Cleve Backster Part I: Introduction

I have been trying, for something like the last eight or nine weeks, to write one or more blog posts about Cleve Backster, the man who, in 1966, hooked up a Dracaena fragrans to a polygraph machine and concluded that not only do plants all have feelings, they're also all mildly psychic. Backster was later featured in a book called The Secret Life of Plants, which a lot of us will have heard of or possibly even read, because that's the sort of thing you do when you're a plant obsessive, and I know a good chunk of my readership is composed of plant obsessives.

All three of the Cleve Backster posts will include pictures of Portulaca flowers, because Portulaca flowers are pretty and I have a lot of pictures of them. I do not, in so doing, mean to suggest that Portulaca is somehow more relevant to Backster or his claims than any other plant. The majority of these flowers will be from 'Tequila Mix,' though there are a couple 'Sundial Mix' and at least one NOID mixed in.
I wanted to write about Backster and his claims because I strongly suspected, just from the sound of them, that they were bullshit, plus they were plant-related, and about anthropomorphizing plants, which if anybody is qualified to talk about plant anthropomorphization, I think it's me. I originally wasted thousands of perfectly good pixels writing a rebuttal to an interview with Backster from 1997 (the interview is on-line and you can find it if you look; I'm not going to link to it), only to find, through the magic of Interlibrary Loan, that most of my criticisms had been addressed by Backster in a book he published in 2003 (Primary Perception, White Rose Millennium Press, Anza, CA, 2003) and I had to write the whole thing over again.

My criticisms weren't addressed in the sense that Backster provides a lot of meaningful information about his claims and the evidence for them, but they were addressed in the sense that he acknowledges in the book that a lot of what he's described turns out not to work so well in other people's labs, and he goes into more detail about what he's done and what he thinks it means. Backster also has explanations for why other people can't duplicate his results, which explanations sound a hell of a lot like stuff that you just make up off the top of your head when somebody catches you spreading bullshit, but of course I can't prove that that's what he's doing.

It also turns out that in order to present a fair account of what Backster's claims are and why I think they're bunk, a lot of time has to be spent nailing down exactly what the claims are, and I wasn't sure that I had it in me to do that, or that my readers would have enough patience to read it all. So I considered throwing the whole idea out and moving on.


The problem is, though, that Backster's claims, and the willingness of people to believe them, really bother me. Like, above and beyond my normal irritation with bad science, to the point where I started to suspect that the irritation meant something about me, people in general, or both. So I've decided to put my head down and try to charge through all this one last time, and if this doesn't work out, I give up. The stuff that bothers me, we'll try to work out in Part III.

So.

[deep breath]

The story of the "discovery" of primary perception¹ has Backster working in his office early one morning. He was, at the time, running a school for the training of polygraph ("lie detector") operators, something he'd done for the CIA for some period previously.² He watered a Dracaena fragrans³ and was seized by the question of whether or not he could determine when the water reached the leaves using the electrical-conductance part of the polygraph, which is ordinarily used to measure the sweatiness of a subject's palms.


This is not, on the face of it, a particularly silly thing to wonder, nor a particularly silly way to find out. I have no idea whether or not one can find this out using electrodes like Backster had, because he (understandably) seems to forget the question once the plant starts reading his mind, but it stands to reason that the conductance would change when the leaf's hydration level changed, so, you know, whatever. And obviously he had a polygraph right there to test with, because he was running a polygraph training school. So this much of the story all checks out.

What he found when he hooked up the leaf to the polygraph was that the graph sort of slowly trended downward, which I infer means slowly increasing electrical resistance (the same as decreasing electrical conductance). And here's where he starts to go off the rails a little: he notes that in a human subject, this sort of graph would indicate boredom.

So he decides to try to make the plant interested in what's going on. First, he dunks a leaf in some hot coffee. No response from the plant. And Backster is pondering, and thinking, and suddenly gets the idea to burn one of the leaves with a match, at which point the polygraph needle starts to go wild.

Backster is careful to note at this point in the text that he was nowhere near the plant at that moment (fifteen feet away, he says) and there were no other people in the building at that time (it being between 7 and 8 AM), and the only thing that changed was that he had the idea to burn the plant.


Despite the plant being, apparently, in the plant-equivalent of abject terror and panic, Backster goes ahead and fetches a match from another room. While he's doing so, the plant calms down to about halfway between it's earlier, "bored" conductance and it's more recent "freaking the hell out" conductance,⁴ but then he comes back in and lights the match and burnt the tip of a different leaf (i.e., not the one with the electrodes on it), which elicits the desired "oh god oh god I am being burned alive" response from the plant.

