… The desire to find out whether plants possess anything akin to human consciousness has preoccupied scientists since the days of Darwin, or perhaps even earlier. Most researchers are, however, quite cautious about using the word 'consciousness', fearing they might fall into the tempting traps of anthropomorphism. Both researchers of animal behaviour and scientists attempting to explain the workings of human consciousness often view researchers of plant 'psyche' with a certain scepticism. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird are largely responsible for this attitude; their 1973 book, 'The Secret Life of Plants', appeared on 'The New York Times' bestseller list soon after publication, but was almost as quickly dismissed as unscientific and essentially a farrago of nonsense appealing primarily to followers of various new age movements.

The book provides colourful descriptions of experiments conducted by CIA operative Cleve Backster. As an enthusiast of using the lie detector, he once had the idea of connecting a galvanometer to a dracaena growing in his office. Just from Backster imagining setting the plant on fire, the electrical signal captured by the device intensified, as if indicating that the plant was 'feeling' distress.

This experiment became a source of inspiration for various similar studies – lettuce leaves, small onions, tomatoes, plums, and who knows what else were connected to lie detectors and other devices. It turned out that plants were able to 'recognise' even the 'killer' of another plant who had entered the room, and they also 'empathise' with beings from the animal world – plants reportedly reacted if bird eggs were smashed in their presence or if live crayfish were thrown into boiling water. Little wonder, then, that the idea soon arose to attempt to move plants with musical sounds and the like.

Plant behaviour researchers have apparently not recovered from the damage and shame caused by the book by Tompkins and Bird to this very day. Many of them feel compelled to practise self-censorship in their publications and even in conversation, avoiding the use of overly anthropocentric terms such as 'neurobiology', 'knowledge', 'memory', 'behaviour', 'consciousness', 'thinking', 'feelings' or 'learning' when talking about plants. The fear that their work might start to look like alien research is simply too great.

The only consolation is that, whatever hypotheses these researchers may have put forward, and whatever experiments, observations, and theories discussed in their publications, they still had to come to terms with the idea that plants are living beings not endowed with brains, and therefore it is impossible to attribute many processes typically associated with the activity of that organ to a spruce or a birch.

Nevertheless, the researchers' observations are perplexing. Shrubs whose leaves only begin to release toxins lethal to other living beings when they 'sense' the approach of herbivores or an attack by pest larvae; plants that 'learn' to distinguish artificial threats created in a laboratory environment from real ones; trees in the forest that 'report' changes in growing conditions to one another using root systems and mycelial networks, while ignoring species boundaries in this communication, as birches can allegedly understand spruces, spruces can understand pines, and so on. Here, the recommendation sung about in our very own dainas not to break a single twig in a grove suddenly takes on a completely new and slightly frightening meaning. Even Trofim Lysenko, who, in denying the importance of genetic heredity, once claimed that 'a birch can be re-educated into a spruce, one just needs to nurture it', begins to appear prophetic...