Karen Sweigart, age 11, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for her question:

Is it true that plants understand me?

In the mid 1960s, the world of science was astounded by a theory that plants have feelings. Naturally research teams set about trying to prove whether this eye¬popping notion was true or false. And test after test revealed that certain plants do indeed respond to what goes on around them. It's time to discard our old notions that vegetables exist in a silent, insensitive world of their own. However, as our minds grasp these astonishing new ideas it is wise to keep our imaginations within sensible bounds.

It has been proved that growing plants respond to certain types of music. They do their best growing to the soft strains of gentle melodies and phrases with precise harmonics. Some plants actually droop and die when exposed to the harsh cacophony of disorganized rock.. Apparently plants prefer elegant classical music. Naturally, of course, they do not have the sense organs and nervous systems to respond to music as we do. But certainly they have secret systems to respond to music in ways of their own.

We now know that plants also respond to human feelings, and perhaps to other things around them    in ways of their own. Some of the latest evidence was gathered by attaching them to a polygraph instrument, similar to the so called lie¬ detector. This was rigged up with attachments to mark variations in plant responses on a graph. In some tests, electronic gadgets were attached to translate the graphs into various sounds. Then a number of experiments were made with the plants being tested.

Naturally several tests were made to learn whether plants react to pain. The results proved that certainly something happens to them when horrendous emotions occur around them. When shrimp were dumped into boiling water, the polygraphs attached to nearby plants swooped up and down in wild patterns. Then a researcher decided to test pain reaction of a leaf to a burning match. As he thought of the plan, the graph shot up and down in a wild pattern. But while he lit the match and carried out his threatening plan, the graph subsided almost back to normal. Other tests revealed that wild plants tend to respond vividly to hostile human threats. But garden flowers and vegetables show little or no response to human hostility.

Obviously these strange findings reveal that plants do indeed react to human feelings. But we cannot say that they understand us as we understand each other. It is not likely that they felt human type sympathy for those suffering shrimps. And apparently they respond more vividly to threatening human emotions than they do to a physical burn. This amazing research has barely begun. But already it has opened a door to a vast new field of plant biology.

Previously, biologists were sure that living things needed well organized nervous systems to respond to things and events around them. These new experiments prove that this is not so. Plants have no such nervous systems, but we now know that they do indeed respond to certain human emotions. At present, nobody can explain how this can happen. But while we wait for more evidence, let's not assume that salad greens suffer agony when sliced and eaten or that the lawn goes into a tizzy when we perform our mowing chores.