stalking the wild

Hi all. Here is our sound piece from today's presentation.

I did some research on the Dandelion

 

http://www.hoordebomen.nl/

Listen and download it here: Hoor-de-bomen/podcast

So basically what are atomic gardens?

Paige Johnson: After WWII, there was a concerted effort to find 'peaceful' uses for atomic energy. One of the ideas was to bombard plants with radiation and produce lots of mutations, some of which, it was hoped, would lead to plants that bore more heavily or were disease or cold-resistant or just had unusual colors. The experiments were mostly conducted in giant gamma gardens on the grounds of national laboratories in the US but also in Europe and countries of the former USSR.

These efforts utimately reached far into the world outside the laboratory grounds in several ways: in plant varieties based on mutated stocks that were—and still are—grown commercially, in irradiated seeds that were sold to the public by atomic entrepreneur C.J. Speas during the 50s and 60s and through the Atomic Gardening Society, started in England by Muriel Howorth to promote the mutated varieties.

It's easy to look back at it all as some crazy, or conspiratorial, plot. But the atomic gardens weren't a secret. They've just been forgotten. And it's clear from reading the primary sources that most people involved were deeply sincere. They really thought their efforts would eradicate hunger, end famine, prevent another war.

source and read more:  http://pruned.blogspot.com/2011/04/atomic-gardens.html

11 april 2011 urban-biologist Claud Biemans took us on a "field-trip" to spot wild urban plants in the surrounding from the Royal Academy in The Hague. We met at 12 o'clock that bright morning at the stairs,  when Claud showed two rare species she just found about 30m from the Academy. All together we started walking on the pavement along the Prinsessegracht; and instanly Claud pointed us species striving in all sorts of little corners and niches, and explained about there intrguing surviving strategies  She told us that in 1 square km in the city about 300 different species can be found compared to the countryside this is about 50 different species. Bees know this very well, and are more to be found in cities these days and besides  "Miel Beton" tastes more then delicious. We passed the tramline and wondered if plants along this rail know the schedules by heart, as plants seems to have a memory.  We walked slowly over the heads of the dandelions at the Malieveld and entered the first part of the wood. Henna noticed a treasure just next to a young tree, a Morielje, actually two of them, although they appeared delicious, we left them to their own. Then in a small open field full of Nettles, Jack in the Woods and Run away Robins we spotted in its midst an Green Alkanet with blue flowers; it seemed to be a rare one for that area, normally you meet in the dunes. We went deeper in the forest and actually our attention was sort of evaporating; Claud told us that this part of the forest in the oldest nature reserve in the Netherland, already existing since the dark ages. Still it appears more as a park then a forest. One of the reasons is that after a storm in 1911, the whole forest fell down, as its basically sandground, and it was completely replanted. A forest like this with a nutricious ground has about 50 species in one sqare km compared to a forest in Limburg (south of Netherlands) with poor ground has about 500 different species striving.

list of spotted wild plants in and around Het Haagse Bos:

 

Claud determinating

Linnaeus' flower clock was a garden plan hypothesized by Carolus Linnaeus  that would take advantage of several plants that open or close their flowers at particular times of the day to accurately predict the time. He called it specifically the Horologium Florae (lit. "flower clock"), and proposed the concept in the 1751 publication Philosophia Botanica. He may never have planted such a garden, but the idea was attempted by several botanical gardens in the early 19th century.  Many plants exhibit a strong ciradian rhytm, and a few have been observed to open at quite a regular time, but the accuracy of such a clock is diminished because flowering time is affected by weather and seasonal effects.

