Stupid plants

Plants don’t need to be like us to be smart

A lot has been written in recent years about plants being smart. Believe it all and you’ll suffer nauseating guilt and regret every time you eat a carrot. You certainly wouldn’t hold a Cabinet meeting near a scribbly gum, or trumpet vine. At best, you might seek to commune with the green sentient beans in your vegetable garden. 

It’s frenetic out there. Drawing on chemical stockpiles the envy of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, plants can fend off hostile insect attacks by calling in squadrons of predatory wasps, at the same time warning their vegetable cohorts to prepare arms. Peas have been overheard conversing in clicks, reminiscent of the Khoisan in South Africa.

I’m sure you know by now that under our very feet, kilometres of fungal threads connect forest trees into a real, rather than Middle, Earth version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fangorn forest, populated not by phlegmatic Ents but by collaborative beech and oak. Plants (and fungi) do all this apparent thinking without the need for that distracting mush we carry around inside our heavy, bony case.

[Or do they?] 

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Over coming weeks I'll post some teasers from my new book of 50 essays, The Sceptical Botanist: Separating Fact from Fiction (CSIRO Publishing, 2025), available from 1 August 2025 at CSIRO Publishing and all good bookstores. 

About half, like the source of this extract, were published previously (although I always provide a postscript with my current thoughts on the matter). In this case, the essay first appeared in 2017, in The Sceptic, the now defunct magazine of the Australian Sceptics Inc.

Jerome Entwisle has kindly provided a cartoon for each essay, here and in the book.