Flora

What is the most intelligent plant?

Asparagus.

Why?

Because asparagus is the most monolithic of plants, with the loveliest fern lace in the world That shadowing lace helps keep its ground free of weeds, its immediate area phenomenally clear.

That doesn’t mean it has a mind.

No, no central brain. But maybe there’s mind in petals, stalks and flowers and—while we’re at this—just ordinary arboreal wood. Let’s mention trees.

A tree has bark for cellulose skin, foliage and fir that might do for hair; branches like arms, roots like feet, flowing sap resembling blood, stomata for breathing ambient air; capillary suction to pump up water; pods, cones, parasols in genital profusion. Isn’t it all elaborate, doesn’t it stun? And why not a sense, an over-all sense, a general, informing innate mind-in-matter, a totally sensate unified mood in any tree as a whole, there where it’s stood?

And take all the crops that became good fodder, multiplied by our most diligent tending—can’t we add that also as somewhat mind-bending? Who, exactly, is doing what to whom. Is it the man, at last, or is it the bloom? Who is superior to the other, giving or taking the relevant trouble? Which of the two is really more clever, who is the one who is thinking double, or treble?

And how about this: who figured out how to use the sun, the start of all life and everyone? You think photosynthesis was the work of fools? Nothing will outdo the grasses and trees, that trick they all had up their leaves.

All this begs the question of actual animal and sheer human brain power. Yes. But . . .

Moral: Life that doesn’t have an I.Q may wonderfully succeed or plain up

and down do.