They live, they think, make decisions, are self-aware, and aware of others....
The end of my summer has been filled with a bunch of new, dense, and fascinating papers on the ways and life of trees and other members of the plant kingdom. It is now only a matter of days before the processing of this information is done and a massive download on trees happens on the Slog. You have been warned.
As for the The Secrets Life of Plants, I read it as a teenager and all I can recall of that dumb book is this passage...
These experiments led Sauvin to wonder if plants might not react just as well to emotions of pleasure and joy as to pain and shock. Not only was he tired of shocking himself, he was afraid that repeated shocks of his plants, even indirect ones, might be unpleasantly loading his karma... Sauvin decided on a more daring experiment. During (holiday with a girl friend at his lakeside cottage he established that his plants, eighty miles away, would react with very high peaks on the oscillator to the acute pleasure of sexual climax, going right to the top at the moment of orgasm. All of which was very interesting...