Listening to Plants

By Bob Cannard

 In agriculture we have some acceptance of the term "pest."  I just can't see that.  I go out to the garden and see no pests.  I see high levels of populations of some organism that we've labeled as a pest because it's massing on the fruits or the foods that we wish to consume.  The presence of these organisms is a demonstration of weakness within; probably not the genetic make-up, but most likely the environmental support that the plant is getting.

I can't look at those organisms as pests.  They're really great friends.  They're letting me know whether or not the environmental circumstances are sufficient to support this crop in this environment at this time.  We look so little to the organism that we cultivate.  I'd like us to actually look at the plant.  Actually look at the plant as if it were one of our children, know the plant, truly connect with the plant.  Listen to its speech, for instance, its speech of anchorage.

Photo by Jan Mangan

We go out into the garden and we want to pull a weed, and that weed doesn't want to get pulled.  It's well bonded within its spot.  It likes it there.  It's there of its choice.   So we could learn something from that “pestiferous” plant organism, the weed. Plants that like it where they are have good anchorage.  Plants that don't like it where they are don't have good anchorage.  Plants that don't like it where they are and don't have good anchorage, if they're fed and their needs begin to get met, increase in anchorage qualities and characteristics.  Anchorage is one of the ways of speech of plants.

The plant population that has it together is happy in its environmental structure and doesn't have pestilence problems. Bugs are another form of speech. Bugs and plants have grown up together beautifully for the life of this planet.  If there was real adversity between them, one or the other would have won out a long time ago, and it probably would have been the bugs.  But they can't do that.  They have completely sympathetic activities.  The bugs are the cleaners and the gleaners and the improvers of life.  They're the bathers.  They eat up the old leaves off of that old, no longer needed low-level, which once was the present part of the plant and now has elapsed into being the past of the plant.  The plant doesn't need it anymore.  It's withdrawn the nutritional support so that these old leaves become deficient.  The plant has drawn the needed nutritional support from the task of supporting the old leaf, in order to put it into its present, into its flowering, into the seed-bearing time of its life.

This observation of past and present and conceptualization of where that is leading us is so important in growing a plant.  If we don't have a plant that has energy and completeness and contentment and even etheric sweetness, then we have a plant that we've cultivated with adversity.  We look at the garden and we think of all those hateful weeds and all of those horrid bugs and all of these pests. If we carry this energy of adversity into the garden, that's what we're likely to harvest.  If we utilize the resources of the bugs, instead of focusing our energies on them as pests, and if we strengthen that plant, we can learn about nutritional support; and in the process we can harvest a more complete meal, one that digests nicely, has lots of energy to share with us, has its own little form of thought process, whatever species, whatever type of the great diversity that is available out there to share with us.  We start thinking like a cilantro or a carrot or one of those potatoes, any and all.

Our food is not grown that way.  I really feel that it's because we don't look at plants.  We look at people instinctively.  We can walk down the street and say, “Oh, my God I've got to duck in this store and escape the passage of this crowd of people.”  We instinctively know something about our own organism.  Not very much, quite frankly, but it seems like we do have some sort of capacity for that. But with plants we hardly even address the issue. We've got to drop right down to the organism that we actually are interacting with, and very rarely do we do this.  Interacting with plants in this manner is truly restorative.

This is an excerpt from a Bioneers Conference presentation.