Beronda L. Montgomery: Lessons from Plants

Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. And today I'm very pleased to say we have Beronda Montgomery on the show and we'll be talking about her book Lessons from Plants, which is out from Harvard University Press in 2021. Beronda, welcome to the show.

Beronda Montgomery:

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Marshall Poe:

Great. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Beronda Montgomery:

Sure. I am originally from Arkansas.

Marshall Poe:

Really?

Beronda Montgomery:

Yeah, from Little Rock.

Marshall Poe:

I lived in Arkansas for a while. I lived in Fayetteville for a while.

Beronda Montgomery:

Oh, okay. Yeah. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas and went off to college at Washington University to study biology and math and thinking I would go to law school and ultimately fell in love with biology and went off to pursue a graduate degree. That led me to being a professor, and I've often said that being a professor is the best way to stay a student for a lifetime. So I was a professor for 18 years at Michigan State and new to Grinnell College since July 1st.

Marshall Poe:

That's terrific. And so how did you make your way to Grinnell College and how do you like it?

Beronda Montgomery:

So I am really enjoying being at Grinnell College, especially the last week or so, the students are back and so there's the real energy of a new year in the air. I made my way to Grinnell College after being at Michigan State for 18 years as a professor of biochemistry studying plants. About 10 years ago, I started to really look at lessons that I thought we could learn from plants about how to be better instructors and mentors and leaders. And that work took me into conversation with lots of different colleges and universities about cultivating college campuses.

And ultimately I got a call saying, "There's a campus that might be a really good fit for the way you think about the world, the way you think about leading." And ultimately, as I came here and had a chance to talk to people at Grinnell and alums of Grinnell, it seemed like a good fit for the ways I view the world and taking me back to my liberal arts roots back to Washington University liberal arts.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that's a great story. Grinnell is lucky to have you.

Beronda Montgomery:

Thanks.

Marshall Poe:

So let's talk a little bit about the book. Why did you write Lessons from Plants and what were you hoping to accomplish with the book?

Beronda Montgomery:

So I think it was a twofold purpose for writing the book. Apart from... I always say that I am a writer who happens to be a professor. I love to write. So the opportunity to write a Booklink project was one that I was drawn to. But I think the concept of Lessons from Plants predated the book in that some years ago, as I was trying to have difficult conversations about things that we need to do as mentors and leaders in terms of cultivating spaces that really give people an opportunity to grow, I found that starting talking about plants would allow people to enter conversation about difficult interactions and get deeper into the conversation than if we start talking about human human interactions.

Because we often have a defensiveness when we think about the things we need to do, but thinking about the way things work in the world and asking what we can learn from that, it was also a way for me to reconnect with my mother. I grew up in a house full of house plants and vegetable and flower gardens in the yard. She has always loved plants and always had a green thumb. So it was a way for me to translate the kind of very technical things that I was learning about plants to something that I could invite the people I really love into the world that I was in as well.

Marshall Poe:

That's a great answer.

Beronda Montgomery:

Thank you.

Marshall Poe:

And particularly doing honor to your mother.

Beronda Montgomery:

Absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

That's always important.

Beronda Montgomery:

Absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

Important to remember our mothers.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

So there's a striking expression or phrase that you use in the book; 'plant blindness' or 'plant bias'.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

What is that?

Beronda Montgomery:

Yeah, so I approach trying to think about the ways that we acknowledge that often humans don't pay close attention to the plants in their communities. And often we just ignore the plants. For example, if you take someone into a museum and ask them what did they see, they'll often recount the stuffed animals that they saw, the preserved animals, but they rarely talk about the plants that were around that. And that's been talked about a lot in history as plant blindness.

In recent years. People who think about ability and disability have asked us to reconsider using blindness because it does have a kind of disability trigger for some people. And so there've been a lot of different conversations about whether we should talk about it as increased plant awareness. There's one person who has started talking about plant awareness disparity. I use plant bias simply because the first people who started talking about alternative ways realize that it may be a bias against seeing certain things that are far removed from us. And so that's what that communication and conversation in the book was about.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I had plant blindness when I was growing up. As I said in the pre-interview, I'm from Kansas originally. And so we divided plants into ones that you could make money from and the ones you couldn't.

Beronda Montgomery:

And I think that's very common in the U.S. That's very common. We're tuned into corn and other things that we see as commodity crops, but often not others. Yes.

Marshall Poe:

The other ones were trash plants. And actually, they didn't use the word trash.

Beronda Montgomery:

Oh.

Marshall Poe:

I won't go any further than that.

