Murmuring Plants

Murmuring plants It all started when the local news channels proclaimed, “Famers find that their plants have gone missing after a day of heavy rains.”

One of the farmers kept arguing that he was unable to find the remnants of the destroyed plant.

‘The remnants must have washed off’ was my counterargument. It was sad to know that these farmers had to face such puzzling circumstances, but I was in no mood that day to think about the case of the missing plants and lose my sanity in the process. This news went on for some days, but it was common to lose some crops if it rains heavily.

I had my things to worry about -- must apply for Ph.D., had to order plasmids for my project, it has been ages since I had Choco muffin and the list continued. I did not give much thought to the crop loss issue.

One day in my small kitchen garden, I observed that amount of my wheatgrass had reduced drastically when I was harvesting them on one weekend. I assumed that this was because I had started with a small number of seeds, or the pesky kids from downstairs might have plucked off some of the wheatgrasses. But after a few days, I noticed that my huge tomato plant was missing, while its pot was still in its place with dirt around it. I was so furious wanted to shout at those kids.

How dare they pluck out my plants. I could not find them, instead found my plant blooming in the muddy patch, right below the corridor where I had kept it. I was getting late and was forced to leave it to grow there as I did not want to disturb the plant. After few days, the plant was missing from that muddy patch. It was high time to interrogate those kids. I went to their parents to ask about them, turns out these kids hadn’t been at home for nearly a month. That was surprising. Was there a new thief in the building?

My work in the lab was piling up and I had no time to hunt this new thief. But one by one my plants were going missing. One weekend I went to the manager of our apartment to resolve this issue. Luckily, we had a CCTV camera fixed on every floor to monitor the entrance of all the flats, and there was a camera focused on my flat’s entrance. In its vicinity, my kitchen garden was also visible. We began observing the footage to see who was playing with my garden, and we found that no one had entered the garden apart from myself. I felt as though I was slowly losing my mind.

Manager Uncle, an old retired bank manager, told me that it was probably due to heavy rains that my plants were dying.

“But uncle, my plants have survived this kind of rain last year and nothing happened to them, they are well protected in the garden. Moreover, even if they die due to heavy rain, their remnants should be left there.” As I pointed that out, I felt Déjà vu. I had heard this argument before. The pattern was repeating, I realized.

He just sighed and excused himself from this crazy hunt for the plant thief. I did not give up, I wanted to know what was happening and began studying the footage again. Something was fishy, wheatgrass, which was dense in the initial days, became clearer significantly one night after heavy rain. That was surprising. Also, on one of the days when it rained heavily, the tomato plants had gone missing. That is when I thought of checking if there is any camera cover that

muddy patch below the corridor. Unfortunately, the cameras were not covering that area. I observed helplessly, as the plants in the garden slowly went missing. I returned to my house dejectedly; I could not find the thief.

I had two options before me: either I could give up on the garden or I could try to find out what was happening to them. I went with the latter, bought some good cameras, fixed them in the required area, and waited patiently for it to rain.

Meanwhile, I started to study those farmers cases keenly and mapped affected farms to see if there was any pattern. Through my study, I could see a trend emerging: many of the farmers on the outskirts of Bangalore were affected early in the year due to rains. However, farms that were beyond the radius of 150 km of Bangalore were not affected in the same way even after having a similar amount of rain or more, but the plants began going missing within a week of the arrival of rains. The farms which were almost 300 km away from the heart of Bangalore were not affected by this phenomenon at all. It looked like some sort of plant disease was spreading slowly across the country and its origin was Bangalore.

As the radius of this neo-disease increased, the perfect circle of disease spread was changed, there was some sort of depression in the perfect circle of affected areas. By the time I mapped all these observations it was Monday morning and I had important experiments to carry on in the lab which I could not afford to miss. I got ready and ran to the lab with dark circles under my eyes.

Fortunately, it rained on Wednesday again and I was waiting desperately to see the mystery unfolding with my naked eyes. But I could not see any abnormal movements. I was disappointed.

However, the rain continued the next day, it was much heavier than the day before. As I sat down to observe the footage, I noticed that my mint plant was missing in the live record, but when I went back to the timestamp when it disappeared, I could see that while it was raining, my mint plant had started to move.

