You’ve finished mowing the lawn and you look back to survey and savour the verdant site you’ve left in your wake.
Instead of a smooth green carpet, you see stalks standing tall with sunny yellow heads bobbing in the breeze.
You realize that the dandelions ducked.
A flowerbed or garden, painstakingly freed of invasive grass, will nevertheless sprout green periscopes mere days after you’ve dug.
The grass, it seems, was lying low until your back was turned.
A canola field, pounded by hail, will rebound to deliver a decent yield. A feed barley crop, which last saw moisture with the last spring snowflake, will produce so much protein that you won’t have to supplement cattle rations for the next year.
Read Also
Topsy-turvy precipitation this year challenges crop predictions
Rainfall can vary dramatically over a short distance. Precipitation maps can’t catch all the deviations, but they do provide a broad perspective.
We’ve observed all these amazing plant abilities but plants can still surprise us.
They’re adaptable. They’re smart. They’re wily. And now it appears they can even recognize their relatives.
As reported last week in the Globe and Mail and on CBC Radio, an associate biology professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., has discovered that plants – or at least a certain variety of mustard plant – can recognize close relatives.
Planted with others from the same parents in the same pot, research showed the plants will grow fewer roots than when they’re planted with strangers from the same species.
Said Susan Dudly, quoted in the Globe: “When push comes to shove, they will hang with their family, but compete with strangers.” Sounds like any other prairie families you know?
Dudly’s research bears similarities to that reported in August 2005 by Penn State researcher Omer Falik. He took pea plants with two roots, separated them, and then forced them to grow near each other and also near other plants.
He found that the plants grew longer roots next to the neighbours and fewer roots when next to their separated sibling.
It’s apparently a “keeping up with the Jones” instinct.
Dudly’s study led us to dig out a research report from last February that proved plants can communicate through some sort of chemical vocabulary. Scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute simulated an insect attack on sagebrush. They found that tobacco plants nearby, though not attacked by insects, still mounted an insect defence.
So let’s recap. Plants can deflect attack, have amazing tenacity, turn adverse conditions to their advantage, co-operate with their relatives and respond quickly to signals of impending trouble.
No wonder they are so well suited to farmers.
