Behavioral Consultant Tries to Plant the Seeds of an Idea Among Skeptics

Talking kindly to plants and flowers helps them grow bigger, stay healthy and look pretty, and an unloving atmosphere can create an opposite reaction, said Richard Howell, who sometimes hooks plants to sensitive electronic monitors to see what they have to say.

For instance, orchids sometimes faint if people talk sharply to them, says Howell, 50, of Newport Beach. “But they usually recover when the stress is gone,” he said, and notes that most plants are not as sensitive as orchids.

In times past, said Howell--who is a behavioral consultant, behavior modification speaker and polygraph operator--many people have questioned his theory, if not his sanity, although most don’t think it’s that farfetched to have plants react to activities around them.

“When I first talked about flowers and plants reacting to human emotion,” he said, “only a third of the audience believed in me. Now when I give the same talk, three-quarters of the audiences show a positive reaction.”

Besides giving lectures on behavioral methods for companies, Howell uses a polygraph machine to weed out job applicants in sensitive businesses. He uses the same type of hookup to show how plants would react to the various emotions that humans transmit through flowers and plants.

Howell feels it’s not unusual at all for flowers and plants to relate to the feelings of any form of life. “We’ve already proved that with electronic machines,” he said. “In fact, there was a test of a corn field in the Midwest where half the field heard music and the other half didn’t.”

He said the field charmed by the music gave bigger, better and more tasty corn. As a means of showing evidence that his theory is correct, Howell will give demonstrations using plants, flowers and electronic machines as part of the May 16-25 Festival of Flowers at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Howell feels that after 20 years of researching the plant-human emotion connection, there is enough scientific evidence to support his theory that plants react to certain conditions around them.

“We don’t know if plants actually have feelings themselves,” said Howell, “but we do know they can respond to human emotions.”

For instance, he said, “graphs on the electronic machine will show massive changes when exposed to extreme emotions like stress or happiness.”

Each time Howell used the word “love” in his explanation, the needle on the electronic graph jumped markedly.

“See,” he said.

Tim O’Neil is not surprised that business for his family-owned Dy-Dee diaper service in Orange and Pasadena is at an all-time high, a fact he announced at the recent Baby and Family Fair at the Anaheim Convention Center.

“Today’s parents are more involved than ever in the upbringing of their children,” said O’Neil, “and that not only includes what they feed them, but how they clothe them, and that’s what diapers are: clothes.”

He said most babies spend 22,000 hours in diapers “so the type of diaper they wear and the softness they have is important. Many parents don’t want them to wear paper or plastic disposable diapers.”

O’Neil said the rising birth rate may also have something to do with his expanding diaper business.

Gee, how time passes, as the comedy team of Rowan and Martin discovered when Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park decided to store the duo because younger guests didn’t know who they were.

Museum officials eventually changed their minds and kept them, albeit in a different location. Rowan and Martin are now standing mute in the museum’s new pizza restaurant.

But would you believe the newest museum attraction is the old-time comedy team, the Three Stooges--Larry, Moe and Curly.

Who?

Another musical break like his first album, “Mad at the World,” and Roger Rose, 27, of Irvine may think about giving up his job as a mail carrier in Costa Mesa.

“So far it has been a success, for the short time it’s been out,” said Rose, who wrote, directed, produced and played many of the instruments on the album.

The aim of his rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, Rose said, is to offer “hope in a world of hopelessness.”

Acknowledgments--Brad Hall, 16, of Anaheim, who last year risked his life to save two friends and a wheelchair-bound man from a burning house, will be honored for his bravery Monday in Washington at a National Inquirer Awards Ceremony.