Gardeners who claim that plants like to be talked to are often subjected to gentle teasing and ridicule. The British press derided Prince Charles when he said that he loved to speak to his own plants. But now, a recent study has proved sceptics wrong. Apparently, plants really like it if you talk to them! Plants, it seems, prefer a woman's voice to a man's. Most amazingly, the study shows that plants respond best to the voice of a direct descendant of the world-famous botanist, Charles Darwin. Certainly these findings appear strange - but they seem to be true. They represent the clear results of a month-long study by the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) into the effect of the human voice on tomato plants.
The study started with a classified advertisement placed in The Times newspaper inviting members of the public to audition for roles as plant whisperers. The RHS then chose a total of ten whisperers to monitor and study. The RHS recorded the whisperers reading passages from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, John Wyndam's The Day of the Triffids and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The RHS then played the various recordings to different plants through the headphones of an MP3 player attached to the plant's pot at root level. The RHS kept all the plants in the same greenhouse in exactly the same conditions. The RHS measured the plant's vital signs before, during and after the experiment. Importantly, the RHS also measured the vital signs of a large number of control plants that simply grew in the greenhouse without benefit of contact with the human voice.
The results of the study revealed that the plants that grew the most listened to Sarah Darwin, the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, the world-famous author of the ground-breaking work On the Origin of Species. Sarah Darwin read extracts of her great-great-grandfather's book to her plants. As a result, her plants grew a total of 1.6cm higher than the most successful of the control plants. The RHS suggested that it was the quality of Sarah's voice rather than her subject matter that inspired her plants to grow. All five women volunteers' plants outperformed those listening to the voices of the men who took part!
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Elevator, cookie, apartment, trunk, parking lot, fries, potato chips, (baby) pacifier, garbage collector, main street, truck, math, sidewalk, gas, eraser.
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