The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth

By Stephen Harrod Buhner

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Plants Are All Chemists

• Plants make up 99 percent of Earth's biomass.
• Their 275,000 plus species each contain hundreds of chemicals that can be combined in thousands of ways.
• The leaves of plants function like lungs, taking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen and water, thus allowing all life to exist.
• Carbon dioxide is produced by the decomposition of plants through rotting and burning, through human digestion, and during gas and oil combustion in cars.
• The water vapor from plant exhalation cools the earth and provides water for rain clouds.
• Plants have a carbon base which combines with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen to create multitudes of chemical arrangements. Their feedback mechanism allows them to adjust these chemicals in order to stay in balance with their surroundings.

The growing process of a plant provides a good example of this balance.

1. Each seed is given a protective coating that keeps it from decaying or being attacked by bacteria.
2. Once it senses that the conditions are right for sprouting, the coating dissolves into the surrounding soil to continue protecting it.
3. The seed then uses the food stored inside to begin growing.
4. Once the seed begins to grow, completely new sets of chemicals are activated, both below and above ground.
5. The chemicals released by the roots attract the most appropriate types of the bacteria and micro-flora to the area, thus providing the protection and nutrients necessary for the plant to thrive. (While roots may not take up much area, they definitely cover a lot of ground; the rootlets of one rye plant may have the combined length of 680 miles!)
6. The plant provides the area bacteria with food and protection as well, creating a mutually supportive relationship. Together they create healthy soil.

Animals and plants have also developed a symbiotic relationship over the centuries. Plants allow animals to eat about 20 percent of their population before defending themselves with chemicals. Animals help the plants by keeping their populations at a reasonable level, by spreading their seeds, and by providing fertilizer for the soil. Here's an example of how this relationship works. In Russia, the weather is cold enough to keep the snail population at a minimum so clover plants in the area don't need to produce chemicals to inhibit their presence. In England, however, the weather is never cold enough to reduce the snail population so the clover plants produce a specific compound to keep the snail population reasonable. The chemicals are present in both the Russian and English clover but are only activated in England where they are needed. Plants have developed a wide variety of ingenious ways to protect themselves:

• making plant estrogens that affect the reproductive cycles of animals who eat too much of them
• giving off a pheromone that tells a visiting insect that a predator is coming
• creating a smell that attracts feeding mites to eat up threatening mites

When plants die or drop their leaves at the end of the season, they end up on the ground where the compounds are made into humus by the effects of rain and sun. One component of humus is humic acid, a chemical that breaks down plant matter into its chemical compounds, then detoxifies them in order to make fertile soil. It stores these chemicals to be released when needed, but also uses them to communicate with the live plants in the area about what is needed for this particular ecosystem. Plants have been creating healthy communities for 500 million years so it is foolish to think that we could improve upon their expertise. While worms and insects are relatively small creatures, they perform large services to an ecosystem. Insects chew up massive quantities of leaves and drop the useful leftovers into the soil. An acre of 50,000 plus worms can process as much as ten tons of plant matter in a year.

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