Plants are so familiar to us that we don’t notice or appreciate some of their characteristics. We see them mostly according to how we use them—for food and beauty. For a fresher perspective, I’ll describe plants as strangers from another world, as aliens. Making them foreign may make them more vivid.

• Plant-aliens don’t eat anything. They make their own food. For that purpose they anchor themselves to a water source and then grow their own solar panels.
• Plant-aliens follow a clock that is geared to the sun light and the seasons. Small aliens push out leaves and flowers quickly in early spring so that they can catch maximum sunlight before the slower growing leaves on the trees above them plunge the smaller plants into shade.
• Unlike the many earthly animals that cooperate so they can secure food, plant-alien food makers don’t appear to be social. They don’t visibly react to each other at all. In fact, however, unbeknownst to most humans, their root systems and leaves communicate with neighboring plants to protect or to share resources.
• Many plant-aliens are giants. They tower over all animals.
• Through their sophisticated plumbing and evaporation mechanisms, tree-aliens pull water up long distances without using any visible pump. Most animals, in contrast,, must use small internal pumps to keep fluids moving through their bodies.

• 

  Somehow, plant-aliens survive sub-freezing temperatures that last for weeks or months. They get as cold as the frozen earth around them. Animals can’t survive if they get that cold; hibernating animals cling to a slow metabolism that keeps them above freezing.

• One process that plant-aliens do share with animals is sexual reproduction. Their equipment for doing so, however, is kinky. An individual alien may contain flowers with structures that are male or female or both or that change from one to the other.
• Plant-aliens breathe in carbon and exhale oxygen. Animals do the reverse.

Plants-aliens have successfully colonized the earth. They occupy the coldest and hottest zones, they outnumber animals and they are both larger and smaller than we are. And we animals are at their mercy for our food and oxygen.*

*With appreciation for David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants (1995)