Plant sentience

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.

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New science is revealing layers of sophistication in plant sentience, signalling and real-time responsiveness, challenging us to raise our own awareness when gardening or designing.

The notion that organisms inhabit distinct perceptual worlds or Umwelten was proposed over a century ago by Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll, who saw every creature experiencing reality through its own sensory apparatus and personal perspective.

Plants, we now know, are not passive. For decades it has been understood that they emit chemical signals: volatile organic compounds to deter herbivores or summon the predators that feed on them. Trees, exposed to the vibration of chainsaws, increase their chemical defences. The sweet scent of freshly cut grass is less pastoral charm than distress signal. Beneath the soil, the mycorrhizal network, dubbed the “wood wide web” by Suzanne Simard, allows plants to exchange nutrients and information in a manner that looks increasingly like cooperation.

Now comes the latest twist. Studies from Tel Aviv University show that plants detect the wingbeat frequencies of insects and respond accordingly, whilst insects themselves hear the faint sounds emitted by plants. Pollination, long treated as a largely mechanical transaction, begins to look more like a dialogue.

Approximately 87 per cent of flowering plants depend on animal pollinators. Nectar is the lure, pollen the payload, and genetic diversity the prize. But nectar is metabolically expensive. A plant that offers it indiscriminately risks being plundered by freeloaders: ants, microbes, inefficient visitors. How clever, then, to listen, to detect the hum of an efficient pollinator’s passing wings and increase nectar production at precisely the right moment.

What does this mean for the gardener? There is huge pleasure to be had in understanding the relationships between plants and animals, and curating a visual and culinary concert both for insects and human sensory delight.

Variety is key in this orchestration, with perhaps 60 per cent of planting best allocated to a spread of generalists: species that attract a wide array of pollinators. These are the social hubs of the garden, the “party plants” like Origanum majorana and knapweed Centaurea nigra, members of the mint and daisy families, or umbellifers whose open structures provide accessible nectar to a broad church: bees, hoverflies, beetles and butterflies.

After the generalists, specialist relationships add depth and resilience. The bell flowers of campanula cater to particular bees (we have 270 species in the UK); loosestrife Lysimachia vulgaris supports bees that harvest not only pollen but floral oils; tubular blooms such as honeysuckle Lonicera fragrantissima favour long-tongued pollinators, whilst legumes like clover Trifolium incarnatum provide protein-rich pollen essential for larval development. Each plant appeals to a nuanced audience.

As in any symphony, timing is also key. Early-flowering willows like Salix caprea offer vital sustenance to bees emerging from winter. Late-season ivy becomes a humming metropolis when little else is in bloom. Night-scented flowers extend the garden’s hospitality to moths, creating a fluttering dreamscape, especially if plants glow white and scented.

Water is of course vital, and so is habitat, so add a bed to the breakfast to complete the invitation. Leafcutter bees fashion intricate nests from rose leaves and solitary bees require cavities to rear their young. Dead wood, hollow stems standing overwinter, and holes in walls are no longer seen as signs of neglect, but of ecological generosity.

Pollination, ultimately, is about reproduction: fruit, seed, continuation. Some plants cheat, like the bee orchid, which mimics the appearance and scent of a female bee to attract naive males. Others rely on wind, or self-fertilisation.

Yet even here there are subtle interactions. Tomatoes, for instance, benefit from “buzz pollination”, in which bees vibrate the flower to release pollen. We don’t fully understand it, but we can plant for it, and that is the point. To tend a garden is to enter into a relationship that stretches our comprehension.

Devices such as Chirrup.ai and Sensibee can catalogue birdsong and insect traffic, whilst the AI Pollinator Pathmaker can suggest what to plant. Whilst potentially useful, in digitalisation we lose connection and joy. The most sophisticated instruments available to the gardener remain the least fashionable: curiosity, presence and attention.

Only then can we understand the deep reciprocity of the relationship. As Iain McGilchrist wrote: “Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention.”