So it turns out that plants communicate via a hidden network of fungal connections [article thanks to the BBC].
Trees and other plant life are not, as scientists have naively thought until recently, sub-sentient lifeforms, separate from each other. In their natural habitat with full fungal symbiosis, forest flora collect, process and disseminate multi-dimensional information to one another within a network or “macro-organism” of massive scale.
Broad bean seedlings that were not themselves under attack by aphids, but were connected to those that were via fungal mycelia, activated their anti-aphid chemical defenses. Those without mycelia did not.
Here’s a YouTube video about this by a forester with a Ph.D. (for the sci cred):
In this video she states that the communication takes place even across different species of plants. And further in the first article, we are told:
“These fungal networks make communication between plants, including those of different species, faster, and more effective,” says [chemical ecologist at Xavier University, Ohio] Kathryn Morris. “We don’t think about it because we can usually only see what is above ground. But most of the plants you can see are connected below ground, not directly through their roots but via their mycelial connections.”
Imagine how much earthy wisdom was lost when the old forests of Europe were felled… Mindlessly… By the clever human; and how much ancient light is currently being lost, traded for soulless monocrops, perversions of natural ecosystems, using plants that do not have even the capacity to reproduce, in places like the Amazonian rainforest or the jungles of Indonesia.
Check out the video text description for more writings by Suzanne Simard about the role of fungal networks in forest macro-organisms.