium sulfate, and many other chemicals,
Pfeiffer discovered that if a solution of copper chloride to which extracts
of living matter had been added was allowed to evaporate slowly over,
fourteen to seventeen hours it would produce a **crystallization pattern
determined not only by the nature but by the quality of the plant** from
which the extract was taken. Pfeiffer developed an even simpler and less time
consuming method to demonstrate how life veritably pulsates from
living soils, plants, and foods, but not from inorganic minerals, chemicals, and synthetic vitamins, which are dead. Requiring none of the
complex equipment of the standard chemical laboratory, it uses circular
filter-paper discs fifteen centimeters in diameter, provided with a small
hole in the center for insertion of a wick. The discs are laid in open petri
dishes in which stand small crucibles containing a 0,05 silver-nitrate
solution. This solution climbs up through the wick and spreads over the
discs until it has expanded about four centimeters from the center.
From the brilliant-colored concentric patterns Pfeiffer has been able to disclose new secrets of life.
Pfeiffer laboratory has series of beautiful crystallizations, looking like exotic undersea corals. A strong,
vigorous plant produces a beautiful, harmonious, and clearly formed
crystal arrangement radiating through to the outer edge. The same
crystallization made from a weak or sick plant results in an uneven
picture showing thickening or incrustation.pg 244
------------
==== Live Plants or dead Planets ====
---Pfeiffer came to realize that it is only our human egotistical point of
view that labels a weed a weed, and that if they were viewed as a
functioning part of nature, weeds would have much to teach. Pfeiffer
proved that a whole group of weeds, including sorrels, docks, and
horsetails, are sure indicators that the soil is becoming too acidic. Dande-
lions, which lawn owners so feverishly dig up; actually heal the soil by
transporting minerals, especially calcium, upward from deep layers, even
from underneath hardpan. The dandelion is thus warning the lawn
owner that something is wrong with the life of his soil. Pfeiffer came to the conclusion that,
when soil lacks lime, silicon-loving plants such as daisies move onto it.
When they die, they bring to the soil the missing calcium. pg 264
---with **Pfeiffer's chromatograms** established scientific proof that certain plants
beans and cucumbers, for instance
grow better if planted in coniunction with each other, and other plants, such pg 263as beans and fennel, seem
to fare badly together. //related to companionplanting://[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting]]
---The New Alchemists say: "To Restore
the Lands, Protect the Seas, and Inform the Earth's Stewards." This is
what the planet's vegetal covering on terra firma has been doing since
long before the advent of man to his stewardship. In that sense, **//plants
are the oldest alchemists.//**
---------
==== Alchemists in the Garden ====
---Baranger: there's no way out; we have
to submIit to the evidence: //"plants know the old secret of the alchemists.
Everyday under our very gaze they are transmuting elements."//**Bold Text** pg 279
---Tillandsia, or** Spanish moss
can grow on copper wires** without any
contact with the soil.
---Kervran (1901-1983) medical scientist and engineer:
powerful energies are at work in the germination process of seeds which
synthesize enzymes, probably by transmuting matter within them. His
experiments have also convinced him that **lunar forces are extremely
important in germination**, though botanists have long asserted that only
warmth and water are required.
---Though not applied as abusively as in America, even the more limited
European use of artificial fertilizers has led, says Kervran, to a mounting
lack of resistance in plants to pests. The increase of infestation is no
more than a consequence of **biological imbalance.** pg 286
----------------
==== Dowsing Plants for Health ====
---Simoneton found that the **normal healthy person gives off a wavelengt
radiance of about 6,500**. Bovis and Simoneton's thesis: human beings should eat fruit,
vegetables, nuts, and fresh fish that give off radiations higher than their
own normal 6,500, if they wish to energize themselves and feel healthy.