The approximate opening and closing times of aequinoctal flowers that can be used in an horologium florae:

0200 h -  Night blooming cereus closes
0500 h -  Morning glories, wild roses
0600 h -  Spotted cat's ear, catmint
0700 h -  African marigold, orange hawkweed, dandelions
0800 h - Mouse-ear hawkweed, African daisies
0900 h -  Field marigold, gentians, prickly sowthistle closes
1000 h - Helichrysum, Californium poppy, common nipplewort closes
1100 h -  Star of Bethlehem
1200 h - Passion flower, goatsbeard, morning glory closes
1300 h -  Chiding pink closes
1400 h -  Scarlet pimpernel closes
1500 h -  Hawkbit closes
1600 h - Four o'clock plant opens, small bindweed closes, Californian poppy closes
1700 h -  White waterlily closes
1800 h -  Evening primrose, moonflower
1900
2000 h -  Daylilies and dandelions close
2100 h -  Flowering tobacco
2200 h -  Night blooming cereus

source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaeus%27_flower_clock

In 1950 T. C. Singh, head of the department of botany at Annamalai University, Madras, India, discovered under microscope that plant protoplasm was moving faster in the cell as a result of the sound produced by an electric tuning fork. This discovery led to his conclusion that sound must have some effect on the metabolic activities of the plant cell. He began wondering whether sound, properly prescribed, could spur field crops to greater yields. From 1960 to 1963 he piped the “Charukesi raga” on a gramophone via a loud- speaker to paddy rice growing in the fields of seven villages on the Bay of Bengal, and got harvests ranging consistently from 25 to 60 percent higher than the regional average.  Singh further reported that merely by dancing the “Bharata-Natyam,” India's most ancient dance style, with- out musical accompaniment and executed by girls without trinkets on their ankles, the growth of Michaelmas daisies, marigolds, and petunias was very much accelerated, causing them to flower as much as a fort- night earlier than controls, presumably because of the rhythm of the footwork transmitted through the earth

1973 Dr. Weinberger said basic farm equipment of the future will include an oscillator for production of sound waves and a speaker.” He set up large-scale tests to determine the practicability of their idea. they discovered that experimental “pink” noise, which, at 20 to 20,000 cycles per second and 100 decibels, sounds to the ear about the same as the noise received 100 feet away from a 727 jet plane about to take off, caused turnips to sprout much faster than those left silently in the ground.

Mrs Dorothy Retallack, a Danish organist and mezzo soprano in 1968 tried experimenting with different types of music to plants:  The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the any musical form: plants exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European, scores grew toward the transistor radio, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb the slippery walls of their glass cage.  But even this affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees, the nearest one almost embracing the speaker.

Dorothy Retallack and Professor Broman working with the plants used in music experiments.

Allotting one chamber for a control group,  she used the same plants, as in the first experiment, setting them in identical soil and affording them equal amounts of water on schedule. Trying to pinpoint the musical note most conducive to survival, each day she tried an F note, played unremittingly for eight hours in one chamber and three hours intermittently in another. In the first chamber her plants were stone dead within two weeks. In the second chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in silence..

source: http://www.musicforyourplants.com/, Secret Life of Pants,  http://www.dovesong.com/

Semyon Davidovich Kirlian (1900-1980), a Russian electrician observed in 1939 that an electric spark can "take its own picture" as it passes through a photographic emulsion. To Kirlian, the fuzzy field surrounding any object was a photograph of its aura. First he was ignored by Russian scientists, but during the early 1960s the Russian press and popular magazines promoted him as a "great discoverer." Pseudoscientists flocked to see him to study the aur and probe the bioplasma field.

 It is through his bioplasmic body that parapsychologists believe a man can be in direct contact with a living plant. 

During the Kirlian Photography procedure, the object, such as a leaf, is placed on a photographic emulsion within an apparatus that generates a high-voltage (15,000 to 100,000 volts), low-amperage, high-frequency electric current. The resulting photo shows a bioluminescense glow surrounding the outline of the object. Proponents correlate these patterns with acupuncture meridians. Now-days Kirlian photography technique is amongst used  to deternmine vegetal's vitalness in the foodindustry

source: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/kirlian.html http://www.o8ode.ru/article/eng/engl/kirlian.htm, Secret Life of Plants

Viennese biologist Raoul Francé (1874-1943) put forth the idea, shocking to contemporary natural philosophers in these days, that plants move their bodies as freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human, and that the only reason we don't appreciate the fact is that plants do so at a much slower pace than humans.

