An office overlooking Times Square, 1966, early morning. Cleve Backster has spent the night teaching lie detection to police officers, and it occurs to him to connect one of his polygraph electrodes to a leaf of his Dracaena massangeana, simply to see whether the water poured into the pot registers on the leaf. The trace should go down, since a plant saturated with water conducts current better. It goes up, in a sawtooth pattern, exactly like that of a man who has just had a shock. Backster then does what he does with suspects, he looks for the threat. Boiling coffee produces almost nothing. He imagines something worse, burning the connected leaf, and that is where the book turns: the moment the image of the flame forms in his head, before any move towards the matches, the pen draws a long rising curve. He goes out to fetch the matches, another oscillation. He burns the leaf for real, the reaction is weaker. He pretends, and gets nothing more.
That is the scene that launched one of the best-selling and most disputed books on the subject. The Secret Life of Plants was published by Harper & Row in 1973, Robert Laffont brought out Liliane Flournoy’s French translation two years later, and it has never left the shelves since. An introduction, twenty chapters, five parts, 367 pages.
What is inside
The first part, the only one contemporary with the writing, revolves around one instrument, the polygraph, and five investigations: Backster, Sauvin, Vogel, Lawrence and the Soviets. The second digs up forgotten pioneers, Bose, Goethe and Steiner, Fechner, Darwin, Luther Burbank. The third deals with vibrations, music, electromagnetism, force fields, Kirlian photography. The fourth goes down into the soil, attacks chemical agriculture and ends on the biological transmutations of Louis Kervran. The fifth tips squarely into esotericism, dowsing, agricultural radionics, the action of thought on matter, and closes on the Findhorn garden.
From the first part, what is worth remembering is the only experiment in the book with a real protocol, the one with the brine shrimp. After two and a half years of development, Backster builds a set-up from which any human presence is banished. An automatic tipping device drops small live shrimp into boiling water at randomly chosen moments, control trays pour water alone, three Philodendron cordatum wait in three separate rooms on three galvanometers, a fourth channel on a fixed resistor monitors the current. The plants are said to react in synchrony with the deaths. The paper appears in 1968 in The International Journal of Parapsychology under the title “Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life”, and it echoes around the world. Around it, there are no longer protocols but anecdotes, often fine ones: the Canadian physiologist in front of whom only one plant out of six reacts, and who admits to incinerating the plants in her laboratory in order to weigh their dry matter; the plant murder drawn by lot among six police officers, with the surviving plant supposedly identifying the culprit; the three office plants said to register the private riots of their owner, lost in the crowd one 31 December. Backster honestly notes that the culprit, in the case of the six police officers, may well have been broadcasting guilt. He also reports his real failure in a New Jersey murder case.
The chapter that is worth the whole book
The sixth. It tells the story of Jagadis Chandra Bose, and it is cut from a different cloth. We see the child carried on the shoulders of a reformed bandit employed by his father, the Cambridge student, then the Presidency College professor who refuses his cheque for three years because he is paid half the salary of an Englishman. A laboratory five metres by six, a single assistant, an illiterate tinsmith. In 1895, at Calcutta town hall, Bose sends hertzian waves through three partitions to a room twenty-five metres away, where they trigger a relay that topples an iron bar, fires a pistol and detonates a mine. One year before Marconi’s patent. He will never patent anything, on principle.
His discovery amounts to a continuity nobody wanted to see. His coherer tires with use and recovers at rest, heated iron oxide yields muscle-like curves, and the horse chestnut, the carrot, the turnip respond to shocks as metals do. Plants can be chloroformed and come round again in fresh air, so that he transplants a large pine without shock by anaesthetising it. Sir Michael Foster, secretary of the Royal Society, recognises in one of his curves the response of muscle tissue, then learns that he is looking at a piece of tin. Bose presents to the Royal Society on 10 May 1901 and concludes:
“Such absolute boundaries do not exist.”
