Psychology, as you will no doubt discover over the next year or two, is considered a broad church. This means that psychological methods can be applied to even the most unusual aspects of human (and plant) behaviour. A recent experiment at the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) gardens at Wisley provides us with an illustration of this point. Over 20 years ago, Prince Charles famously claimed that it was important to talk to plants, and that they responded by growing faster. There is some evidence to support this claim. In 2007, South Korean scientist Mi-Jeong Jeong played 14 different classical pieces to rice plants under laboratory conditions. He found that sounds at specific frequencies, between 125 Hz and 250 Hz, made the growth-promoting genes more active and the plants grew more. So to the Wisley experiment…
How do you test whether talking to plants makes them grow? The RHS invited people to audition to take part in the experiment. About 40 people did so, reading extracts from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. From these auditions, a variety of voices was selected. Each voice was played for a period of 1 month via an MP3 player and headphones attached to plant pots containing tomato plants. The conditions were otherwise the same for all the plants, and there were even two control plants that were left alone (i.e. not talked to).
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