Do Plants Have Feelings?

• Plants may not have human emotions, but they do sense and react to their environments in remarkable ways.

• Certain responses help plants survive, adapt, defend themselves, and secure resources.

• From sensitive plants to Venus flytraps, the secret life of plants is more fascinating than you might realize!

It might sound weird to ask the question, but…

DO plants have feelings?

The truth is more complex than you'd think. This is, in fact, a much-debated question in the plant world. And what has surfaced over the years in an effort to find out may blow your mind about what’s going on inside your plants.

A Secret Life

If you have read the famous 1970’s best-selling book, The Secret Life of Plants, you know that Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird were totally convinced that plants not only have emotions but also intuition. They conducted all sorts of experiments with plants, including: 

• Playing music

• Talking to them

• Creating environmental vibrations

But their findings were discredited. Fast forward nearly 50 years, and it still hasn’t been scientifically proven that plants have feelings.

Maybe It’s a Different Kind of Living?

Let’s take a quick step back. It’s important to note that we describe the ability to have feelings by intelligence. And since plants do not have brains or a central nervous system (which is how intelligence is defined), it is said to be impossible for them to have emotions or the ability to reason or feel.

A lush collection of Peperomia obtusifolia, an easy-care indoor plant, at Tula Plants & Design.

But why, then:

• Do plants twist and turn in reaction to light?

• Do invasive plants invade? 

• Do some plants curl up and close when touched?

• Do carnivorous plants know to devour a fly at the perfect moment – and why do they eat flies in the first place?!

Plants may not have feelings. But they are indeed alive and have been described as sentient life forms that have “tropic” and “nastic” responses to stimuli. Plants can sense water, light, and gravity — they can even defend themselves and send signals to other plants to warn that danger is here, or near.

Your Own Plants Can Show You the Evidence

Ficus Facts of Life

Imagine the fiddle leaf fig you brought home from Tula House is dropping lower leaves. Well, that is a tropic response to danger. The danger in this case is most likely a change in the environment, water, or light conditions. 

A fiddle leaf fig, or Ficus lyrata, is very sensitive to its environment and will respond dramatically if it does not receive the light or water that it needs to hold onto those big, beautiful leaves. Let’s assume your plant was not receiving the light it needed to thrive. Since light is food for a plant, and the only job of a plant is to survive, it will drop its lower leaves to preserve energy when light is not sufficient.

Your Ficus sensed danger. It was not receiving what it needed to survive. Its response was to preserve its energy– to stay alive! To have enough energy to grow new leaves, it needed to lose those bottom ones.

If anything gets in the way of a plant succeeding in its only job — to grow — it will respond and do what is necessary to survive.

A lush collection of large tropical plants for sale at Tula Plants & Design in Brooklyn.

Other Signs of Plant “Feelings”

Other tropic responses are illustrated in the slow bending, wrapping, and vining of plants towards light.

The passiflora vine is an invasive plant. It is a fast grower and uses tentacle-like spirals to clasp onto other mediums (like plants and buildings) in order to reach more sunlight — aka food. It will cover its host plant, which will unfortunately suffer, but that doesn’t matter to the passiflora.

It doesn’t feel pity; it feels the need to survive.

Smart & Speedy Sentience

Nastic responses that demonstrate your plants’ sentience are faster than tropic responses and can be seen right before your eyes.

The Virtuosic Venus Flytrap 

Let’s take the Venus flytrap, which is a carnivorous plant that grows in the peat bogs of the Carolinas. It presents a perfect case of how a plant reacts to touch to ensure survival and reproduction.

The problem for the Venus flytrap is that the peat bogs of the Carolinas do not have a sufficient supply of nitrogen or phosphorus. So, it has developed a smart, aggressive tactic of trapping prey that have the nutrients it needs to survive.

Tenacious Techniques

The Venus flytrap is a virtuoso at deploying strategic techniques that allow it to survive and thrive. 

• First, it uses nectar and a well-designed landing pad to attract insects.

• Then, after an insect lands on the plant’s convex lobes, the pest makes contact with teeny tiny hairs. This contact triggers a kind of internal timer.

• If the insect does not move in time, the lobes snap shut!

It’s meal time for the Venus flytrap, which in the blink of an eye has secured much-needed nutrients to survive.

Awareness You Can See for Yourself

There are so many wild examples of plants and their sentient lives, but let’s stop there. We’ll leave you with an easy way to see all of this for yourself.

The Time Away Test

The next time you go on vacation, note the condition your plants are in before you leave, and the condition they are in when you return. This works best during the growing season, but I promise you will notice one or more of these changes:

• A stronger turn towards the light.

• A new leaf unfurling.

• A few fallen leaves because you forgot to water and/or open the blinds.

Plants may not “feel”, but they do sense. And depending on opinion, the ability to sense the way plants do could be more incredible than any feeling we humans experience.

Want to learn more? Discover a world of amazing plants and learn how to care for them. Stop by Tula House today!