The birthday of Prince Charles falls on 15 November. What has this to do with gardening? He believes talking to plants makes them grow.
Strolling the 150 hectares of the Highgrove House garden and farm at in the hamlet of Doughton, just outside Tetbury in Gloucestershire, His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles and Baron of Renfrew, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter talks to his plants.
This has not pleased all of his subjects. “He is unfit to be King,” declared Ron Davies, Labour Member of Parliament. What had got Davies’ knickers in a knot? “He spends his time talking to trees, flowers and vegetables,” huffed the politico.
Hold up there a minute. Our future monarch might be on to something.
Ancient gardening books from India instructed in dohada. Plants and even trees might be sung to, have music played to them, even danced around. If that didn’t work, they might be kicked.
Highgrove House lies on the edge of “cider country.” The apple trees there were, until recently, wassailed at the beginning of each year. Trees that had produced well were joyfully sung to. Woe betide, however, those that failed to crop well. Thumping with the blunt end of an axe or pounding with sticks, even blasts of shotguns fired alongside them were their fate.
And this worked. Botanist Anthony Huxley recorded over a quarter-century ago that ‘harsh noises’ broadcast experimentally on crops in the United States have actually increased yields.
According to Huxley, plants reacted more favourably to Bach and classical Indian sitar music than to “acid rock” – at which ‘they cringe, lean sharply away . . . and die in a few weeks.’ This, he says, sounds like an old Solomon Islands practice of creeping up on enemies’ trees before dawn and suddenly uttering piercing yells – guaranteed to destroy them within a month. Given that the Solomon Islanders were enthusiastic cannibals, the trees may have got off easily.
Some gardeners believe flowers can be revitalized by music, said a British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph this past September.
Halfway around the world from Highgrove, scientists in South Korea, claim they have identified plant genes that “hear.” Mi-Jeong Jeong of the National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology in Suwon and his colleagues played 14 classical pieces including Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in to rice growing in paddies.
The discovery, say the Korean scientists, could mean that genes controlling, for example, flowering of plants could be switched on by broadcasting music at certain sound frequencies.
Could the fields come alive with the sound of music? Alas, other scientists rain upon the parade – and they are from Prince Charles’ England too.
The British New Scientist magazine says that the findings have been ‘greeted with profound skepticism.’ Philip Wigge of the John Innes Centre in Norwich doesn’t think much of the research methods used in Korea. Martin Parry at the Institute for Arable Crops Research-Rothamsted in Harpenden thinks the wind might drown out the effect.
Member of Parliament Davies had to apologize later for his outburst against Prince Charles. Perhaps Parry and Wigge will also have to withdraw their objections at some later date – or perhaps not. Meanwhile, if you want to try chatting to your plants, don’t bore them to death.
One way or another, if people really, really care for their plants, surely they will give them every care possible. So if they also talk to them, well, it just shows how much they appreciate their green friends. And if that makes them grow better, who’s complaining?
Closer to home, if this isn’t enough, you can experience a Talking Tree in the “Living Room” (lobby) of Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Fall, Ontario. This “child friendly” hotel also has a fireplace where it hosts a nightly story time by staff – featuring in addition a talking bear and a talking moose if chatting with a tree is too much for dad.