A month later, Sir John Burdon Sanderson demands that he remove the word “response” from his title, reserved in his view for physiologists, and denies the electrical response of plants on the grounds that he has never managed to obtain it himself. Bose refuses to make the correction, the session breaks up in silence, the paper is buried. The Linnean Society publishes it and invites him to do the whole thing again before them on 21 February 1902. Then come the crescograph, which magnifies a movement ten thousand times, then the oscillating crescograph, which lowers the plant at the very rhythm of its growth so that any variation leaps to the eye. Bose sees in this a growth by pulsations, about three a minute in Calcutta, and describes a dying plant that shivers as if in spasm while releasing a strong discharge. Bernard Shaw, a vegetarian, watches a scalded cabbage leaf convulse in the laboratory and inscribes his collected works to him. In 1926 he will sit on the League of Nations alongside Einstein. His rule of method is the finest sentence in the volume:
“The last word belongs to the plant and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears the signature of the plant itself.”
The rest, from best to worst
Marcel Vogel, a chemist at IBM, first throws Backster’s paper into the wastebasket before fishing it out again, and makes clear one point that everyone gets backwards:
“It is extremely important that it be understood that the plant’s reaction is, in my view, not a manifestation of plant intelligence but the consequence of the fact that it has become an extension of oneself.”
Pierre Paul Sauvin runs a miniature electric train by way of a philodendron relay. Karamanov, in Leningrad, gives a bean plant electronic “hands” and then “legs” that let it set its own day length and water intake. T. C. Singh plays ragas on the veena to balsam plants and reports seventy-two per cent more leaves. At the Kirlians’, in Krasnodar, two leaves of identical appearance give two images, and the paler one comes from a sick plant that shows no symptoms yet. Then comes Findhorn, the sand of a caravan park in Moray Bay, the nineteen-kilo red cabbage, the United Nations agronomist R. Lindsay Robb declaring that these results cannot be explained by any known method of organic cultivation, and finally Dorothy MacLean announcing that she is in direct contact with the deva. Between the two, a Japanese cactus is said to have learned to add up to twenty, and nothing on the page signals that the reader has just changed worlds.
What the book argues, and what is held against it
Six theses stacked up with no step between them. Plants are active and sensitive, and our blindness comes from our timescale. The border between living and non-living is a convention. Plants have the equivalent of a nervous system, a memory, a language. They perceive our intentions. This perception is said to escape the electromagnetic field, since no shielding stops it. And finally, man is said to act on living matter through thought. The fourth is the one that made the book’s fortune, and it is the only one that no independent replication has ever confirmed: the study by Horowitz, Lewis and Gasteiger published in Science in 1975 finds no reaction to the death of the shrimp and puts the traces down to contact artefacts and subjective reading.
This has to be said for a reason that is not caution, but clarity. The book itself contains the objection, without seeing it: Vogel recounts that all three of his student teams failed and that he alone succeeded, then sets up that failure as proof that you have to love plants to get a result. The real flaw is therefore not being wrong, it is serving up, in the same typeface and the same tone, Bose’s measurements validated in London in 1920, the very real Decatur nitrate affair, the irradiation of aerial photographs to kill insects, and angelic entities. The reader has no way, within the volume, of sorting them out. The effect lasted two generations: by tying plant sensitivity to parapsychology, this book made the field untouchable for botanists, and those who work today on plant signalling still begin by distancing themselves from it.
It is great reportage, that much must be granted. Tompkins came from intelligence, Bird from science journalism, neither of them was a botanist, and every chapter opens on a dusty pane of glass or on a blue Volkswagen loaded with instruments, never on a thesis. The linking is done by contiguity, not by demonstration, which produces an impression of convergence that nothing argues for.
It is the first book I read on the subject, and I owe it two things. Bose, whom it would have taken me ten years to come across otherwise. And the quarrel over the word “response”, in 1901, which is worth more than any plea when someone today disputes the verb you use.
Read in January 2016. Note written in 2026.