No plant is without movement; he describes a summer day with thousands of polyplike arms reaching from a peaceful arbor, trembling, quivering in their eagerness for new support for the heavy stalk that grows behind them. When the tendril, which sweeps a full circle in sixty-seven minutes, finds a perch, within twenty seconds it starts to curve around the object, and within the hour has wound itself so firmly it is hard to tear away. The tendril then curls itself like a corkscrew and in so doing raises the vine to itself.

Other ingenious plant tricks are for instance perfomed by the orchid Trichoceros parviflorus: it will grow its petals to imitate the female of a species of fly so exactly that the male attempts to mate with it and in so doing pollinates the orchid…. night-blossoming flowers grow white the better to attract night moths and night-flying butterflies, emitting a stronger fragrance at dusk, ….the carrion lily develops the smell of rotting meat in areas where only flies abound, ….  Alpine flowers know when spring is coming and bore their way up through lingering snowbanks, developing their own heat with which to melt the snow. Some artic springflower are shaped like satelite-dishes, tracking the sun through te day becoming solar-energy collectors, attrackting insects brave enough to fligh in the chilly air to these warm shelters.

This Indian licorice, or Arbrus precatorius, is so keenly sensitive to all forms of electrical and magnetic influences it is used as a weather plant. Botanists who first experimented with it in London's Kew Gardens found in it a means for predicting cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

source: The Sectret Life of Plants, The Action Plant

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 Orpheum frutescens is a flower which has struck up an exclusive relationship with a particular bee – the carpenter bee. They work together in a remarkable way. In order to get the tasty pollen the bee has to vibrate its wings at a particular frequency – middle C. These oscillations then make the flower open its stamens which releases the pollen, covering the bee in the fine yellow powder. This specific relationship ensures that the flowers’ pollen is taken by the carpenter bee to another flower of the same species, and so isn’t wasted.

The most effective way to trigger in a human being a reaction strong enough to make the galvanometer jump is to threaten his or her well- being. Cleve Backster, America's foremost lie-detector decided to do just that to his plant in the office he dunked a leaf in the cup of hot coffee perennially in his hand. There was no reaction to speak of on the meter. Backster studied the problem several minutes, then conceived a worse threat: he would burn the actual leaf to which the electrodes were attached. The instant he got the picture of flame in his mind, and before he could move for a match, there was a dramatic change in the tracing pattern on the graph in the form of a prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. He investigated further, and reported a finding that other human thoughts and emotions caused reactions in plants that could be recorded by a polygraph instrument.

Randall Fontes and Robert Swanson, two Californian psychology students have shown that  there is an energy exchange between plants and human. As an example, while working in the laboratory with leaves of a plant attached to a galvanometer by electrodes, Bob accidentally yawned, and this was markedly recorded on the machine's graph. They then both began yawning, with similar results on the graph.
"People have various levels of consciousness, many of them hidden, and through the use of highly sensitive plants that soon will be developed these levels could be measured.''This could, for example, be especially useful in career selection as you could tell if a psychologist has the ability to help people, a lawyer is good at law, a politician at politics, or artist at art. Many brilliant people or geniuses going unnoticed could be discovered.
If that seems rather far out, an electronics engineer not too long ago was able to build sophisticated equipment to mentally trigger a device through a plant at considerable distance. In one experiment he set a philodendron on a laboratory bench 2 1/2 miles from his home, and sent a strong emotion to the plant. When the plant received his telepathic message, it triggered a radio signal that turned on the ignition of a car in the laboratory parking lot, starting the motor.

 

source:  http://www.ebdir.net/enlighten/backster.html, ; Secret life of Plants