Plant Voices
Lawns and Roses, Daffodils and Weeds
In one of my comic books, decades ago, a man swallows a potion that gives him the ability to hear plants speaking. He loves overhearing the conversations of flowers and trees. Even more, he loves being the only person who can hear their voices. Until a neighbor snips a bouquet of roses, and he hears them scream. Until that neighbor’s husband mows their lawn, and uninterrupted wailing begins. Though the man covers his ears, there’s so much terror and pain it’s unendurable, something like a terrible tinnitus. In the final panel, he holds icepicks to his ears.
For a few days, I listened to daisies when I ripped their petals off. I imagined a flower’s scream, high-pitched and girlish. A tree, I thought, would groan like an old man as it was sawed in half. The weeds that grew waist-high in the field behind my house would whimper like boys trying not to cry. When I cut the lawn, whatever horrible sounds it made were drowned out by the power mower.
Months later, my father put me to work pruning shrubbery. Good work to have, he said, because, with care, it encouraged growth. I snipped anything that looked out of place. When the branches snapped, I listened to their voices as they fell.
Onions
In a magazine at Dick Frankie’s barber shop, I read about how some scientists had been observing onion plants, believing they possessed something called “mitogenetic rays.” Their theory was that one onion plant influenced the growth of another nearby plant unless glass was placed between them. I imagined the scientists’ faces, how they resembled the plant-listener in my comic book as they crouched down to measure their results.
I didn’t get to finish the article, but it looked as if those men were about to learn something no one else knew. If they were smart enough, they’d figure out how the onions communicated with each other, what sort of language was spoken with mitogenetic rays.
My father, when I mentioned the article, told me those experiments had taken place years ago. “Dick Frankie must have been cleaning out his cellar,” he said. He looked out our kitchen window toward the patch of back yard where he grew onions every spring, and said that all those onions needed was a little weeding to give them a chance. With or without mitogenetic rays, the onions could do the rest on their own.
Forests
My father loved to be anywhere forested, especially near where we lived in Pennsylvania. He hiked me through game lands, county and state parks, and national forests. He could identify every native plant, or so it seemed. Leaf by leaf, he rattled off maple, birch, oak, ash, locust, hemlock, and four varieties of pine. He split and held sassafras branches to my nose, teaching how, if attention were paid, the nearby scenery could yield the pleasure of tea. Though there was nothing around us except foliage, he would say, “Listen closely. What you hear is paradise.”
“The Tree of Heaven”
Years later, my first house came with a large lawn and an assortment of trees and shrubbery, most of which I didn’t recognize. My neighbor called the largest tree a “tree of heaven.” One frosty morning in very early October, in less than half a minute, all of its leaves fell off with what sounded like an enormous sigh. A cascade of fronds. “It’s a big weed,” my neighbor explained. “But it has its ways.”
My father, when I told him about the simultaneous leaf drop, said, “You’re lucky enough to have a gingko in your yard. Enjoy.”
Hybrids and Mimosas
When I moved into my current house, a sympathetic neighbor gave me a “fast-growing hybrid poplar tree” to help “spruce up” the landscape. He was right. Like the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk vine, that hybrid towered an additional eight feet, sometimes more, each year. As if it were on steroids, it nearly roared with growth. It also put up new shoots from its roots, ones that spread across our lawn and the lawn of another neighbor. When, after several years, I did some research, I learned that its roots ordinarily spread at least twice the tree’s height.
It was replaced, compliments of a friend, by a beautiful, young mimosa tree. And then, as it matured, it, too, put up shoots from its roots. Someone else lived next door by then, so at least he had no history with my invasive foliage. The proliferation of young mimosas seemed to chatter among themselves between mowings; the roots from which they emerged stretched nearly to the rhododendrons that hugged one side of his house.
Now, four years after that mimosa was taken down, it continues to generate shoots from the roots that snake through our lawns. It seems immortal.
Palms
My granddaughters, teenagers now, have lived in Los Angeles all of their lives, but Covid has subtracted most of our usual trips to movies and restaurants. And wildfire, this year nearly close enough for evacuation, makes them curious about the nature of where they live. Every plant but the succulents is brown and brittle. Yellowed fronds from the tall palm trees litter the sidewalks so profusely that they ask whether the trees are dying.
In their neighborhood, someone occasionally prunes them. Someone who has mastered how to use a harness and cables because, he tells us one morning when I visit, “Spiked shoes should never be used. They will permanently damage the trunk.” The girls look interested, so he goes on. “I use the chainsaw for the large fronds. I saw them close to the trunk, but do not cut the trunk. Cuts never heal. They leave the tree defenseless. I pull the boots by hand. I never attempt to saw them off. If they do not pull easily, they are telling me to leave them for now.”
My granddaughters are as fascinated as I am. “They are so delicate,” he goes on. “I never use the tools on another palm tree without disinfecting. Diseases are easily spread by dirty cleaning tools. The lower fronds turn yellow, wilt and die. The upper leaves rapidly follow. At last, a few surviving fronds will form a spike at the top of the tree, but by now the entire plant is dying. You will hear it moan if you listen closely.” I expect the palm pruner to smile, but he doesn’t. “Once a tree is infected,” he says, lowering his voice nearly to a whisper, “there is no cure.”
Our Decorative Plants
Where my wife and I live, drought feels endemic now. The afternoons are worst, even the succulents in the shade look as if they will begin to whine. In full sun, the hardy, decorative grasses and the prolific yucca appear stoic, but the iris and hostas that once thrived have collapsed.
The hanging potted plants must be tired of my wife and me telling each other that our dawn and dusk sprinklings are the best we can do. Throughout the lawn, green is taboo, a public confession of water-waste. A short walk from here, fields of stunted, drooping corn seem, when the wind blows, to cry in unison, inconsolable.
Our house plants, though locked inside a gated community and regularly watered, seem threatened when we wait until past noon to turn on our two room air conditioners. Despite our care, even the cacti appear vulnerable. But there are afternoons, when we talk aloud about the absence of rain, my wife and I lapse into admitting our belief that the descendants of every variety of what surrounds us will, in time, persevere without us.
The Gingkoes
On the campus where I work, one walkway is lined with gingko trees. That soft, simultaneous crash of leaves happens later each year. One of the biologists has tracked it. The timing, he informs me, is approaching November because of climate change. “It will happen on Halloween,” he says. “For a couple of years.”
The Joshua Trees
It is one hundred and five degrees and barely past nine-thirty a.m. when my wife and I finish hiking in August, both of us stunned by what some living things can stand from a mid-morning sky. Yet even such adaptive trees have limits. The Joshua trees, we have been told, are vanishing in an orderly way, the last to die those that flourished at higher elevation because it’s become too torrid even for them. Today, the park is posted like a condemned building, forbidding tourists after ten a.m., but there are latecomers who seem willing to test that warning. What it feels like is that we have toured a hospice for the terminal while inevitable drives by in his ancient, rusted car. I want to say that the voices of Joshua trees are ancient or timeless, but in this landscape, under this sky, they form, in unison, only the barely perceptible hum of collective protest.
Gary Fincke's latest collection of essays The Darkness Call won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleiades Press, 2018). Read more.