Breathing with Plants
This week, I have a fact for you to contemplate: Plants breathe. They take in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the inverse of our oxygen-in, CO2-out breathing. You might kind of know that already, from elementary school science, but I want to freshen that idea for you a bit as we contemplate plants as autonomous beings. Are you wondering HOW they breathe? I certainly did. They don’t breathe through holes in their head like we do. They simply absorb and expel gases through tiny pores in their leaves called stomata. Trees also breathe through lenticels in their bark, so even if it’s winter and they have no leaves, they’re still exchanging gas. Plants have a constant exchange of air molecules with atmosphere around them. You could sit next to a plant and swap air for hours. If you have houseplants, you’re doing it already without even thinking about it.
That may seem foreign and strange—breathing through cells dispersed all over the body. But here’s another interesting fact that I learned from an essay by Mauricio Tolosa in a delightful and profound book called The Mind of Plants. We humans also breathe through our skin. No joke! It’s not much—maybe 1%-2% of our respiration. That’s about 200-400 breaths, or around fifteen minutes to a half hour’s worth of breathing each day that we do through our skin. Still, we have that in common with plants. Cool, right?
Okay, now that you’ve made that connection, recognized what may be a new similarity… we’re going to take this into practice the way we have the last few weeks. Find a plant near you, if you haven’t already. Maybe you have a favorite houseplant. This time, though, if it’s outside, go outside to be near the plant so you share the same air. Spend a few minutes breathing and think about how you are breathing through your skin. That way, it’s a shared experience. It’s an exchange of gas happening with your entire body and the plant’s entire body.
Try to just relax and breathe, and with every breath, think about those gas molecules entering and exiting through your skin. Think about how so many of them came from the plant—a gift to you—and how so many of what you are exhaling are going back to the plant, a gift to the plant. You are nourishing one another.
I don’t know about you, but I find tremendous joy in that interdependence. I come away with the feeling that the plant matters more to me than it did before. And that I matter more to the plant, too. How about you?
P.S. Want to learn more about plant intelligence or awareness? Here are some of my favorite books on the topic, all written for non-scientists:
The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, a collection of essays and poems edited by John C. Ryan, Patrícia Vieira, and Monica Gagliano
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate--Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard