Plants ‘Talk,’ but It’s Hard to Figure Out Their Point

Joe Sanchez talks to his house plants. And, get this, they talk back to him.

Little of his plants’ chatter makes sense, but it certainly makes for quite a conversation piece.

Sanchez, a 53-year-old aerospace engineer from Long Beach, read the book “The Secret Life of Plants” 12 years ago and was swept away with the notion that plants can communicate and that humans have turned a deaf ear.

So he hooked up his harmless house plant to a mechanical device he constructed. “And,” Sanchez said, “the plant would recognize me entering the room, or when I spoke or turned my back to it.”

Clicking Sounds

The machine, Sanchez said, makes clicking sounds that flow from the plant.

“I’m sure it came from the plant, because when I unhooked it, nothing happened,” Sanchez said.

Come now. Does a plant really communicate?

“Yes,” Sanchez replied. “There’s some kind of a transfer of idea, thought or perhaps even feelings.”

Years passed and the curious engineer, the kind of man who feels quite at home tinkering with space shuttles and the like, decided to press further to find out whether plants possess a vocabulary and are capable of expressing feelings in human terms.

Last year, he attached a voice synthesizer to a computer. The computer was then hooked to a leafy green illuminati .

Next thing you know, Sanchez, a former nuclear weapons specialist, had the little plant that sits beside his computer desk babbling incomprehensibly.

What happened was that Sanchez allowed the plant’s electrical impulses to flow through the feeder wires so it could choose from a vocabulary of more than 1,000 words that he had programmed for it.

Reactions to Stimuli

Researchers in the past have hooked lie detectors to plants and reported that jagged lines left on the machine’s paper showed that vegetation felt pain or love or fear.

Sanchez, a rabid science fiction fan who has used his Apple II to handicap horse races and translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, is positive that his latest homemade voice box has got his once taciturn plants speaking out.

Over the last few months, one of his plants, a Dieffenbachia , has croaked a mouthful over the voice synthesizer from among the 1,000 random words in the computer program.

“Yes, I have one here,” Sanchez began. “Let’s see. It said, ‘After the production above a large prototype my in reality in a great or high degree spiritualized well.’ ”

A few days later, the plant uttered this profundity: “In order above copy in all probability the remedy. Besides the remedy, a long and consistent intuition.”

Sanchez said he once placed the feeder wire from the plant in his mouth. “And it said, ‘Man tastes good.’

‘Something Is Going On’

“Something’s going on here, and I don’t what it is, but something is going on,” Sanchez said.

Another message sounded much like Carl Sagan talking about billions of stars. The computer-plant barked, “Along a cosmic future, flow at first sight, the depth was sharp, define on land, carefully after future, before the expansion, my did, under the sun identical.”

Indeed.

Sanchez believes that plants and humans exist in the same sphere electromagnetically but that they are not attuned to each other.

Or maybe, Sanchez said with a laugh, the plant is a kind of green conduit to “the other side.”