Beronda Montgomery:

Okay.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. So actually I should say, I had this really interesting experience. I was at Home Depot or something and they were selling Venus fly traps.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

I was like, "I'm going to get a Venus fly trap."

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

I don't know. What's up with that? And I was really reminded reading your book about this because that plant did a lot of things.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

It did a lot of things. And so you really touch on some big philosophical points here. And one of them is, I guess, you call it awareness, 'plant awareness'. What is plant awareness?

Beronda Montgomery:

I think plant awareness is an invitation to be aware of all the living beings that are around us, in this case focused on plants. But I think that it is just a sense of whether we are aware of all the other organisms that share the planet and have a sense of what their roles are. And I think in particular, plant awareness is critically important when we think about a lot of big issues. If we understand the critically important role that plants play in our own existence, being aware of that may give us a different kind of relationality to them and maybe a different sense of responsibility about caring for the planet so that they continue to exist as we continue to exist.

Marshall Poe:

So let's just go through some of this. Because I have all kinds of prejudice against plants and-

Beronda Montgomery:

Oh my.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Really. Yeah. Me and everybody else. I don't pay enough attention to plants. That's right.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

You point out in the book, there are things that plants do that we usually only attribute to, well, I guess I would call them sentient beings, but that's wrong because plants are sentient too. So one of them is they communicate. Use biotic signals.

Beronda Montgomery:

Absolutely. I mean, I often share this, that much of what's going on around us in terms of plant communication we are aware of, but we think of it as something that's related to us. So when you smell a rose and you smell the scent, or you're next to a tomato plant and you smell the scent if you crush the leaves, that triggers to us in awareness of what kind of plant it is, but that's actually the language of plants. Those chemical mixtures that we're smelling are actual the language of plants.

Roses are producing those beautiful signals to attract the pollinators. Tomatoes are producing some of those signals to ward off herbivores. And so plants' language is really a chemical based language. The beauty of it is that like plants, plants that are related, can recognize the language of a kin plant and have a different response than if they recognize the language of a plant that's not related. So every time we're smelling those scents, that's plant communication and conversation that's going on around us.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Well said. And I'll go back to the Venus fly trap for a second. I got the Venus and I put it on the window ledge above my sink, and I keep a very clean house and there are no flies or gnats or anything in my house. At least so I thought. I put that Venus fly trap up there and suddenly...

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

... Suddenly there were all these bugs.

Beronda Montgomery:

The hidden bugs pick up their language.

Marshall Poe:

And so this was the Venus fly trap doing what?

Beronda Montgomery:

So that is actual communication. So in addition to plants communicating with each other, they communicate with other organisms. And so the Venus fly trap produces chemicals that attract the very rare bug that makes it into your house.

Marshall Poe:

Well, I'm not sure they're very rare actually.

Beronda Montgomery:

And so the bug is being attracted to the likelihood of getting some sugars. But the Venus fly trap is attracting that bug because the Venus fly traps are a type of plant that we think of as actually eating insects. And that's because they have really high nitrogen requirements and the bugs actually get trapped in the Venus fly trap and they degrade the bug to release the nitrogen from the bug as a source of fertilizer.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, it was pretty remarkable to see this happen because I really didn't think there were any gnats or flies in my house.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

But there were, and the Venus fly trap found them. There are other things that plans do in addition to communicate. You say they have a certain kind of memory.

Beronda Montgomery:

They do.

Marshall Poe:

Didn't expect that.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes, they do have a memory. And I think that the plant that demonstrates that most readily, a lot of us have encountered it probably in elementary school, is something that I thought about because you mentioned Venus fly trap, a mimosa plant, which has these leaves that some people think of like a fern. It's the plant that often was brought into a kindergarten class. And if you touch the tip the leaf closes up.

Well, those plants have served as a powerful tool for testing plant memory, because if you do that several times, it'll close and it reopens and you touch it again and it closes. If you do that too many times, it recognizes that that's just a regular signal that it doesn't need to use any energy to respond to. So that's thought of as memory when it says, "Okay, well I've been touched frequently." The other kind of memory are plants that over winter. And so these are plants that they have to be exposed to a cold winter. And when spring comes, there's a memory that winter has passed. And so that warm day is a signal for spring and flowering as opposed to just a random day.

So there are-

Marshall Poe:

This gets us right into it because, especially the mimosa... It was a mimosa, right?

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes, that's correct.

Marshall Poe:

Yes. It came to recognize what was really a fault signal.

Beronda Montgomery:

That's correct. Yes. Absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

And it leads us even further away from the general taxonomic distinction between flora and fauna. It looks like it made a decision.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes. And that always triggers people to think that plants can make decisions. So I always talk about them as biological or molecular decisions. It's not the same thinking pattern that we have, but it is a series of reactions and a response. And if we think of being able to respond appropriately to some signal that you get as a response, they are absolutely able to respond appropriately to certain signals.