He later showed a colleague (who would eventually become his business partner) the trick, but wouldn't let the colleague hurt the plant, he says. The plant also reacted to the mental threats from the colleague.

Subsequent experimentation refines and elaborates this effect. Backster learns that the plants can tell the difference between a human intending to do something and merely pretending to intend, thereby making houseplants smarter than virtually all dogs, and an awful lot of children.⁵ He finds that plants are "territorial," in the sense that they don't notice or feel everything that happens everywhere, but only stuff in the space they have decided belongs to them, and only among the humans and animals they have decided are relevant to their interests. So for example, a plant at one end of a thirty-foot hallway might respond to a person at the opposite end, thirty feet away, but wouldn't necessarily respond to a person on the other side of the wall, only two feet away, if the plant only considers the hallway to be its territory.


Plants, Backster finds, also attune themselves to the emotions of the people around them, particularly the individual who cares for them. If you water a plant every day,⁶ says Backster, however routine it may be to you, the plant knows that you're you and will preferentially feel emotions relating to you. So, for example, if you go a couple blocks away and get hammered in a bar and get yourself into a bar fight, the plant, two blocks away, will also register strong emotions relating to you being thrown across a pool table or what have you. Readers who are thinking, at this point, hey, wait a minute! You just said they don't notice anything outside of their particular territory! are correct: Backster says both things, in rapid succession, on pages 30-33 of his book. I have no idea whether he realizes that the two claims are in conflict, but he doesn't appear to notice it within the book. Now please, don't get ahead of me again.

Backster further claims that plants are also sensitive to non-human and partly-human life forms, including but not limited to bacteria in sink drain sludge, human cells being shed during urination, eggs, brine shrimp,⁷ human sperm cells, etc., and that these same kinds of conductance responses can be measured from eggs,⁸ yogurt, human cells in petri dishes, and so forth. That is, primary perception is not only something observed in plants: basically anything you hook up to an electrode which is alive, and some things that aren't alive or never were alive, will show some kind of a response like this (Though in the book, as I recall, Backster doesn't try to make claims for inanimate objects so much. He does mention it in the 1997 interview I talked about earlier). Further testing reveals that in extremely traumatic situations (a lettuce leaf in a plane where everyone is eating salad, for example), plants/eggs/yogurt/etc. will do the equivalent of "fainting," and their graph will go completely flat. Etc.

Backster comes up with an experiment he is obviously very proud of,⁹ wherein a plant is put in a small room with a beaker of continuously boiling water, and another beaker containing brine shrimp, and a randomizing device (try as I might, I couldn't figure out how this was supposed to work, but I'm not terribly interested either, and it doesn't matter: I'm happy to accept that it works the way Backster tells me it works), such that the plant is being read by the electrodes, and at some random moment, the beaker containing the brine shrimp is tipped into the beaker of boiling water and they (the brine shrimp) all die. On what we are told is a statistically significant number of occasions, the plants reacted when and only when the shrimp died, and this experiment was the basis of Backster's only published paper to date, in the Winter 1968 International Journal of Parapsychology, called "Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life." I would really like to have read this paper, because I'm curious about how he set up the experiment and the specific results he reports, but I couldn't locate it.¹⁰


What happens subsequently, alas, is that as news of Backster's experiments spread, and scientists attempt to duplicate his results, they find that they cannot. Backster comes up with a flurry of explanations for this:

One, the researchers who were attempting to repeat his results were doing things like washing the plant's leaves with distilled water before the experiment, thereby getting the plant attuned to them personally, which is of course a big no-no, because . . . apparently plants like people better than brine shrimp. Or something. Maybe they'd like the shrimp better if the shrimp were washing their leaves. I don't know. In any case, the plants react to what the people are thinking and feeling during the experiment, instead of to the shrimp, even though the shrimp are right there next to them and plants are supposed to be territorial and all. Backster claims he had to have someone else buy the plants and store them elsewhere in the building until immediately before the experiments, so as not to get the plants attuned to anybody. You also can't watch the experiment while it's in progress, because your conscious awareness of what's happening with the experiment interferes with the experiment in some vaguely-defined but apparently important way.

Two, the same plant can't be used in identical experiments over and over. They get used to having brine shrimp executed nearby,¹¹ and so are only good for maybe three experiments apiece. Which apparently he didn't tell the scientists¹² about until after they did the experiments and failed to duplicate his results.


Three, life is just fundamentally non-reproduceable, and "Mother Nature . . . doesn't jump through a hoop ten times in a row merely because someone wants her to." Backster claims that the best way to get results is to not try, to just go on about your business doing whatever you do, noting when you're reacting strongly to things or when interesting things are happening, and then you can check these against the log from the plant later and see what things the plant considered important. You also can't conduct these experiments when animal experiments are going on elsewhere in the building, or there's noise, or people visiting the lab, or someone talking on the phone, because then you don't know whether the plant is responding to the thing you're trying to make it respond to, or if it's reacting to your secretary having a fight with her husband by telephone in the next room.

