Once upon a long Earth-time past, a plant did something that had never been done by plant-kind before: it blossomed. Ahh, the shiver that ran through leaf and stem and twig and root! Joy floated like perfume on a breeze as the wondrous news spread, and the botany collective sighed as that singular flower tipped its face to the sun.
That sun set and rose and set again untold times until there came a day when it shone upon a prismatic glory of blooms, some shy as green, others boisterous as red. (If you’d seen them, you’d be the inventor of singing.) Someone saw them—bugs and birds—and the plants thought, “Blight! We do not want them eating our flowers the way they eat our other parts. Ideas? Anyone?”
Somebody had a fantastic idea. “What say we give those rootless non-botanicals something sweet—let’s call it nectar—and when they stop by for a meal we’ll get a favor in return?”
The speaker whispered this next vibration. “We’ll get them to take our pollen to the neighbors.”
Almost everyone shimmered with happy agreement. A few dissidents said, “Forget it. When those bugs try for our nectar? We’re going to eat them. See how they like it.”
The pollen plan succeeded beyond the plants’ wildest dreams because the result was none other than Fruit. (I’m sure you know how that works. You also likely know that the buzz on the plants’ best buddy, the bee, says they’ve run into trouble. And no bees = no fruit. No more peaches, blueberries, blackberries, apples, oranges… Unthinkable. Please send happy thoughts to bees and support your friendly or unfriendly, doesn’t matter, neighborhood entomologist.)
So, what’s next? Plants have been evolving for a long while and I’m wondering what they’re working on now. If their bee buddies die out, will the plants devise another way to spread pollen and bear fruit? As in, walking roots? (Work with me here. Shakespeare could have prophesied more than he intended in Macbeth when he wrote about the forest coming to the castle.)
Or will plants be very annoyed with a fruitless future and make a massive shift toward the dissident group? Watch out for that Venus Fly-by Trap! Argh! That rhubarb just ate Granny!
Or—and this is my favorite—will plants attempt to translate our extremely foreign language and open up communications with us? I have no doubt they are already conscious; unconscious entities (ex. the dead drunk, doped up, knocked senseless) do not turn and follow the sun’s arc across the sky as sunflowers do, much less produce flowers and fruit.
I don’t expect we’ll ever hear them talking aloud (their lack of vocal chords would pose a problem) so if they were to get in touch with us, how might that happen? And what would they say?
