Talking to the Triffids: Decolonizing how we teach about plants (and why it matters)

Introduction: Teaching about plants

Teaching about plants is an essential component in modern Science and Geography curricula; children are taught in schools about the primary parts of plant anatomy, different modes of pollination, and perhaps how traits are passed between generations of plants. Plants are discussed as passive producers, positioned at the base of diagrams that show how they serve to feed the rest of the ecosystem. It is unlikely that any such curricula alert children and young people to the sensitivity of plants and the nature of their relation to their environment. In this paper, I argue that we need to find ways to teach about plants that recognize and appreciate the particular ways in which they are sensitive and communicative. This would serve to correct the partial and limited presentation of plants in education and allow for a wider recognition of non-human forms of life. Such recognition could, in turn, help us and our children towards a more holistic, ecological understanding of possible futures for us with plants, and indeed for the planet that we share.

The scale and depth of the change to our thinking that such an understanding would require demands more than facts and figures that show the aspects of plants that have been hidden or ignored. A shift in the values and beliefs about the status of plant life in relation to our own is needed, and to bring about this kind of alteration requires powerful tools indeed. I will argue that it is through stories, fictional re-tellings of plant-human relationships that we can begin to re-imagine plants and profoundly alter how we recognize and value their role and importance in our world.

Plants have served as inspiration for numerous Science Fiction stories. Here I draw on one of the best-known examples, The Day of the Triffids, by (Wyndham, 1951). Wyndham’s monstrous plants serve two functions within my argument, the first of which is to exemplify the established human understanding of plants as inferior and unintelligent. This is explored through ideas of colonialism and exploitation. The second function the Triffids have here is to serve as the focus for three fictional excerpts that I have written as part of this paper. Drawing on evidence from plant scientists that reveal plants as sensitive and communicative, I show how these capabilities could be explored, understood, and imagined through stories. The short fictional excerpts that I have written for this paper are inspired by Wyndham’s book and offer examples of how plants might be re-imagined through narrative. Informed by insights drawn from science that show us plants’ capacities for communication through sound, their sensitivity and receptivity, these sections of fictional narrative offer an example of how stories allow us to reconsider entrenched beliefs. I set out to show that education can re-think some of what might be considered our colonial treatment of plants, and that this re-thinking requires the insights of science combined with the engagement of our imaginations.

If the ways that humans have thought of plants as inferior in order to justify their indiscriminate use can be understood as a kind of colonialism, then stories are proffered here as a means to think of them otherwise. Davids describes how stories can be a decolonizing tool, inspiring empathy in the face of difference and making apparent barriers that prevent us from thinking against the force of a prevailing colonial ideology (Davids, 2024: 201). In order to address the misrepresentation of plants in education, scientific facts alone are not adequate. To learn, with our children, to recognize plants as sensitive co-inhabitants we will also need stories, narratives that help us to imagine otherwise: It is these speculative alternatives that have the power to change our minds.

Plants as colonized, humans as colonizers?

Plants are alienated from humanity by the ways in which we think of their differences as forming an unsurpassable rift between them and us, but also in our understanding of their differences as inadequacies. Blekinsop et al. (2017) argue that such a decisive division between plants and humans can be understood as a mechanism for colonization, whereby the colonizer seeks to separate themselves from the colonized, whilst simultaneously asserting superiority. Plants are denigrated by humans, and the understanding of them as ‘lesser’ is naturalized and reinforced in the ways we (humans), as colonizers, speak of and treat them. Plants are understood as being incapable of any form of reason or sensitivity, and any attempt to disagree with this view is dismissed or even derided. Through insights from plant scientists, we can begin to understand why we need to adapt and expand the ways that we teach about plants in order to accommodate their sensitivity, responsiveness, and capacity for communication. Fictional narratives offer us a way to consider how we might make these changes, and how the ways that we tell stories about plants can help to shift our deep-seated beliefs about them.

Our conceptions of plants as inferior are so entrenched that these ideas have become ‘matters of fact.’ Human superiority over plants, and their reduction to unfeeling, unthinking automatons, has been established in part through education and the ways that we teach about them. Plants have been reduced to raw materials for humans’ consumption, a relegation that has been justified and supported by the belief that they are lesser beings (Gerber and Hiernaux, 2022: 6, 7, 8). In this paper, I want to consider the possibility that the relationship between plants and humans could be considered as one of colonizer and colonized. There are many reasons why depicting this interrelationship in this way would be inadequate, or indeed fictional, but I offer this position as speculation, rather than a proven truth or even fully worked theory. I believe that it offers us an opportunity to step closer to a more thorough understanding of human’s positioning of plants as inferior and the assumed power and mastery that accompanies that belief. How might it be possible to ‘unthink’ the dominant conception of plants as insensitive and without intelligence, and how might such an alteration help us to uncouple our thinking from an assumed ownership of and mastery over plants?