So these are, more or less, the claims being made. On Wednesday, I will try to take them apart, in Part II.

-

¹ This is Backster's term for it. He's basically acknowledging the obvious, that plants don't have noses, tongues, eyes or ears with which to sense their environments, and proposing that they know the things that he thinks they know through some other, more fundamental means. It's information being processed by the plant, so perception, and it's being processed at a fundamental, base level, without the use of sense organs like our own, ergo primary. This also has the added benefit of making it sound more important, which I bet is not accidental.
² Pages 11-20 of his book are spent establishing his credentials, which are neither negligible nor particularly impressive: he went to prep school, he went to college, he volunteered for the military following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and sort of wandered into polygraph operation as an offshoot of his interest in hypnosis. He wound up in the CIA, trying to figure out ways of making interrogation subjects talk, or at least figure out when they're lying, via hypnosis, "truth serum," and eventually polygraphs, which were just beginning to be investigated as an interrogation tool. Backster's introduction is amusing to me, in a way I can't quite pin down: it's like he paints himself as this total badass who is incredibly smart and does everything incredibly well, and yet his self-presentation is clumsy enough that I came away with the impression that he thinks he's Batman or James Bond or somebody. I kept thinking, dude, you study plant feelings: I mean, at best, you're a minor supervillain.
³ Also a Ficus elastica, which I feel bad for, both because it's often left out of the story and because it is probably dead now. I figure someone should give it the dignity of a mention. The original Dracaena was still alive as of 2002-03, but nobody ever says what became of the Ficus. Backster never claims to have hooked up the Ficus to the electrodes, which I think is kind of weird, since it was right there in the same office and everything, and why wouldn't you.
⁴ The reader should note that I'm paraphrasing like mad, here, and Backster, being both a gentleman and of a different generation (born 1924, and still alive as of this writing, as far as I can tell), doesn't actually use words like "freaking the hell out," probably because such words are associated with those damned hippies or something. He's very square, for someone who's into all this weird parapsychological shit.
⁵ My own observation, not Backster's.
⁶ Don't do this. Why would you do this?
⁷ (= "Sea Monkeys")
⁸ Curiously, it doesn't even appear to matter whether the eggs are fertilized or not: a cell is a cell is a cell, apparently.
⁹ Not unfairly: it's a fairly clever idea for an experiment, though it may or may not measure what he thinks it's measuring.
¹⁰ It's difficult to locate forty-one-year-old parapsychology journals, just in general, and then a staggering amount of scientific publication is not on-line, or is on-line but in a form inaccessible to anybody who doesn't have thousands of dollars to throw at subscriptions to The Journal of Amphibian Digestive Systems or whatever. I understand -- journal editors have to eat too -- but it also puts up obstacles to research. If you want to know what's going on in science these days, you have to have a lot of money for subscriptions, access to a university library, or the ability to settle for secondhand journalist interpretations of the research, which are frequently oversimplified or misunderstood to the point of being wrong. Very frustrating.
¹¹ (Who wouldn't? Most of us would barely notice living brine shrimp, much less dead ones.)
¹² I refuse to say "other scientists," since that would imply that Backster was an actual scientist. We'll get to why I don't consider him an actual scientist eventually.

Pretty picture: Aechmea fasciata flower

Not only a pretty extreme close-up, but it's also a pretty big picture when opened full-size in a separate window. So have all the detail you want.

My ex-work has several Aechmea fasciata blooming right now, plus some brand-new Aechmea 'Del Mar,' barely old Neoregelia 'Ardie,' and a handful of other Neoregelias of varying ages ('Yang,' some NOIDs). Some are pricier than others, but they're all pretty. If you're in the area and want to be impressed, or you're looking for some cool bromeliads, and you haven't yet figured out where I used to work, e-mail and I will happily let you know where to find them.

No, I'm not getting paid to advertise for them. But I ought to be, shouldn't I?

Saturday afternoon Nina picture

Unfinished business: Hibiscus, Alocasia, Anthurium

Some odds and ends to take care of. First, I have finally obtained pictures of the Alocasia 'Frydek' I mentioned previously, for those of you who wanted to see it. The color is more true-to-life in the second picture, but the first picture does a better job of showing off the velvety texture:




If it were any genus besides Alocasia, I would have one of these already: they're so damn pretty. But I have all the spider mites I need for now, thanks.

