Plants certainly know more than we give them credit for. They likely have memory, an acute sense of their environment, and the ability to communicate with other plants. We are unfortunately somewhat limited by our own ways of understanding the world to fully understand what plants know. We can learn the biological mechanisms that undergird complex concepts like memory and communication, but to know what is like to be a plant, to know what it feels like to have roots, to be stationary and be connected to a network of similar beings to oneself, and make life out of light is perhaps something we will never understand, but we can certainly respect. Our ways of being, especially our different mobilities, I think, are one of the largest obstacles in truly understanding each other. Another point made by one of the writers this week is how we operate on such different timescales. We have been molded by the forces of capitalism and the constraints of our own lifespans to experience time much faster, so we will often assume that plants are simply “sitting there.” I’m still thinking about the point made about how plants and music could be interconnected. I’m reminded of how someone was able to record the sounds corals make, which is a beautiful cacophony of popping sounds, and I wonder if there is a way to capture the sounds that plants make on a microscopic level, such as water traveling up the stem or the movement of various other materials through the plant. In that way, we would be listening directly to the music of the plant instead of projecting what music we think plants embody, though I also love the idea of humans emotionally connecting to plants through human music. That is one way I think the voices of plants could be told. There are plants in the arboretum that can sprout early in the winter because they know how to maintain a warm temperature (skunk cabbage), plants that can grow bulbs on every part of their body (pinellia), plants that don’t necessarily need roots for the uptake of nutrients (tillandsia), and so much more they know. I think our challenge is finding ways to translate across the languages of humans and plants to properly tell their stories and knowledge in a way that isn’t us simply projecting onto them. Though it is time-consuming, perhaps the best way to understand and tell the story of plants is by spending a lot of time with them, to notice the subtle changes they go through over the seasons. On a side note, from personal experience, I can attest that many people anthropomorphize plants, I certainly do it myself. This week’s readings, however, have made me think of plants in a different light. I never considered that they are conscious of our presence and the presence of non-plants. I was thinking in a very anthropocentric lens, that since they do not see in the same way we do, that they don’t understand what is happening when they are put into a new pot or watered. I really enjoy the moniker of “caretaker” to describe anyone who cares for plants. The shift from the term “owner” to “caretaker” gives more agency to the plants, but I also wonder if there’s a word that can describe the relationship between plants and people that is perhaps better, such as the indigenous understanding of nonhuman beings as grandfathers.