In this paper I will not attempt to offer a complete or comprehensive presentation of colonialism; what I explore here is how ideas of colonialism could correlate with humans’ relationship to plants, and what we might learn from this possible pattern.

I will introduce here the two main sources that have served to fuel this exploration. Blekinsop et al. (2017: 354) have argued that our exploitative treatment of plants amounts to colonization, and that the incontestable dominance of humanity over plants forms a hegemony. They argue that this position is difficult to challenge, both because it is so entrenched and because it treats any attempts to consider plants as sentient, sensitive or intelligent with dismissal or even derision. Blekinsop et al. (2017) draw on Memmi’s definitions of colonialism to formulate an argument that parallels the treatment of plants by humans with the exploitation of enslaved people by colonizers. The parallels that have been suggested by Blekinsop et al. (2017) aid in making clear how the machinery of these dominant conceptions work to enable the indiscriminate use of plants by humanity.

Maata (2020) approaches John Wyndam’s novel The Day of the Triffids as a narrative that reveals contemporary attitudes towards colonized peoples through parallels with the eponymous invading monstrous plants. Drawing on connections between HG Wells and the expansions of the Science Fiction genre just proceeding or contemporary to Wyndham’s publication of The Day of the Triffids, Maata has argued strongly for the connections between Wyndham’s descriptions of the Triffids and colonized peoples. Maata describes the book as a depiction of ‘the reverse colonization of Britain - and especially London, by lethal three-legged beings who feed on humans and are dead bent on putting an end to the rule of Man’ (2020: 34). Maata makes a strong case here for a reading of the book that places the Triffids as a manifestation of colonized peoples, with responses from the colonizing forces (in the shape of the humans frantically struggling to survive) that parallels colonial theory: ‘the challenge to a human centric hierarchy is conflated with or at least runs in parallel with a challenge to western colonial power’ (Maata, 2020: 33). Wyndham’s fictional dystopia reveals contemporary concerns with the perceived threat posed by colonized peoples. Fiction acts here as a means to show this threat, and also, according to Maata, draws strong parallels between the Triffids and colonized peoples. I come to Maata’s argument somewhat in reverse, exploring the ways that these parallels reveal the attitudes that some humans hold towards plants.

I set out to trace these parallels and connections, exploring how the conceptions of colonialism in relation to plants offered by Blekinsop intersect with Maata’s perspective on Wyndham’s presentation of the Triffids as reflecting contemporary attitudes to colonized humans. The Triffids (Wyndham, 1951) also forms the link to the speculative portion of my own argument, providing a means to reimagine the relationship between plants and humans through fictional excerpts, offering an example of how narrative can serve as a means not only to reveal but also to disrupt deep-seated beliefs, and the values and prejudices that underlie them.

Enter the Triffids

In The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham, 1951), Wyndham invites us into a dystopic vision; a world of monstrous, predatory plants walking amongst the ruins of modern civilization. Wyndham shows us a planet and society devastated by a blinding comet blast that affected most of the population, followed by an infestation of carnivorous plants. These Triffids have been bred and farmed on a massive scale for their oil, and following the comet impact they have escaped to overrun the towns, cities, and surrounding countryside. The Triffids in Wyndham’s novel have tall stems bearing leafy branches, topped by a trumpet-shaped flower that houses a long protuberance. These ‘stingers’ can be extended with speed, resulting in injury, blindness or, in more severe cases, death. The Triffids also gain nutrients from rotting human flesh using this appendage. Before the comet impact and subsequent plant invasion, the narrator Bill Masen was working on a Triffid farm with a colleague named Walter Lucknor. Wyndham uses the character of Walter to provide readers with insight into the capabilities and activities of the Triffids.

The most prominent feature that Wyndham gives the Triffids that renders them monstrous is their ability to move. We are accustomed to plants being stationary, more akin to objects than animals. The Triffids in Wyndham’s novel have acquired the ability to ‘walk’, albeit in a stumbling fashion. The Triffid’s movements are described as inferior to that of a human being; ‘ungainly’, and later ‘walking like a man on crutches’ (Wyndham, 1951: 30, 60, 61). The humans in the novel are only able to recognize the movements of a Triffid by comparing them to a human being with a disability or injury. Their progress is described by Wyndham as “strenuous” and ‘clumsy’, leading us to interpret them as unnatural and inferior to humans, and as somehow damaged in comparison (Wyndham, 1951: 30).