Marshall Poe:

And this leads me to another thing in the book and it directly relates to the mimosa about the wasting of energy. Plants have energy budgets. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Beronda Montgomery:

Absolutely. So plants have energy budgets where they have a certain amount of energy and they have to make molecular decisions about what's the best use of that energy. And I liken it to humans with our financial budget. So unless you're Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates, I don't know you, maybe you're in the category.

Marshall Poe:

No, I definitely am not.

Beronda Montgomery:

We have this financial budget where as soon as you're paid at the beginning of a month, you might be able to have a luxurious dinner. But as that budget is depleted, you have to make different decisions. And plants do similar things with their energy budget. So they have to make decisions about whether growing or defending themselves against a pest is the most appropriate use of their energy. And you can actually see them weighing those decisions depending upon what environment they're in as to whether energy goes one direction versus the other. So they actually usually have these budgets and they make, what we think of in plants as wise decisions, about where that energy needs to go first.

Marshall Poe:

Another thing that... We'll get back to the issue of, well, maybe we won't get back to it. Maybe we'll go to it right now.

Beronda Montgomery:

Okay.

Marshall Poe:

One of the things that made me think in your book is about the way that we taxonomically divide living organisms. And I think this goes back to Aristotle. I'm an historian, so I think it does. He invented a taxonomy for living organisms, and there's a strong distinction between flora and fauna. Is that distinction still made in biology? I mean, obviously it is, but in the light of your research and other people's research, is it fuzzier than we thought?

Beronda Montgomery:

I think it's fuzzier in some ways, but there's still a pretty strong distinction between organisms that have a nervous system and those that don't. And I think the reason that I say it's fuzzier is that we recognize that plants can make some decisions and responses that really are the same from an outpoint standpoint of individuals or biological organisms that have a nervous system. They just do it in different ways.

But there's a pretty strong distinction as to whether you have a central nervous system or as opposed to whether plants they don't. But there are still some central organizing principles that allow them to respond as a whole organism.

Marshall Poe:

So I'm interested in this analogy between whatever plants have and a central nervous system, because it does seem to me that they communicate with their various parts.

Beronda Montgomery:

Absolutely. So certainly there is strong evidence that plants communicate. So for example, if the root gets a signal that can be perceived and respond, have a change in the above ground part. So there's definitely some coordination across the entire organism. The question is what's the basis of that?

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. This is exactly my question. How does that happen?

Beronda Montgomery:

Often what happens is that plants do have signals, whether they're hormones, electrical signals, or other signals that start in one part of the plant and can travel through other parts of the plants. And we know that hormones can be transported through xylem and phloem, which is a system that flows throughout the plant. Much like you would expect something flows through the blood system. But there are no nerves in terms of the nervous system that are mitigating that.

So often it's hormones, but there are also electrical signals in plants that can be measured.

Marshall Poe:

Really?

Beronda Montgomery:

Yeah. There are electrical signals. In fact, part of what's happening with the Venus fly trap and mimosa is an electrical signal after touch. And then there are also these waves of things like calcium, that if you touch the shoot, you can see a calcium wave from the shoot to the root. So there are multiple ways in which plants are able to communicate, whereas organisms, like us, have this central nervous system.

Marshall Poe:

I see. So they're a little bit more adaptable than we are, because all we have is a nervous system.

Beronda Montgomery:

Well, and that's what I say, they have much more complicated in some ways.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. And one of the things that's a very strong distinction is plants... Well, a lot of sentient beings with nervous systems move...

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

... And plants don't. But, I don't know, I have these vines outside.

Beronda Montgomery:

Plants do move.

Marshall Poe:

It looked like they grabbed that tree.

Beronda Montgomery:

Plants do move. Plants move in lots of different ways. So there is actual movement of plants. I mean, when you think about a sunflower, you can see it actually moving, turning its flower towards the sun. Vines certainly move. There's this mutation... There was a professor when I was a postdoc at Indiana University, Roger Hangarter. He may still be active there. I'm not sure if he's retired. But he did an artist show called Slow Motion where they actually did time lapse photography of plants. And there's a lot of movement in plants. It's just slower. And certainly many of us have seen movement of plants as they bend towards the light in our house. But there's also slower movement of plants where over their life cycle, the roots are moving. Plants move through growth, which is different from the ways that we move through muscles.

Marshall Poe:

So this is kind of a broad question, but one of the things you said in the introduction was that we should think differently about our relationship, not only with plants, but with each other. What have you learned from studying plants about the way we should treat each other?