There was also a request on last week's really big Anthurium leaf post for a picture that showed the context, as the leaf in question blocked view of the rest of the plant. So here you go.

Anthurium "hookeri." The really big leaf is pointing to the right in this picture.

I also tried to get a picture of the Anthurium "crenata" I mentioned in that post, but they don't appear to have one any more. There is still a very large Anthurium where I used to work, though, which is probably more closely related to my "hookeri:" it was sold to them as Anthurium 'Red Line' or 'Redline' or something like that, and allegedly gets a red midvein in bright enough light. Their plant didn't have the red midvein when it arrived, and hasn't developed it since, but it's a pretty impressive-looking plant regardless:


And then finally, I was asked for a picture of the Hibiscus flower that went with the buds in Wednesday's post, so here you go.


I have some buds on my other Hibiscus now, the pink one with the orange border, so there will likely be more Hibiscus pictures coming up soonish.

Random plant event: Yucca guatemalensis resprouting

Like most people, I have ideas all the time, and like most people, some of my ideas are better than others. Earlier in the summer, I thought it sounded like a good idea to cut back all of my big Yucca guatemalensis plants, because they were getting too big to be easily manageable, and there was all that bare, propagatable stem just sitting there doing nothing. So I cut them back down to maybe a foot tall or less, and stuck the tops in pots to root, and the leftover cane I put in vermiculite, in the hopes of getting it to root and sprout and make even more plants.

The stupid part of this was that I probably, I'm thinking, should have left more stem on the original plants. I also probably should have known better than to leave them outside in this summer, of all summers: so far they've just gotten really wet and cold. They're coping with it pretty well, considering, but I started out with seven separate plants (in three pots), and one of them rotted and died almost immediately. Of the other six, four have not yet done anything, and then there are these two:



Of course it's good that these two have decided to resprout, and as best as I can tell, every single one of the tops has already decided to start rooting, which is a lot quicker than I was expecting. The cane sections haven't really done anything yet, but cane sections take a while anyway, so I'm not worried about that. So overall it's not like I've lost anything. But I still wish I'd left a little more cane on the original plants, and that the weather had been a little warmer and drier for them.

They're Yuccas, so they might still forgive me yet. But you know how it is when you cut something way back and then realize afterward that maybe you overdid it a little.

Air Traffic Controller (Streptocarpus cvv.), Part II

Okay. So, when we left Part I, I was promising jokes, light refreshments, and nectar guides. Help yourself to some soda/cookies/nuts/whatever, and then we'll get started.

Streptocarpus 'Purple Martin,' with really obvious nectar guides.
Nectar guides are, like they sound, markings on the flower which guide pollinators toward the nectar. In some plants (e.g. black-eyed susan, Rudbekia hirta, or Gazania), the flower guide is simply a dark spot¹ around the center of the flower. Other plants make the whole flower dark but make the pollen stand out very brightly (Zantedeschia does this in UV, as does Glechoma hederacea), and still others draw lines or spots which point toward the nectar (Digitalis, Streptocarpus, Geranium, Viola).

Viola NOID, also with really obvious nectar guides.
I admit to being kind of puzzled about this, initially. To my thinking, the flower itself should be advertisement enough. I mean, bees aren't usually that much smaller than a lot of the flowers they pollinate, so if they wandered around on the flower for a second or two they would find the nectar anyway, whether there were "EAT AT JOE'S" signs or not. And it's not like their eyesight is particularly bad, considering that they can clearly manage to see small distant objects pretty accurately in order to find the flowers at all.² So what does the plant get out of this? What, for that matter, do the bees get out of it?

My best guess is that it's worth the effort for the flowers because there are a limited number of bees, and each bee can only visit a limited number of flowers in a day (or season, or whatever). If you want all the flowers in a field to have the best possible chances of being pollinated, it's helpful to make it as obvious as possible where the nectar is, to minimize time spent fumbling around trying to find the nectar. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're competing with other plants for pollinators, any advantage you can get over your competition, everything else being equal, is going to be helpful. If you can get eighty pollinations in an hour when everybody else is only getting seventy-eight, you will inherit the earth. So it can be worth it to become an air traffic controller.

And if you're a bee? Well, obviously you can collect more nectar in a given amount of time if you don't have to fumble around looking for it, which enables you to bring back more nectar, which means you can raise more baby bees. That much is pretty straightforward, actually.

Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars:' slight nectar guides are present, but they're not very pronounced.
This waste-of-time theory has been observed in the wild, on a Delphinium species which produces both normally-colored flowers with nectar guides and albino flowers with no markings: both hummingbirds and butterflies took longer to pollinate the albino flowers. The researchers went the extra step to verify that this was because of the lack of guides, and not just that the hummingbirds and butterflies were less enthusiastic about white flowers, by painting nectar guides on the petals, and painting other petals on the same flower blue, and then timing the pollinators again. They even made sure that the change wasn't just because the pollinators were attracted to the paint, by painting blue flowers that were already blue and comparing the response.³ (ref.: .pdf file)

Having said all this, nectar guides are not a universal thing. Nectar, in fact, is not a universal thing either. Flowers that are pollinated at night don't really need guides, for obvious reasons.⁴ Cultivars don't necessarily have the same nectar guides as their ancestral species, and may not have nectar guides at all. Streptocarpus 'Falling Stars,' above, has much less pronounced nectar guides than 'Purple Martin' or 'Tanager.' We also had a fourth variety at work, 'Snow Bunting,' that was pure white. (Not only could I never get a decent picture of it myself, but I can't find one on-line, either.) I'm fairly sure it didn't have any markings at all.⁵ So nectar guides are not mandatory, just helpful.

As with human air traffic control, certain conventions have arisen to make everything run smoothly.⁶ Nectar guides are often in specific colors, either yellow or "negative ultraviolet."⁷ In some plants, the nectar guide, but not the rest of the flower, changes color when the flower has been successfully pollinated, signalling pollinators to move along to the next flower and not waste their time with this one.

Streptocarpus 'Tanager,' with relatively strong but somewhat shortened nectar guides, relative to 'Purple Martin.'
Streptocarpus nectar guides are relatively obvious and straightforward, at least in most cultivated varieties, though as with most things, if you get to digging around in the literature, you find some cool details. Most cultivated Streptocarpus are hybrids, with the bulk of their genes coming from the lavender-colored S. rexii, which displays very prominent nectar guides and is pollinated by bees. However, not all Streptocarpus species are bee-pollinated: some, like S. dunnii, are pollinated by birds instead, and lack nectar guides altogether. (ref.) Such species also show other signs of being specifically adapted against pollination by bees.^{8, 9}

When I first had the idea of going with "Air Traffic Controller" for Streptocarpus, I wasn't really thinking about that choice much beyond the fact that it uses nectar guides, and I wasn't sure that was really enough to hang the choice of "person" on. Seems kind of minor, you know? But it turns out that this was even more apt than I imagined, because not only do Streptocarpus spp. use nectar guides to point pollinators to nectar, but they also use different colors when talking to different pollinators, and send them different signals about when and where to land. It really was the right choice. I love it when these profiles work out that way. (You can tell I'm excited when the footnotes have footnotes.)

-

Photo credits: all me.

