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The problem of loneliness seems to be growing. New research demonstrates many gardeners these days have a more intimate relationship with the blooms in their borders, rockeries, pots, and window boxes than they do with most other actual humans. A newly publicized Australian study has claimed that one in seven plant owners now possess a “deep love” for their items of greenery, enjoying “highly connected” relationships with them to the extent of considering them their family members.

As many as 42 percent of those questioned admitted to being “emotionally attached” to their delphiniums and hydrangeas. “They are my babies,” cooed one survey participant, whilst another told researchers that “I cried over my plant’s leaf getting broken off today, so you could say I’m pretty attached to her.” Would the plant cry if you had to have your leg amputated, do you think?

Roots of the Problem
Such emotionally incontinent petal polishers call themselves “plant parents,” with Joe Bagley, author of the guidebook How to Make Your Houseplants Love You: Expert Answers for Plant Parents, going so far as to declare that “Plants are the new pets,” such is their marigold mommies’ and dahlia daddies’ enthusiasm for treating them like full-blown sentient beings.

“Actual scientists—both quack and genuine—have tried to talk to pieces of dumb plant life down the years.”

Other dippy female respondents to the Australian survey were so eager to make their houseplants love them that they appear to have begun treating them as outright penis substitutes:

Watering them and watching them grow is exciting, I feel proud to keep them alive so long. (female, 22)

I get sad when one dies or is looking droopy, I feel happy when they look alive and freshly watered. (female, 22)

I feel terrible if one dies, I feel as though I have let it down and generally bury it in the garden. (female, 34)

That final one seems a bit extreme. Was the survey participant here Lorena Bobbitt? With her past record, she should have been banned from buying secateurs for life. If they have that much trouble keeping their lovers’ stalks stiff, these weedy women should just try purchasing some false plastic imitation ones instead: “daffodildos,” maybe.

Gone to Seed
Matthew Hall, author of the strange-sounding book Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, talks of the historic “exclusion” of plants from the realm of public discourse in the West almost as if this is a form of white supremacist racism; why, they don’t even have the vote! Such second-class status, Hall says, has sprouted on account of traditional authorities like Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible having long “portrayed [plants] as lesser forms of life, with lesser faculties, lacking in sensation, movement, and crucially, the defining human faculty, intelligence.” Yes, we do treat some of them like vegetables, don’t we?

However, rather than “evaluating themselves as the superior organism!” less plant-racist non-white indigenous peoples, like Abos in Australia or Muslims in Minnesota, more generously treat greenery of all kinds as “elder family members.” Essayist David B. Lauterwasser, in his treatise “On the Personhood of Plants,” agrees, talking of how Maori women call out “invocations of remembrance and reverence” for their plant relatives when harvesting sweet potatoes, asking their permission to be picked. What if the sweet potatoes say no?

Lauterwasser quotes someone named Daniel Heath [Social?] Justice, who proposes that, so similar are plants to humans that, in future, we should refer to them as “leaf-headed standing-people” instead because, in the end, “we are, after all, not that different from plants.” You’re certainly a bit of a cabbage.

How are plants like humans? For one thing, when they communicate with one another at a distance using transmissions through interconnected systems of roots, this apparently means they have also independently invented the internet, something that has allowed them to become communists. “Above the ground, capitalism rules; but in the ground, a socialist network dominates,” Lauterwasser cites one “expert” as saying. Secondly, they have sex, just like we do: “their genitals are generally on the tip of their branches…. [We] stick our noses into them and call them flowers.” In fact, “Plants can not only smell, taste and feel, but also see, hear, communicate and think.”

The only thing they can’t do is walk, which means that, although clearly sentient, they have no actual visible brains: “Of course, plants don’t have centralized organs like us animals, but what good would it do if a plant had vital organs such as a heart or a brain if it can’t run away?” Dunno, ask Stephen Hawking.

Lettuce Learn From the Experts
Actual scientists—both quack and genuine—have tried their best to talk to pieces of dumb plant life down the years, much as King Charles enjoys doing today, particularly when fielding calls from Harry and Meghan. Even Charles Darwin once persuaded his son to play the bassoon to a mimosa, “just to see what would happen.” The answer was “nothing.”

Another experimenter, Jagadish Chandre Bose, wired vegetables up to various devices to measure the electric currents running through them; he said they would “jerk” the moment they died. Shades of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s similar claim that, if linked up to the correct monitors, “tomatoes scream when sliced.” When G.B. Shaw visited Bose’s lab, the renowned vegetarian playwright was intensely disturbed to witness a cabbage undergoing supposed measurable “convulsions” as Bose boiled it to death in a pot; did this mean the only truly moral shape of diet from now on would be that of self-cannibalism, or “auto-anthropophagy”?

In the 1960s, Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation specialist, took a break from asking Cubans if they were commies to hook plants up to lie detectors in order to measure their hypothetical emotional responses to various stimuli; a whole “plant orchestra” was once created upon such principles.

