The 15th Shanghai Biennale: Does the Flower Hear the Bees?
Botany, I read in Zoë Schlanger’s bestseller The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, is full of groundbreaking discoveries these days (Schlanger 2024). We now know that plants have cellular conduits that allow propagation of electrical charges, that some plants release chemicals in the air to alert neighbors of insects, and that evening primrose increases its nectar’s sweetness when it senses the frequency of the hum of bee wings. While such plant-feeling, plant-talking, and plant-listening are not sustained by the same biological apparatus as ours, the functional parallel is apparent. Perhaps it is time to broaden our understanding of intelligence.