¹ Rudbekia "flowers," as well as those of Gerbera daisies, sunflowers, and many other familiar plants of the Asteraceae, are actually clusters of a large number of tiny, individual flowers. Only the outer ring of true flowers grow petals, which serve to attract the attention of pollinators (though cultivated varieties of these plants may produce inflorescences in which every flower produces petals, as for example in some of the more hideous cultivars of Echinacea^a). Although to us the petals of Rudbekia look uniformly yellow, to a bee the petal changes color about halfway out: the inner part of the petal absorbs ultraviolet and the outer part reflects it.
This is the same kind of thing people see when we look at, say, a Hibiscus that's yellow with a red center, it's just that in the case of the Hibiscus, the difference between the two parts of the flower is in the green part of the spectrum, which we're able to see. The outer part of the flower reflects both red and green (a combination our brains call "yellow"), and the center reflects only red. The same thing is happening in Rudbekia: the outer portion of the petals is reflecting red, green, and ultraviolet, and the inner portion is reflecting only red and green. There are pictures at this site which can show you what you're missing in UV wavelengths. The Rudbekia plan, with UV absorbed in the center and reflected on the outer edge, is typical of a lot of flowers, though that's not the type Streptocarpus uses.
^a I know you like them, jodi, but they don't look right. . . .
² Though their eyesight is not especially good, either: human eyes are much better at seeing detail, whether from far away or close-up, than bee eyes are. So this might be bad logic on my part.
³ This sort of double- and triple-checking, silly though it might sound to the non-scientist, is actually very important, and is called scientific control. Without it, experimental data is difficult or impossible to interpret accurately. For example, suppose I let Nina loose in the house ten different times, and each time I find her hiding in the Aglaonemas. I conclude, oh, anoles are crazy about Aglaonemas, and I post this on the blog and talk it up and publish papers and books about it and eventually it becomes my whole career, the anole-Aglaonema-attraction theory. Then somebody points out that when I did these experiments, all my Aglaonemas were in the same room, and how do I know that Nina didn't just prefer that room for some reason? And somebody else asks if I've tested this on any other anoles, and how can I be sure that Nina doesn't just have some "personal"^a fascination with Aglaonemas? And somebody else wants to know whether I did this all at the same time of day: maybe she was just looking for the brightest/darkest/warmest/quietest/etc. spot she could find. And so on, and the questions keep coming and suddenly nobody wants to buy books about the special bond between anoles and Aglaonemas anymore, and my career is ruined, and the husband, Nina and I all lose the house and Nina's turning tricks in alleys in order to buy crickets, and it's all because I wasn't controlling for these variables in my original experiments.
There are some critics of science that don't understand this concept, many of them failed scientists themselves, and they will complain about how Western science is all about "controlling nature" and "making nature jump through hoops" and what have you, because they're not able to understand that there might be reasons for their experimental results that have nothing to do with their particular pet theory. I'm hoping to bring this up again in a different set of posts, eventually, so I figured I'd get the idea out there for everybody to chew on ahead of time.
^a (In quotes because she's not exactly a "person," so "personal" is probably not the right word to use. Though "anoleal" doesn't sound right, either.)
⁴ Although I will predict that if nobody's found them yet, somebody is going to someday discover a night-blooming flower that uses texture, instead of color, as a nectar guide. There are already day-bloomers that use hairs pointing in a particular direction instead of pigments, for their nectar guides (e.g. Iris). It doesn't seem like that big of a stretch to think that a bat-pollinated flower might reflect sonar differently from different parts, in a way the bat could read. Color, after all, is just differences in the reflection of light, so why not differences in the reflection of sound? If I were an actual botanist, instead of just playing one on the internet, this would be something I'd be interested in going looking for.
⁵ (It was also really boring: I didn't care for it.)
⁶ E.g. saying "niner" instead of "nine," which seems like a quirky affectation until you imagine trying to tell the difference between the spoken words "nine" and "five" while trying to control a large, loud, potentially dangerous piece of machinery, and then all of a sudden it seems totally obvious and kind of brilliant. Similar logic underlies the use of the NATO alphabet (Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo etc.) for letters.
⁷ "Negative ultraviolet" means "absorbs ultraviolet." Since people can't actually see ultraviolet light, we've never had to come up with a name for this color. I mean, to (non-color-blind) people, red is red, and red+green is yellow, and red+green+blue is white, but red+ultraviolet is also just red, to us, and red+green+ultraviolet is also just yellow, because the presence or absence of UV doesn't register on our eyes or brains one way or the other. Bees, on the other hand, do see ultraviolet, and so to a bee, red+green is yellow and red+green+ultraviolet is a different color, which they may not regard as being terribly similar to yellow at all. Weirdly, though, to bees, red+green+ultraviolet is the same color as green+ultraviolet, because they don't see red.^a
This, incidentally, is why none of the great honeybee artists have ever been appreciated for their genius in the human world (Particularly BZbzbZZ and BzbzzbzZZbz, whose work human critics have called "derivative," "uninspired," and "cliched" despite their wide acclaim in the honeybee community. This has led to some frustrated and enraged honeybee artists stinging humans as an act of tragic revenge/suicide, made all the more tragic because they can't tell people apart from one another very well and therefore almost never sting their critics. The life of the honeybee artist is a tortured one.): we're literally not seeing the same pictures.
All of which is to explain what "negative ultraviolet" means: it's a color word we've had to make up for colors that we can't see, and would make little sense to the bees. Though very little makes sense to bees anyway, as you know if you've ever tried to talk to one.
^a Which hopefully answers the question you've never thought about: how come red flowers are so attractive to hummingbirds? What's so special about red? The answer is, it's not that the hummingbirds are necessarily so attracted to red as that, if you're a red-flowering plant, you're basically invisible to the bees, so if you want to get pollinated, you have to either change colors or focus your attention on the non-bee pollinators. If the red-flowering plants are being pushed to adopt ever more hummingbird-friendly designs, then evolution is going to reward hummingbirds that focus ever more tightly on red flowers.
⁸ S. dunnii is also adapted in other ways to pollination by birds: besides having red flowers, the flowers are more tubular in shape, and narrower (suitable for a bird's beak, but not large enough for a bee to crawl in), and all face the plant's one large leaf, which is used by birds as a perch while they collect the nectar from the flowers. The flowers of bee-pollinated species like S. rexii face every direction. (From this paper, which contains a lot of interesting stuff relating to nectar guides and pollination.) There are a few "unifoliate" (= "one-leaf") species of Streptocarpus (S. dunnii, S. grandis, S. pusillis, S. polyanthus), which grow only one leaf, and which are a little too weird-looking to be commonly grown, though they're cultivated by people who are, you know, really into Streptocarpus and are useful in hybridization.
⁹ Species like S. dunnii, if not S. dunnii itself, are probably the original source for the genes which result in red-flowering Streptocarpus hybrids like 'Tanager.' You'll notice that 'Tanager's nectar guides are not as intense as 'Purple Martin's.