Beronda Montgomery:

So I think one of the things that I have learned about plants, about the way we treat each other is I would say two. One of them are the ways that plants in diverse communities often thrive better together than if they're growing alone. And that's because they have this reciprocity where if you're growing something like corn with beans, the bean is fixing nitrogen and shares some of that.

Marshall Poe:

Nitrogen fixing, yeah.

Beronda Montgomery:

Right. Whereas the plant provides support. So I think that's been known for years through indigenous farming practices. Scientists have also shown that they have greater resilience to stress when you grow in these diverse communities. But I think also one of the things that I have been really impressed about in terms of things we can learn from plants are one of the things I learned most is how plants ask for help. And so in the book I talk about this three way interaction that can happen with some plants.

So for example, one plant may be attacked by a mite, and it's not able to defend itself from that mite, but when it's attacked by the mite, it produces a signal that attracts a wasp, that eats the mite. And so that ability to produce the equivalent of a language that says, "There's a problem here and I need help." And being able to draw in help is I think has been a powerful lesson for me. I think often as humans, we can get in this kind of, "I have to figure it out for myself," self-determination kind of mode. And that understanding of the power of voice for calling out for assistance from someone else is I think something that can be critically important as well as being the party who listens for the signal if you have the thing that can actually help someone else.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Well, this relates to my boyhood in Kansas. And one of the striking things about Kansas, and this is true of Iowa as well, is the growth of monoculture.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

And in Kansas, you see these absolutely enormous wheat fields and they are just wheat fields. And I always thought to myself as somebody who studied biology at Cornell College, these are relatively fragile.

Beronda Montgomery:

They are fragile. And that's one of the reasons we have so many inputs. We have to put in fertilizer inputs, We have to put in inputs to help protect them from pests. And we do this because of it's easier to harvest a monoculture than it is to harvest a polyculture and separate it. So a lot of times we do it for the ease of growth and harvesting, but there are significant inputs because of the fragility of the system. Absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. This is a striking thing when you fly over to the United States...

Beronda Montgomery:

Absolutely, yes.

Marshall Poe:

... And you see these fields, how different it actually is. It was.

Beronda Montgomery:

It's been interesting because a part of what's going on in the world, there's been a recent phenomenon in the U.S. where some farms have been permitted to grow two crops together to try to increase. And they're seeing some of the benefits of that, the biological benefits, even though the decision was driven by food shortages because of global crises. And so I think biology keeps reminding us of the importance of it, even though we've set up a system that depends on monoculture.

Marshall Poe:

I even remember this when I was growing up, is that we would grow a wheat crop and then we would grow a soybean crop because soybeans fixed nitrogen, right?

Beronda Montgomery:

That's right. To replenish the soil.

Marshall Poe:

Exactly. This is just standard. Everybody knew this. And I always wonder why they weren't grown together. But I guess it's harvesting is just not...

Beronda Montgomery:

It is. The care and harvesting.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. It's too hard to do. So what is the growth of monoculture do to genetic diversity? I can't imagine it's anything good.

Beronda Montgomery:

Yeah. So there is a lot of evidence that, of course, growing in monoculture reduces the genetic diversity of the entire ecosystem. And so certainly pollinators that would be attracted to other plants are no longer attracted there, and then the animals that feed on the pollinators. And so you actually reduce biodiversity by growing monocultures as well. Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. This is of some concern, I think, that we should pay attention to this genetic diversity. I suppose there are seed banks and things aren't there, where these...

Beronda Montgomery:

Yes, there certainly are seed banks and certainly there are, in a lot of cases, you will see that people try to grow kind of border crops around monoculture to keep some of that diversity. But it's there many different approaches and many different impacts.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. That's great. Well, this has been an absolutely enjoyable conversation, I can tell you that. I've learned a lot about plants and I'll be more plant aware. The traditional final question on the New Books Network is what are you working on now?

Beronda Montgomery:

So part of what I've been working on now is every time I move to a new environment, I try to become aware of the local plant community and local impacts. One of the things I've been really interested in here in Iowa is I had not been aware of what a derecho was until I came to campus and saw some of the trees that had been flattened. And so part of the question I've been asking is what we can learn from the recovery of that as we watch plants recover.

I'm always looking for new lessons from plants, and I am starting to think up new projects that'll also kind of connect my own history as an African American studying botany with plant lessons that are available.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that sounds fascinating. I'm sure your mother is proud.

Beronda Montgomery:

I hope so. I do hope so.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Shout out to your mom again. Beronda, thanks very much for being on the show.

Beronda Montgomery:

Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure.

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