Backster’s work also inspired a Japanese electronics engineer and paranormal researcher, Dr. Ken Hashimoto, to hitch a cactus up to a polygraph and get his wife to talk to it, reassuring the plant she loved it. Amplified by special equipment, the cactus spoke back, in a special new language dubbed “cactese”—which, to the untutored human ear, just sounds like random electronic beeping noises. In extremely bizarre videos, Mrs. Hashimoto can be seen “successfully” teaching the clever cactus to count up to twenty.

Budding Genius
Hashimoto was an inventor employed by Fuji Electronics Industries and had previously built a new and improved form of lie detector for use by the Japanese police force. It appears his ultimate goal may have been to question cacti as potential witnesses to future crimes, as in cartoons where a talking parrot who happened to observe a murder taking place is quizzed in court.

According to a 2017 documentary on the Hashimotos, Conversation With a Cactus (which is part fact, part fiction, so should be taken with caution), the Doctor was inspired to build his modified “4D Meter Deluxe” cactus-chatting machine after being randomly stabbed by one during a stroll:

I was walking through a field of cacti. As I bent over to pick a flower bud, a cactus suddenly attacked me! It felt pain! I then realized that plants were animated beings. I researched how a plant’s consciousness could manifest itself. When a cactus feels emotion, the needle produces its voice.

I feel I may have identified the suspect in this assault here: Operating under the nom de crime “Cactuar,” he is obviously of known bad character, as his limbs make the sign of a swastika when fleeing from his would-be arresters.

By Poplar Consent
At least the cactus didn’t rape Mr. Hashimoto: That would have been truly painful, one would imagine. Other strange individuals, however, may have enjoyed the experience. “My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires,” Andrew Marvell once wrote, but when he did so, he was surely not poetizing about “dendrophiles” or literal lovers of trees; those who have it away with two branches of the same species at once are surely said to be engaging in “treesomes.”

Aptly enough, trees give some people wood: Being a dendrophile is a whole new form of queer identity. On the aptly named Vice website, you can read a piece called “My Love Affair With a Tree Taught Me to Express Myself Sexually,” where conceptual artist Genevieve Belleveau talks about how, aged only 8, she fell in love with a swampland sapling she christened “Rainbow Birch.” This experience threw up some deep moral conundrums:

I tried to have sex with Rainbow Birch in whatever way a child or even a human can have sex with a tree…kissing her and hugging her and rubbing on her. But I felt a kind of shame afterwards, because I did that to a living entity without its consent. I felt weird about trying to impose my sexual desire on her. One issue I continue to return to in ecofetishism is that of consent. I can have these feelings and urges and desires to interact with plants in a certain way, but are they agreeing to be part of this exchange?

As an adult, however, Belleveau successfully established psychic contact with tree life by ingesting psychedelic drugs, “which often open up these channels for people.” This reaffirmed her old childhood sense that Rainbow Birch had not been her helpless, immobile rape victim but in fact wholly “accepted her feelings” and was thus a willing participant. Therefore, “I don’t think it’s bad that I humped the tree or whatever.” I do.

Bedding Plants
Belleveau’s deep meditations upon the concept of plant consent have led her to establish a whole business venture, Sacred Sadism, which aims at “taking BDSM out of the dungeon and bringing it into the garden” by “replacing the traditional accoutrements of BDSM—the whips and leather—with plants and ecological elements” such as “the Kink Tamer Turf, which is basically a paddle-brush with bristles made of fake plastic grass…like a little lawn sprouting out of a hairbrush.”

She then acts out demented abusive role-play scenarios with consenting poplars and suchlike, in which “I’ll be the master gardener, and the slave may be the sapling…. I plant my sapling in the soil, take care of it, tend it, prune it, and tie it to a stake.” Do you then squat down and drop some compost on it, personally, for an extra $50?

Fifty-odd years back, this kind of thing was fit only for satire. A 1971 novel by English comedians John Wells and John Fortune, A Melon for Ecstasy: An Ecological Love Story, tells the tragic tale of Humphrey Mackevoy, a young pervert who drills holes into nearby trees, “all of them thirty-three inches from the ground at an angle of between fifteen and twenty degrees to the horizontal,” before planting his seed within the brand-new hollows, and the increasingly desperate attempts of his outraged local council to stop him. Today, they’d be giving Humphrey a large grant and a special medal for services to queerness.

Perhaps the most beyond-satire case of sex with vegetation came from investigator Pierre Paul Sauvin, who once sought to maintain prolonged psychic contact with his pot plants after attaching some Dr. Hashimoto-like response measurement devices to them, before spending the weekend shagging with his girlfriend some eighty miles distant. When he returned home, he found that, at the precise moment he had enjoyed an orgasm with his human lover, records showed the plants’ tone oscillators had gone “right off the top” in shared ecstasy. If you can succeed in causing a plant to spray its juices that gushingly, you really must have green fingers.

With all this in mind, I’m now seriously thinking about getting my garden paved over.