Pretty picture: Hibiscus rosa-sinensis bud

I'm not saying that Hibiscus flower buds are anywhere near as pretty as Hibiscus flower flowers are, but I bet you we'd still grow Hibiscus even if the buds were all we ever got.

The Ghost Greenhouses of Cedar Rapids

Long ago, when home ownership was still theoretical for me and the husband, he spent a lot of time looking for homes in the area (and also not in the area) that already had attached greenhouses, or businesses with greenhouses that might be for sale, or whatever, for what I hope would be obvious reasons.¹ This place, in Cedar Rapids, was one that he came across, and we went up there and walked around inside it at one point in what must have been the winter of 2007-08. This may, technically, have been trespassing,² but it was in the spirit of looking at it to see whether it would be suitable for buying and building a house nearby and all that stuff.

Oh, such dreams we had.

Anyway. We went back last Sunday. It was kind of a come-for-the-trespassing, stay-for-the-photography deal. (For unknown reasons, I didn't get any pictures during the first visit, and it had occurred to me a few days ago that an abandoned greenhouse would be something my readers might find interesting.)

The reader should be cautioned that it's kind of sad.

All pictures will enlarge considerably if opened in a new window. I did play around some with the contrast and brightness on the original pictures, but it appears that I didn't play around enough, because these all look a lot darker than it was in reality.


The place was named Cedar Rapids Greenhouses. The owners were not big on whimsy. Or possibly they were just sticklers for accuracy. It's still listed on-line in various places, though there's next to no information about it. A few of the on-line sites mention the place in terms of landscaping, though it's unclear whether they sold landscaping plants and supplies or actually did the landscaping themselves, and just grew their own plants too. The sign above says they were wholesale-only, though that's not the impression I get from looking around at what's left. I mean, some of it looks more like it was retail: there was a sign, for example, saying 2" houseplants were $1.49, which seems like a lot to ask for wholesale and maybe not quite enough for retail, even if you take into account that people are often confused about the size of 3" square pots.³ But who knows.

They want $550,000 for the 4-acre property, which seems like a lot: it's in a location with decent traffic, on the southwest side of town, but at the same time I don't know whether there's anything salvageable about the structure. Possibly you'd have to spend another $550,000 to demolish it all and clean up the mess. A couple of the houses have what look like new polycarbonate-panel roofs. The husband speculated that maybe the polycarbonate would be worth salvaging, maybe.

The giant weeds almost touching the ceiling here are goosefoot/lambsquarters; more on that later.
The $550,000 is what they were asking before the A) Cedar Rapids economy specifically, and B) real estate market in general, fell to pieces, so it might not be real firm. There may or may not be a second property under the same name, at a different address, too, which doesn't appear to be included in the sale, but Google Maps was frustratingly inconsistent about listing the second address, so I'm left unsure whether the second site even exists, or whether it's functional. The husband said that it seemed like he'd heard, at some point in his searching, that CRG had decided to sell the site in the pictures because they'd rebuilt elsewhere. I'm unable to confirm either way.

I'm not sure what this picture is supposed to be of; it's not set up at all like the property we were looking at, so either it's gone through a lot of changes or this is some other property. It was up on the wall in the customer service area. (Seems like a shame to leave it there: surely this was somebody's family business, and there would be sentimental value?)
There were two greenhouses which were pretty much fully intact: most of the pictures are from those. Then there was one that was not intact at all, beyond a basic framework and a few tatters of shade cloth, and a fourth one that was mostly covered except for a few panels missing in the roof.

This is the not-intact-at-all one.
There was also an addition where it looks like large equipment used to be stored. There were a couple walk-in coolers there, and a big pile of sand, and not much else. There were also: one smallish room that appeared to have been a front-counter area, another smallish room that looked like it had been an office, and a third room which didn't have any obvious use whatsoever: it was completely windowless, and I don't remember it having anything inside except for, of all things, a badly degraded, probably worthless, 1970s-era Pachinko machine,⁴ which I stupidly failed to get a picture of.