The broken, stumbling depiction of the walking plant is symptomatic of human unwillingness to recognize plants as being able to move with purpose. Plants’ inability to shift their location has been viewed as a lack or deficiency in their adaptation that points to a limit in their sensitivity and attentiveness to their surroundings. It could be argued that this immobility is evidence of their insensitivity: there can be no discernible evolutionary advantage to plants being able to sense their surroundings as they have no possibility of responding. A substantial body of work points out an opposing view, however, establishing the rootedness of plants as necessitating their acute sensitivity, making this essential for their survival (Sopory, 2019: 4). Plants move and grow in a purposeful way in response to their environment; sending their roots in fruitful directions and using their shoots to locate and use supports to enable them to climb (Darwin, 1880: 264-6; Gagliano et al., 2017: 151-60). Some humans’ inability to perceive plants as capable of moving with purpose may be limited in part by the difference in the speed with which they commonly move. Even when the speed of their movement is perceptible to us, we understand this to constitute a reflex only, denying them the sensitivity in which these movements are founded. If we are to teach about plants differently, we need to re-learn them and come to understand their capacity for sensitivity and communication.

Re-thinking plants

How might we go about shifting these commonly held and pervasive conceptions of plants as stationary, unresponsive, and unaware? As I have argued, scientific research alone cannot bring about these changes in belief. Stories can help us to think again, and to think differently. In The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham, 1951), Wyndham’s presentation of Walter Lucknor suggests that this character has developed a particular understanding of the Triffids, and hints at his recognition of their unique sensibility. Fictional excerpts from Walter’s imagined diary have been written for this paper. These extracts develop an understanding of the Triffids that builds on the suspicions that Wyndham gives Walter, showing the plants to be capable not just of particular forms of action and responsiveness. The first extract from Walter Lucknor’s imagined diary offers a means to imagine the Triffids, and by extension, plants themselves, otherwise. Contrary to assumptions, Walter did not die when the Triffids escaped from captivity. He survived secretly in the compound, now taken over by the Triffids themselves, and spent months observing them. A recovered section of Walter’s diary offers his perspective of the Triffids, opening up the possibility of an alternative understanding of the plants. In this section, he describes how he managed to survive, detailing his first encounter with a Triffid that he names Listener.

[Recovered diary entry 1]

I’ve learned a lot about how to recognize the signs that a Triffid is about to defend itself, but I guess I was distracted and, when it hit me, I lost consciousness completely. I went down hard, not just getting my face and neck badly stung but banging my head on the ground. The blow to the head combined with the poison meant that I was unconscious for some time. I must have been still for long enough that the Triffids assumed I was dead and took no more notice of me; they will return to a corpse to feed only when the flesh has reached a sufficient level of decomposition to allow gradual ingestion. It is also possible that they knew I was alive but thought my injuries to be severe enough that I would soon die.

In this excerpt, we can imagine the Triffids’ perception of sound not only as rendering them dangerous to humans, but also as evidence of their sensitivity. The narrative here suggests that not only is the Triffid Walter named Listener sentient and attentive, but also that the anticipated attack was not inevitable. This excerpt invites an alternative view of the Triffids, and of plants. This example of how narrative can enable us to suspend our disbelief, shift perspectives, and open the way for the consideration of alternatives. Such shifts and alterations could have a considerable impact on the ways that we, and our children, think of plants and our relationship with them.

Plant language

Having had our first encounter with the Triffids and shown how Wyndham’s presentation of them echoes our own denigration of plants, in this section I connect this with Maata’s (2020) analysis of Wyndham’s narrative as containing elements of coloniality. Specifically, I explore in this section how communication is an ability denied to plants, and how a reconsideration of this might lead to a clearer understanding of their unique intelligence.

Throughout Wyndham’s book, the humans trap, enslave and kill the Triffids without conscience or consequence. This behavior is justified by the depiction of Triffids as devoid of agency and intelligence. This is analogous to the ways in which colonizers seek to control and dominate by denying that the colonized have the capacity for reasonable thought (Blekinsop et al., 2017: 354). Particularly important to my argument here is the assertion that the Triffids are unable to communicate, and the implication inherent in this is that plants are not just incapable of using sound but lack the capacity to use sound meaningfully.

In the following exchange between Masen, the narrator, and Susan, we can sense his impatience at the suggestion that Triffids have an intentional awareness of sound:

‘” I wish,” I told her irritably, “you'd not keep on saying ‘they hear’ as if they were animals. They’re not. They don't hear. They're just plants”.’

