| MadSci Network: Botany |
There has not been any scientific research that indicates plants can recognize their owners. That is considered pseudoscience. It sounds similar to the Backster effect, some of the plant pseudoscience in the bestselling book, The Secret Life of Plants. Cleve Backster was a nonscientist who hooked philodendron plants up to a lie detector and thought plants could communicate with people and even identify a "plant murderer." His work was debunked by real botanists (see last two references or do a google.com search). Cleve Backster got a lot of attention for his pseudoscientific experiments because they were so fantastic. He proved the old adage; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Plants fit a definition of intelligence because they can sense and adapt to their environment in complex ways. Plants can sense environmental factors such as light, temperature, soil moisture and gravity but nothing as complex as a particular person. Plants are complex but have nothing as complicated as an animal brain like a pet dog or cat that can recognize their owners.
There is an emerging scientific field of plant neurobiology that studies the complex responses of plants to their environment. The Christian Science Monitor (Jonsson 2005) reported on a 2005 symposium on the topic. The second reference has the abstracts for the plant neurobiology symposium.
First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology
Trewavas, A. (2003). Aspects of plant intelligence. Annals of Botany, 92, 1-20.
Trewavas, A. (2002). Mindless mastery. Nature, 415, 841.
Schrock, John Richard. 1989. Pseudoscience of Animals and Plants. Kansas School Naturalist. 35(4)
Galston, A. W. 1974. The unscientific method. Natural History. 83(3): 18, 21, 24.
plant perception (a.k.a. the Backster effect)
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