Believe It or Not

Back in the seventies, when I was tender and impressionable, my mom used to chat with her houseplants. “It helps them grow,” she’d explain to me as I followed her around from one beaded macramé hanger to the next. “They don’t understand the words, but they can tell you’re talking to them. They like the attention.” To her credit, Mom did have a magnificent Boston fern and a sprawling jade plant as living testaments to her efforts.

It just so happens that her ideas date far back past the bad-fad seventies. I don’t think my mom was reading nineteenth-century German philosophy in between her plant waterings, but professor Gustav Theodor Fechner was promoting the idea of talking to plants back in the mid-1800s. In his book Nanna (translated as Soul Life of Plants), Fechner reasoned that plants share our human capacity for emotion, and that lavishing them with good conversation and heartfelt attention promotes healthy growth.

Science can’t deny that talking to plants could help them grow, but for reasons other than those my mom or Fechner offered. You see, there’s the simple scientific matter of plants needing carbon dioxide to grow. When you talk to a plant, you give it a direct dose as you exhale. Of course, you’d have to speak intimately with your green friends for several hours a day (which could be thought odd) in order for your breath to provide a therapeutically significant amount of CO2. Personally, I think this sounds like an incredibly relaxing activity, but it lacks decent income potential.

Or does it? Luther Burbank, a renowned botanist, is best remembered for introducing the Burbank potato, precursor to the Russett potato. But Burbank’s passion was much broader than the spud. He claimed that plants are capable of understanding the meaning of speech, telepathically. Burbank recorded his ideas in his book, Training of the Human Plant. In 1926, Burbank died and was buried in front of his Santa Rosa cottage under a Cedar of Lebanon tree that he planted in 1893.

But his ideas stayed in circulation, and in 1970, George Milstein, a New York dentist, released his classic album, Music to Grow Plants By, which I am almost certain my mother kept in her collection alongside the Anne Murray and Johnny Cash titles that her daughters grew up on.

This all serves to explain why I am naturally predisposed to entrancement by things from which most others maintain a skeptical distance. Like, for instance, Masura Emoto and his water crystal photography. The Rake’s article about Emoto’s appearance in Wayzata last summer inspired letters from readers (and drew some reprint requests as well). Clearly, Emoto hits, and perhaps grates, a nerve with his claims that talking to water affects its “health.” Just when you thought bell bottoms were finally going back out, talking to your water comes in.

Can water in a jar really—as Emoto insists—be affected by words on a piece of paper, taped onto the glass so that they face the water? Is Emoto even a scientist? He’s said to be a graduate of the Yokohama Municipal University’s department of humanities and sciences with a focus on international relations, with a subsequent certification from the Open International University as a doctor of alternative medicine.

I know what you’re thinking. But on the other hand, what harm can come of a world with more love and appreciation? And anyway, if I already talk to my plants, how far a stretch is it to say a little thanks to my water?

Or is this the sort of thinking that will soon have me stepping over cracks in the sidewalk and flipping the light switch three times before I enter or exit a room? Not really. I think it’s more like a direct challenge to the old saw that you’re not doing any harm when you picture your enemy under a bus. In essence, what Emoto and Burbank and Fechner profess is the existence of profound and lawful connections between life forms. They seem convinced that our intentions are powerful and create consequences beyond our current comprehension. They’re also three good examples of the fact that you can’t set out to understand, observe, or prove these ideas without many people poking fun at you.

Milstein, on the other hand, is a tougher nut to crack. With his dentistry practice and his recording dreams, he may serve only to prove that the seventies were every bit as weird as we remember.