Nature’s Threads

Exploring the fascinating world of plant communication at Goorbilyup Gallery, Bridgetown-Greenbushes Visitors Centre

May 10 - 30, 2025

Artist Talk: May 10, 10.30am

Accompanying essay below

The Great Western Woodlands

On my semi-regular walk through Karlkurla, a native bushland park, the chorus of cicadas and birds is constant. Sightings of lizards startled from their sunbathing on the warm bitumen path are common to those of us who often walk or jog along the 7km stretch of pathways. Contrary to a popular belief amongst many WA people, Kalgoorlie and surrounds is a part of the Great Western Woodlands and not desert country at all. The Great Western Woodlands is the largest temperate woodlands left on Earth, covering over 16 million hectares, it is home to over 20% of Australia’s known plant species.

Image by K Arcaro

The bush around Kalgoorlie is an array of green and grey shrubs interspersed with sheoaks and the occasional large gum tree, standing high over groves of the smaller distinctive fluted gimlets. A multitude of small delicate ground plants push through the heavy red clay covered with quartz and hematite gravel. At this level webs of ground dwelling spiders stretch between rocks and plants and the dirt is scattered with ant holes and animal diggings. So in amongst this array of life and microcosms is it any wonder that there may be more to these networks than what we can simply hear and see?

There seems to be an increasing awareness of the role that mycelium (underground fungal networks) play within our ecosystems, but over the past 30+ years scientists have uncovered examples of plant communication and decision-making capacities in more forms than we could ever have previously imagined. There is even new evidence that variations in behaviours between sibling plants may be evidence of plants exhibiting different personality traits.

Did you know that plants can count, make decisions, hear sounds (insects chewing and water running)? They can recognise if neighbouring plant are kin or foe, and communicate with each other and animals through the release of volatile organic chemicals into the air. A primary trigger for volatile emissions is in response to an insect and animal attack. There are numerous examples of how plants respond to predatory attack after detecting volatiles from neighbouring plants, ranging from increasing toxin content in foliage to calling for predatory insects or birds to target attacking insect.

Despite the increasing research into plant communications and decision making capabilities we are still yet to explain the mechanisms and internal structures responsible for these behaviours. Without a brain or central nervous system scientists cannot comprehend how these decisions are being made, calling the discussions of intelligence a moot point. Yet even with our extensive research into our own brains it largely remains as a black box to neuroscientists.

Intelligence without a Brain

Photo by Mellen Burns Artwork by K Arcaro

Botany to date has been able to correlate several plant components with our own bodily organs. For example, mammals rely on the circulatory system with an inline pump (heart) to move blood and in turn oxygen and nutrients around the body to individual cells. Plants do not have a heart but they do have a similar vascular structure which supplies cells within the leaves the necessary water and minerals for photosynthesis, and in return transport food energy to the base of the leaf and plant stem. In 2023 Yang and Farmer discovered that this vascular system was also sensitive to touch and produced an electrical signal transported throughout the plant via phloem cells. Is it possible that this vascular system was also serving as a central nervous system?

Intelligence vs Consciousness

Photo and Artwork by K Arcaro

There are dangers in anthropomorphism of plants. Likening animal and human organs to how plants function highlights the inherent inability to completely explain how they work. Even Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and colleague of Aristotle, who drew parallels between humans and plants acknowledged that using metaphors was purely a way to understand the unknown without providing the solution. The use of anthropomorphism in understanding plant intelligence and consciousness is even more hazardous.

The concept of consciousness in animals is complicated and its definition is not universal. Generally, amongst academics, the term consciousness means having subjective experiences or awareness, the ability to have positive or negative feelings. It was not 2012 a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to formally confer and consider the idea of consciousness in animals. They determined that all mammals, birds and ‘many other creatures, including octopuses’ were conscious beings. The definition of consciousness used by these scientists was the presence of suitable neurological structures including a centralised nervous system and the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours. But surely this definition is limited by our own understanding of how organisms operate?

Photo by Mellen Burns Artwork by K Arcaro

From the beginning of their evolution plants have had to evolve to react to the environment in which they are located, they do not have the capacity to move and alter their environment, nor the need to react to different stimuli with urgency in the way a hunting or hunted animal does. Plants have evolved to interact with the world at a totally different level. We as self-appointed intelligent life need to acknowledge that there are different ways of existing and that intelligence can be present in different forms. Maybe if we can approach our research without any pre-conception, we might begin to glimpse the enormity in the complexity of life.

In an unusual turn of events the world of Law appears to be leading the charge in recognising the rights of the natural world. The first country to recognise ‘Pachamama’ (Mother Earth) in their constitution was Ecuador in 2008. A number of other countries have since followed their lead including Bolivia, New Zealand, India and some local municipals in the US. There are also numerous legal organisations internationally calling for the need to grant legal rights to nature as a living entity with an inherent value and not simply a resource for human exploitation.

(centerforenvironmentalrights.org)

Law is Leading Science