You might expect that being in an abandoned greenhouse would feel creepy or have a haunted-house / ghost-town kind of feeling. Yes and no. I never felt anything like that in the greenhouses themselves. Possibly it would have been freaky at night, but in full bright sunlight in the middle of the day with traffic noise all around, it just felt like a greenhouse that had been maintained incredibly badly. It may be the case that it's impossible to make a greenhouse feel creepy during the day.⁵ The offices and customer-service area were kind of creepy, on the other hand: not only were they darker, but they're the places where, under normal circumstances, you'd expect to find people, and it's a little unsettling to expect people and instead find a pile of dry-erase markers and thank-you cards on the floor and a two-drawer file cabinet with both drawers pulled open.

The $1.49 houseplant sign is barely decipherable in this picture.
The plants in the greenhouses were the same plants as were in the field next to them. There was one large blooming thistle of some kind, and a few different goldenrods (Solidago spp.). More mulberry trees than I would have expected, though it makes sense now that I think about it: of course this would be where birds would go to sit and digest and get out of the rain.



I was also surprised to learn that goosefoot (Chenopodium album, probably) can get huge in greenhouse conditions: there were several there that were probably a good eight to ten feet tall, including the ones in the picture of the pulley and polycarbonate panels, earlier in the post.


There was also a plant there that answered a question it hadn't even occurred to me to ask, ever: what happens when a plant that depends on wind for seed dispersal receives no wind? It turns out that the seeds just kind of . . . accumulate.


With a big enough plant, this leads to a light blanket of seeds on everything --


-- which includes the plant itself:


That last picture is actually as close to creepy as anything we found in the greenhouse proper. Probably the resemblance to cobwebs is what's doing it in that case.

The ability of the weeds to find cracks in the pavement is impressive. And look how tall some of them are!


Probably the most difficult part, for me, was seeing all the abandoned pots and plastic saucers and whatever, knowing that they'd already been there for more than a year, were never going to be used for anything, and would probably just sit there until they broke, disintegrated, or were thrown away. I could have used them for something, rather than just letting them sit there. But I was good, and I didn't take anything. I didn't even touch anything, except for the door handle to get in. But still. Clay pots! Just sitting there, pointlessly, waiting to be broken! It was painful.


Actually, as far as it goes, I coveted the benches, too. A person could do a lot with that kind of bench space, though having to pull out ten-foot mulberry trees first would get tiresome.


I don't know what else to say about it. One hopes that this won't all just be thrown out, that it can be salvaged and used somewhere, though it's already sat for so long that this is looking less and less likely. And, again, even if the structure is sound, which I don't know whether it is or not, the amount of clean-up a person would have to do to make this all functional again would probably be such that it would be simpler to start over on a new piece of land and build everything from scratch.


I keep trying to find a way to sum it all up, and nothing sounds quite right. Mainly it was sad, more than anything else, with maybe a hint of postapocalyptic (though for postapocalyptic you also need silence, and we didn't have that). It seems like a huge waste of stuff, and space. But it's not like I would know what to do with this stuff, this space, if it were handed to me. And, like I said, probably the thing to do would be to tear it all down and start over anyway. Since I figure that's what's most likely to happen in the end, I guess the one bright spot is that I've seen and documented the place. If it can't endure forever, at least it has a web memorial, right? I hope this excuses the trespassing.

From the back; I neglected to get a shot of the place from the front.

-

¹ If it's not obvious: I want a greenhouse.
² When I mentioned this to the husband, he pointed out that there were no "NO TRESPASSING" signs posted on the property, which is true, though I don't think the absence of a sign prohibiting trespassing means that trespassing is necessarily desirable or encouraged.
³ Square pots are measured along the diagonal, not along the length of a side. This gets particularly confusing when you're talking about 3" square pots, because the length of a side of one of those is 2.1 inches, close enough that everybody (and I mean everybody -- used to drive me nuts) called them 2-inch pots at work, and we even had signage to that effect. This despite the fact that nobody seemed to have any problems with the 4" square pots being 4", not 3" which also only works when you measure along the diagonal. If the CRG people were also unaware of this particular industry convention (which it seems like that would be hard to miss, if you're in the industry, but things happen), then maybe they were actually selling 3" plants for $1.49. Still a little high, but not terribly unreasonable for wholesale.
⁴ Which I recognized as such only because one of my grandfathers bought and fixed up gambling equipment like Pachinko and slot machines and etc. for a while in the mid- and late 1980s (perhaps longer than that; I haven't actually seen him in more than ten years). I think he may only have let me play with the Pachinko machine once, during some kind of family get-together, but it was awesome. The time he gave my brother and me each a roll of quarters and told us to go upstairs and play the slot machines was a lot less entertaining, didn't last nearly as long, and was, I suspect, more of an oblique lesson about the perils of gambling than an attempt to keep us entertained.
⁵ Though before making such a sweeping pronouncement on the matter, I'd want to give David Lynch a fair crack at it. If anybody could do it. . . .