Wyndham described the Triffids as attentive to noises, however his characters are resistant to the idea that they respond in a calculated, intentional way to sounds. The sounds that the Triffids make are reduced to noise, described as meaningless “clattering” (Wyndham, 1951). Maata views Wyndham’s description of these sounds and the characters’ refusal to understand them as communication as clearly aligning the Triffids with colonized peoples (Maata, 2020: 37). We can connect this view to the ways in which humans seem to be unable or unwilling to conceive of plants as capable of signaling in a meaningful way (Blekinsop et al., 2017: 361), and evidence from plant science can helps us to uncover how mistaken this view is.

In Wyndham’s characters’ descriptions of the meaningless sounds that Triffids produce, we see reflected our own human preconceptions and the ways that these render us incapable of understanding plants’ communication. Recent developments in plant science show us that plants have a ‘language’ that we are only just becoming aware of. It should be noted that many scientists continue to meet any suggestion of plants’ capacity for communcation and response with dismissal, despite the increasing body of evidence that supports this view.

Plants are sensitive to sound vibrations in ways that exceed human perception, with researchers needing to amplify or alter sounds to make them audible to humans (Sanan-Mishra 2019: 157-8). Plants respond to sound vibrations, and these responses are likewise sometimes visible to humans, and at times take place at a molecular scale that is invisible (Sanan-Mishra 2019: 154-7). These sound vibrations can be understood to be meaningful to them, in ways that humans can infer through the ways that other plants respond. A plant detects the sound of an insect chewing the leaves of a nearby plant, responding by producing in its own leaves a compound which will deter the insect from eating its own foliage (Apel et al., 2014: 1257-56). Plants have been found to extend their roots towards the sound vibrations produced by running water (Sanan-Mishra 2019: 156-7). Plants produce sounds in the cavities that make up their stems and supporting structures; bubbles moving through the fluid here burst, producing an audible noise. When under drought stress, the frequency of these sounds alters, and it has been shown that plants nearby, but not close enough to be short of water themselves, respond by preparing for imminent drought (Sanan-Mishra 2019: 153).

It is clear from these examples that sound vibrations have meaning for plants, and that their sensitivity to these sounds allows them to make a meaningful response. Maher determines that this amounts to ‘feeling’, and by feeling we mean a feeling ’of’ something (Maher, 2017: 70). An organism might respond to a stimulus, take for example our own motor reflexes – pulling our hand away when something is hot – Maher sets out the idea that these reflexes show that the sensation matters. Plants’ responses to sound vibrations work in just the same way, amounting to a kind of recognition. The vibrations have a specific meaning, and the plant has a specific response.

The understanding that plants are sensitive to sounds as vibrations from their environment, and that they are capable of responding in ways that are of benefit to them offers us an insight into their capabilities. Root tips ‘decide’ on the best direction in which to grow; plants ‘tell’ their neighbors to store water in order to avoid drought; leaves alert one another of an imminent threat. It is not necessary for our argument to decide if these are examples of ‘intelligence’, but merely to establish that the ability to produce sounds that have meaning, and to detect and respond to sounds shows plants to have capacities that challenge our established conceptions of them. Plants have been shown to use sounds and chemical signals to communicate; however, these discoveries can be difficult for us to accept. “We are sure not to hear plants speak if we continue to hold onto the anthropocentric prejudice that sees in our intelligence, cogitation and languages the gold standards of intelligence, cogitation, and languages as such” (Marder, 2019: 104). The findings of plant scientists can awaken us to the elements of plant communication that we are too insensitive to attend to. In this way, their findings become a listening instrument; just as they amplify and modify plant sounds to make them audible, plant scientists’ findings alert us to what our humanness disallows us. These developments in our understanding of plant communication have been met with skepticism and derision, consistent with plants’ position as a colonized other (Schlanger, 2024: 45-9).

In the next fictional excerpt, Walter begins to understand that the Triffids are not only aware of sounds, but that the noises that they make amount to coherent and meaningful communication. Walter has remained undetected by the Triffids, and during his time hiding has developed some insight into their language.

[Recovered diary entry 2]

The section of narrative invites an imagining of the possibilities of Triffid communication, offering as it does so an opportunity to re-imagine plants themselves as not just capable of receiving and expressing meaning, but also of the capacity for thought that this communication would imply. In the next section, I address the sensitivity that this capacity for communication implies.