It looked as if it was haunted, it’s root was moving like tentacles and it jumped from the grill. I was shocked on witnessing this action. When I switched to the other camera, which was focused on the muddy path, I could see that the mint plant was still moving on the path, away from the building and I lost the sight of the plant in the footage. I ran outside to see if it was still moving, but it had stopped moving the moment I got closer. It looked like it has been rooted there for ages.

There was a muddy path ahead of it and I believe that if I had not reached it, the mint plant might have followed that path. So, I continued in the direction to see if I could spot anything unusual. It led me to the common neighbourhood garden, which was bordered by some fancy shrub.

Upon closer inspection of this shrub, I saw many different plants hiding between its stems: Aloevera, tomato, ginger, or turmeric, spinach, carrot, the list continued. I was definite that no one would plant these here as the gardener regularly trims this shrub and remove weeds. There was only one possibility left, all these plants have been running away from their garden. I couldn’t go any further as the path which led to the end of the gated community complex was marked by a wired fence on one side and the other side was a drain.

I came back to look at my plants, and to my disappointment, many more of them had gone

missing. The next day, I went around in our society to ask about the missing plants. Many had lost plants but did not bother to dig more into the mystery of their disappearance. One of my neighbours had a huge customized pot in which he grew plants randomly, and he claimed that he did not observe anything unusual.

Over the weekend, I sat with my map to finish plotting the affected area, with some new information at hand. As I had mentioned the perfect circle had started to lose its shape as the affected area increased. Using Google Earth, I found out that the disruption to the expansion of the affected area was mainly due to an encounter of cities or towns during expansion.

However, there was also another variant: conserved forest, where there was no farming. In cities and towns, I was expecting similar behavior as I saw in our apartment. But in the forest, I don’t know what to expect. No one might have reported as it was not a direct hit to the economy.

To confirm my suspicions, I contacted my friends in other cities which were within the affected area and asked them to find houses with a garden. Meanwhile, I visited Banerghetta to know if there is any change. Locals over there told me that for some reason they feel that the forest is getting denser. The foot trails which they used were vanishing, and although most of the trees which were numbered were still there, many shrubs had overgrown in few weeks. As I gained more information about the new inhabitants of this forest, I realized that these plants were not native to that area, but were commonly found in kitchen gardens.

Even though I work in a biological research lab, my knowledge about plants is very limited. But I was convinced that these plants have somehow learned to move around when it rains, and they move only when there are no humans around. And something in Bangalore triggered this behavior in plants. And they are concentrating in the forest. That reminded me about the large pot in my house, into which I threw away discarded seeds from which many plants bloomed.

Surprisingly, not even a single plant had left that pot. Also, one of my neighbors had said that his plants were also fine. All these three cases had a similarity of having polyculture. Something is happening to plants when they are with different varieties, instead of the same varieties.

I decided that it was high time to contact my friend who had done a master’s in botany. I was nervous to call her in the beginning and thought that no one would believe my story. But with a lot of conviction about the movement I had observed, I called her. But Harhitha in turn had a surprise for me.

Pheromones are a type of chemical released by animals to communicate with other animals about food trail and to alert danger. The presence of pheromones and its uses have been studied well on animals, I knew that plants also release pheromones, but did not know about it in depth.

Harshitha hypothesizes that one of the botany labs in the city might have created mutated plants. These plants might have initiated the chain process of signaling something to other plants via pheromones. Which for some reason had made these plants run away to the forest.

She pointed out how my plants started to run away after I got lemongrass from a nearby nursery. She doesn’t have any theory for the mobile feature of plants, but she believes that one of the agriculture institutes working on ‘all nutrients in one plant’ project might be the initiator.

As she has been closely watching their work and has been a regular visitor to that locality. “It could be possible that these mutants might have signaled regular kitchen plants about how efficient they are and there is no requirement for kitchen garden anymore. It might have scared other plants to run away to the conserved area where they know that plants are guarded. Also, they might have the ability to recognize animals and differentiate them based on species. It’s just that we never tried to study this feature of their’ s as we had no behavioral assay for that.

Now we need to study how did they learn to move around?” Harshitha continued “maybe the rain makes the soil loose and the roots get enough free movement to move around. But the exact science behind this particular feature is yet to be studied”. She concluded with excitement. ***End***