There's Help In The Dirt
by Kacey
There is healing to be found right under your feet. Mother Earth is calling you to dig your hands into her soil and feel the blessings of plants. Jan Johnsen of the NY Botanical Garden lends her thoughts to this exploration of nature.
Transcript
This is Shine On,
The health and happiness show with new episodes every week on how to live well.
Shine On is heard all over the world as a podcast,
But it's heard first on the radio in New York's Hudson Valley.
Hi,
It's Casey.
Thank you so much for tuning in to Shine On.
Are you tuning in just to see if I sound any better?
Oh,
Yes,
Things are looking up just a little bit.
And part of the reason is spring is here.
Things are budding.
Oh,
My girlfriend sent me beautiful flowers the other day,
And the smile on my face is still enormous.
What is it with plants?
What is it with plants and flowers that make us so darn happy?
Well,
That's what we're going to look at today.
I have three deck plants,
You know,
Plants that are usually out on my back deck.
I think they're geraniums and like a palm tree kind of guy.
They're in the second bedroom.
They've been wintering there because we get good sunlight in the second bedroom.
But,
You know,
They've had it now.
They are starting to droop and get spindly and they want to be outside.
And every day I'm saying to these plants,
Hang in there,
Hang in there just a few more weeks.
I promise you'll be outside soon.
And some of you are shaking your heads and thinking,
I do that,
Too.
And others just think we're crazy.
But I have a relationship with my plants.
I love to water all the little plants around the house.
I can't wait until summer to get out on the back deck.
Here's what summer is to me.
Summer is all the plants go out on the back deck,
Right?
And then I move them around,
Move them around,
Move them around,
Move them around,
Get them just where I want them to be.
And then it's fall and I'll come back inside.
Do you do that,
Too?
I also have a little garden that I absolutely adore.
It's rocks and plants and all kinds of things.
And the reason I have a garden is because of our guest today,
Jan Johnson.
Jan Johnson is an incredible gardener.
She's an award-winning landscaper and author.
She wrote the book Heaven is a Garden and the Spirit of Stone and Florotopia and Garden-topia.
And she's been on the show a couple of times for her two latest books.
And both times she just gave me the courage to get in there and play.
Just stick something in the ground and see what happens.
You learn as you go.
And you learn what the plants like.
And we are going to learn a few fascinating things today.
So welcome,
Jan Johnson.
You have discovered something pretty special.
And that's a little-known aspect of nature that helps plants grow.
So tell us all about that.
So everyone knows that sunshine and water and fertilizer makes plants grow.
Right.
However,
There's something else that makes plants grow that we're just now finding out about.
But I kind of figured it out when I was young.
I was in high school.
I was 16 years old.
And I was in an art high school in New York City,
But I was really good in biology.
So my science teacher asked me to enter the New York City Science Fair,
Which I did reluctantly.
And she said to me,
Well,
What are you going to do your science experiment on?
And I had no idea.
And so at that point,
I thought about it and thought about it,
And I came to her and I said,
I want to do it about the effect of sound on the growth of plants.
And she laughed hysterically.
She thought it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.
In fact,
She thought it was so silly that she brought me into the teacher's lounge and had me tell the other teachers what my experiment was,
Because it was so hysterical.
To a 16-year-old,
That was,
You know,
I was mortified.
I just,
You know,
A 16-year-old,
You know,
Make fun of me,
What?
So that was the best thing that ever happened,
Because I was going to show her that it wasn't so silly after all.
Long story short,
I won first prize at the New York City Science Fair.
Wow.
Tell us about the project.
How did you,
What was the experiment itself?
Okay,
So I lived in an apartment in New York City,
And so I couldn't play the radio all day long to my coleus plants on the windowsill.
But what I could do is I could set up a little box and set my alarm clock on it that just ticked all day long,
Tick,
Tick,
Tick,
Tick,
Tick.
And then I had a control,
Which was far away,
So I couldn't hear the sound.
And then I had someone else do it in their apartment as my backup.
And the plants with the sound grew through time as much as the plants without the sound.
Wow!
Here's the part that's so fascinating.
So when I did my research,
And this,
You have to understand,
This was decades ago.
I hate to tell you how old I am,
But it was like in the late 60s.
So when I did my research,
I found that they had done some experiments in India,
And they found that sitar music and violin music were the best music or sound to make plants grow.
Do we know what part of the plant is responding to the sound,
Or?
Yes,
We do.
But back then,
We didn't.
Back then,
I surmised,
I told the judges that I thought the vibrations of the sound increased the flow of cytoplasm,
You know,
Make the plants,
Like our metabolism,
Frankly,
To make the plants grow.
And that sounded plausible,
Right?
But we really didn't know.
Okay,
Let's go forward a few decades.
This is the best part of the story.
And I'm sitting at my house,
You know,
Reading some article.
This is about 10 years ago or so.
And they said in the article that violin music has the same megahertz as birdsong.
And all of a sudden,
It hit me,
And I got chills up and down my body,
And I realized birdsong,
The sound of birdsong,
Makes plants grow.
And so,
And I will now tell you why.
See,
This is why I didn't want to let you know beforehand.
What they found out was that the vibrations open up the pores on the bottom of the leaf,
Which are called stomata.
And so,
The stomata open up with these high-frequency vibrations of birdsong,
And they then absorb more oxygen or more carbon dioxide.
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