---Myrna I. Lewis, taken by
the Soviets on a visit to several sanitariums in the Black Sea city of Sochi
to find aging Soviet citizens, afRicted with a variety of ills, both physical
and mental, **being treated not with drugs but with vibrations from
flowers in greenhouses** where they were led to smell specific blooms so
many minutes a day. They were also being treated with music played
in their rooms and the sound of the sea recorded on tapes. pg 308
---During his months in Wales, Bach felt his senses quickening, becoming more developed. Through a finely developed sense of touch he was
able to feel the vibrations and power emitted by any plant he wished
to test. Like Paracelsus, if he held a petal or bloom in the palm of his
hand or placed it on his tongue he could feel in his body the effects of
the properties within that plant. Some had a strengthening, vitalizing
effect on his mind and body; others would give him pain, vomiting,
fevers, rashes, and the like. His instinct told him that the best plants would be found blooming in the middl,e of the year, when the days are
longest and the sun at the height of its power and strength. pg 309-310
---Though many of the flowers did not contain the healing properties
he sought, Bach found the dew from each plant held a definite power
of some kind, and deduced that the sun's radiation was essential to the
process of extraction. As collecting sufficient dew from individual flowers
could be laborious he decided to pick a few blooms from a chosen plant
and place them in a glass bowl filled with water from a clear stream,
leaving them standing in the field in the sunlight for several hours. To
his delight he found that the water became impregnated with the
vibrations and power of the plant and was very potent. To potentlize his
water Bach would choose a summer day with no clouds to obscure the
sun's light and heat. Taking three small plain glass bowls filled with fresh
water, he set them in a field where the flowering plants were growing,
then selected the most perfect blossoms and placed them on the surface
of the water.** To lift the blooms from the water without touching the
fuid with his fingers he used two blades of grass.** The water was then
transferred by means of a small lipped phial to bottles. When half-full
the rest of the bottle was filled with brandy designed to preserve the
mixture. Before the next experiment Bach would destroy both bowls and
phials. pg 310-311
---blindfolded ruddy-cheeked Scotsman, Alick McInnes, can** put his hand over a ripe
bloom and tell from the wavelength of its radiation** just what plant it
is and what its medical properties may be. In India, where he spent
thirty years working for the British Raj, Mcinnes got his first introduction to the fact that plants not only give off radiations which are sensible
to humans, but are themselves sensitive to the radiations given off by
humans; this he discovered when he visited the Bose Institute near
Calcutta. pg 312
---By the entrance to the Institute stands a luxuriant Mimosa pudica.
Visitors are requested to pick a small frond from this compliant horticultural guinea pig and place it in one of Bose's complicated machines,
which provides a schematic pattern of the vibrations of the plant on a
sheet of paper. A visitor is then asked to place his wrist inside the
machine and watch as a duplicate of the pattern is produced, demonstrating that mimosa is so sensitive it can pick up and faultlessly reflect
individual human radiations. pg 312 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose]]
---Mcinnes: Each flower species has a time when its
radiations can best be transferred to water, usually, though not always,
when the Howers are at the peak of their maturity, which is also usually
near a full moon.
Potencies, as Mcinnes calls the **radiations which are transferred to
water** can be taken from the rose around midsummer, or June 21, and
from the dandelion around the Easter full moon. When conditions are
right, transfer of the radiations is instantaneous, the water can actually be
seen to change, "an awe~inspiring experience never to be forgotten,"
------
==== Radionic Pesticides ====
--- T. Galen Hieronymus suspected that the unknown energy emitted from metals
might be somehow linked to sunlight; since it could be transmitted over
wires, it might have an effect on the growth of plants.
To find out, Hieronymus placed **some aluminum-lined boxes in the
pitch-dark cellar of his Kansas City house**. Some boxes he grounded to
a water pipe and connected by separate copper wires to metal plates on
the outside of the house exposed to full sunlight. Other boxes were left
unconnected. In all of them Hieronymus planted seed grain. In the
connected boxes the seeds grew into sturdy green plants. The seeds in the unconnected boxes had no trace of green and were anemic and
drooping.
This brought Hieronymus to the revolutionary conclusion that whatever caused the development of chlorophyll in plants could not be
sunlight itself but something associated with it, which, unlike light, was
transmittable over wires. He had no idea at what frequency this energy
might be located on the electromagnetic spectrum, or even if it was
related to it. //more on hieronymus:// [[http://tesla3.com/free_websites/zpe_hieronymous.html]]
-----------------------------
=== related libarynth topics ===
* [[plant perception]]
* [[plant movement]]
* [[HPI]]