Feeling plants

Throughout The Day of the Triffids, the idea that Triffids could be sensitive and purposeful is dismissed, and even derided, reflecting the anthropocentric bias contemporary to the writing of the book. I have argued that these biases might be interpreted as exemplary of a kind of colonization, exerting a long-standing, and enduring influence on our understanding of plants in the present. The fictional excerpts that I have written as part of this paper have served to imagine how Walter’s views of the Triffids might have developed. Extending from the novel, these sections of imagined narrative have enabled the possibility of a very different encounter with Triffids. In these excerpts, Walter works to decipher and then to express himself in the language of the Triffids; as he does so, he is not only uncovering how the plants communicate, he is also engaged in an attempt to show them that he is capable of binding himself to them in an understanding. Walter rejects the systems of control put in place by the humans within the Triffid Farms, and instead seeks to establish communication with the plants, despite how different they are from him, as well as the possible threat that they pose.

In the final fictional excerpt, Walter risks his life in order to test the theories that he has been developing. This encounter narrates the drastic change in the ways that Walter, as a human, is seeking to engage with the Triffids as he gambles on their sentience, and their receptiveness to communication.

[Recovered diary extract 3]

Conclusion: Teaching about plants … differently

What kinds of revisions, re-thinking and re-imaginings would we need to enact in the ways in which we teach about plants in order to reflect an understanding of them as aware, communicative, and as feeling? Our assumptions of human superiority allow us to avoid confronting the ways in which our treatment of plants is sensed and felt. Plants do not have a centralized nervous system in the same way as humans and animals, and so we decide that they must be incapable of feeling. Just as our own nervous system relies on electricity, developments in plant science have shown that electrical signaling forms the basis of plants’ awareness of and sensitivity to touch and injury (Mousavi et al., 2013: 422-26). Through these experiments, it is possible to observe the waves of electrical impulses moving through a plant’s body in response to a wound. We cannot know if these responses result in a sensation that we could recognize as ‘pain,’ but this limitation in our own imaginations does not detract from the evidence here that points to plants’ sensitivity and intense sense of harm or injury.

It is almost impossible for us to consider the idea that plants are sensitive to the ways in which they are cut, gathered, and harvested by humans. Our understandings of the ethics of these encounters would need to be reconsidered, perhaps transformed, if they were to acknowledge the extent of plant awareness and sensitivity. Plants have evolved the ability to endure predation; their modular anatomy, and the distribution of functions necessary to their lives throughout their organisms mean that they can be preyed upon without fatality. Our understanding of this has become so entrenched as to prevent us from understanding that this ability for plants to reconstitute themselves is neither infinite nor eternal. We entertain the illusion that the devastation of plant habitats is reversable, and that plants will respond to our destruction of them with a continuous bounty. Our blindness to plants’ sensitivity complements our belief in their endless ability – and obligation – to provide for us. Becoming aware of plants as sensitive beings capable of communication and meaningful responses would necessitate our cognizance of the lasting effects that our indiscriminate and unthinking utilization of plants has and is having on our world.

If the idea of plants as sensitive and sentient sounds like fiction, then perhaps fiction is what we need in order to understand plants better. Considering the idea of plants as colonized by humans, even as a fictional idea, has enabled a deeper understanding of the ways in which we humans fail to recognize their sentience, their awareness, movements, and communication. Insights from plant science have aided us in imagining stories that challenge established depictions of plants as inert and passive, and fictional excerpts have functioned as examples of the ways in which stories can be used to help us to reconsider our deeply held beliefs about plants and their capabilities. These excerpts might act as examples, offering ways to activate similar storying practices in the classroom; perhaps teachers might enable students to understand some of the ways in which plants communicate – the sounds they produce in response to drought, the ways that they detect attacking insects, or their sensitivity through their root systems to the sounds of running water – and use these as the bases for science fiction short story narratives of their own. Maybe plants dominate humans by cutting off their access to water supply – using their ability to detect underground water sources to surround and control them, thereby removing humans as a competitor for scarce water supplies? Such activities would allow a myriad of imaginings of plants, and I argue, a greater awareness of plants’ capabilities.

I have argued that through fictional narrative we might re-imagine plants and transform the ways in which we learn and teach about them. I have presented fictional narratives as a means to re-imagine plants in education, and to understand and appreciate plants’ capacities for intentional movements, sensitivity, and communication. If stories can help us see beyond the firmly established beliefs that relegate plants to a lower level of being, then stories might also help us to imagine differently the ways in which we might relate to them. Stories such as these have the potential to profoundly alter the ways that we educate our children about plants, about their interrelationship to non-human others, as well as the ways in which these interrelationships are decisive in the future of the planet we share with them.