A beautiful woman loved growing tomatoes, but they refused to turn red. One day, she noticed her neighbor’s garden was full of huge red tomatoes. So she asked the gentleman : “How do you get them to go so red?” Well, he replied : ”I stand in front of my row of tomato plants , naked in my raincoat, and then “flash” them. My tomatoes turn red from blushing so much.”
So twice a week the lady “flashed” her own crop, hoping for the best . One day the same gentleman was passing and enquired : ”By the way, did your tomatoes turn red ?” ‘’No” she replied, “ But my cucumbers are enormous.”
Pitcher plant. Photo: archer10
This is the stuff of male fantasies….And anyway, tomatoes in Thailand will go red without any human persuasion. But it’s odd how so few jokes involve plants , even if they have, over the centuries, occasionally been given anthropomorphic powers. With animals , of course there are many examples of creatures with human attributes, ranging from classic children’s tales such as “Alice in Wonderland”, “The Wind in the Willows” and and “Winnie-the-Pooh” to more recent examples – “The Lord of the Rings”, the tales of “Doctor Doolittle” and the whole raft of Disney film cartoons..
But plant examples do exist. The mandrake root , for instance, which belongs to the poisonous nightshade genus of mandragora , and which contains hallucinogens, has long been associated with witchcraft. According to legend , the bifurcated root – which can bear a striking resemblance to the human form – screams if uprooted and curses or kills all who hear it. In John Donne’s poem “ Go and Catch a Falling Star , the speaker daringly exhorts the reader to “ Get with child a mandrake root.”
More recent research , some initiated in a 1924 book “The Secret Life of Plants” , espouses the notion that plants do indeed have a kind of consciousness , that they possess auras, and are capable of responding to human stimuli such as music. A polygraph scientist called Cleve Backster conducted experiments with a dracaena ( a plant many of us have in our gardens) and attached it to lie-detector electrodes.. Not only was there a sudden leap on the galvanometer when he dunked a leaf in hot coffee, but the dracaena reacted in a similar way when he opened a box of matches in its presence. It convinced him that plants can “think” or at least react.
Even if some of these theories are highly contentious, it is clear that plants have “senses”, that they can detect light and dark, have a rudimentary form of “memory” which allows them to store and retrieve information and, perhaps surprisingly, that the genes which regulate these responses are also part of human DNA.
A more traditional view is the idea that certain plants have an affinity with humankind on account of their appearance. In mediaeval times, it was, for instance, believed that walnuts were an important cure for diseases of the brain – a view based on the fact that a walnut kernel bears an uncanny resemblance to the human organ. Visually erotic stimulants might include carrots, parsnips, asparagus, bananas and yes – cucumbers…
Other connections between plants and people derive from the characteristics of plants rather than mere visual symmetry . For example, the pitcher plant or nepenthe (which grows here in marshy areas) is actually carnivorous . Equipped with deep “pitchers” at the end of stout tendrils, the nepenthe attracts insects and even frogs to its scented slippery rims, whereupon they fall into the fluid at the bottom. Digestive enzymes in the liquid do the rest.
Some plants such as the Venus fly trap have snap traps – hinged leaves which close on unsuspecting visitors ; others such as the sundew, exude a slimy mucillage which acts like fly paper and ensnares small insects. A few bromeliads have the same capacity to ingest insect protein. Meat eaters all….
green galoshes 