by Steve Jones
His home county was in those days famous for hops. So fond was the British working man of his beer that Kentish fields were filled with poles and wires up which the bitter vines were trained. Each September tens of thousands of labourers and their families came from London to pick the crop and to have what, in Victoria’s glorious days, passed as a holiday. Climbing Plants asks a simple question. How does a hop find a support and climb up it?
To succeed, its shoots as they peep above the soil must seek out an upright of the right size even if they emerge some distance away. Then they must twine around it to clamber upwards. The talents of the hop were the introduction to a new world of botanical behaviour.
Most of the work was done with the help of Darwin’s son Francis. It was, as ever, interrupted by ill health: ‘The only approach to work which I can do is to look at tendrils & climbers, this does not distress my weakened Brain.’ Charles noted, first, that a pot plant in his sick-room circled round as it grew. He and Francis began to cultivate a variety of species beneath clear glass plates upon which the position of the tip could be marked with ink. They saw that the shoot of a young hop travels round all points of the compass. On a hot day a complete revolution took about two hours. Should the questing tip touch a pole, the hopeful climber then changed its behaviour, snaked around it and found its way to the top. What looked like forethought depended on just three simple talents: the ability to circle, a sense of touch and the capacity to tell up from down.
Father and son went on to study other plants that climb not just with their shoots, but with structures such as tendrils, hooks or adhesive roots. Whatever the details, almost all the climbers gyrated until they found a support and, once found, clambered away from the ground. The Darwins soon discovered that all shoots, even in species that do not climb, in fact circle to a greater or lesser degree. In the same way, all plants can modify their growth to avoid an obstacle, and all can sense gravity. A hop’s unusual powers depend - as do many patterns of animal behaviour - on natural selection’s ability to modify talents that already exist.
The second book, Movement in Plants, went further. It describes experiments on the sensitivity of roots, shoots and more to light, gravity, heat, moisture, chemicals, touch and damage. The research was far ahead of its time. Although they did not invent the name, father and son discovered the first hormone - not in animals (an event which had to wait for almost thirty years before scientists at University College London found a chemical messenger in the blood of dogs) but in plants. So impressed was Charles Darwin by the powers of shoots and radicles (the first structures to emerge from the seed at the time of germination) that his book ends with a dramatic claim: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.’
Any creature, animal or vegetable, needs, as it copes with the outside world, to find out what is going on, to pass the information to the appropriate place and to respond to the challenges presented by Nature. Men and women do the job with eyes, ears, nerves, brains and muscles. Plants have none of those, but cope remarkably well - and in some ways they put our own abilities to shame.
Why climb? Lord Chesterfield got it right. In one of his notorious letters of advice to his son he wrote that ‘A young man, be his merit what it will, can never raise himself; but must, like the ivy round the oak, twine himself round some man of great power and interest.’ A plant with such an ambition uses its support to reach a lofty place to which it could otherwise never aspire. The helper might come to regret its generosity, but the advantages from the social climber’s point of view are clear.
Such behaviour opens up a new universe of opportunity. The plants that first evolved flowers able to attract pollinators, and those that first developed fruits to persuade animals to move seeds, each discovered a whole new set of habitats and a variety of ways of life. As a result their descendants burst into a variety of form. The ability to climb is less dramatic than are fruits and flowers, but those who take it up have also evolved into a vast diversity of kinds. A hundred and thirty different families in the botanical world have climbers. Within each group, those agile creatures are represented by many more species than are their earthbound kin.
Birds, bats, flying squirrels, snakes and fish all take to the air but in different ways, with modified arms, hands, bodies or fins. In the same way, plants have called upon different organs to help them climb. Some, like hops or peas, use tendrils, based on stems or leaves. Others, such as clematis, have altered leaves in other ways, or evolved specialised roots or hooks that allow them to scramble. Roses have hooks. The ivy uses roots to clamber fifty metres and more up cliffs, houses or trees while Virginia creepers go to the opposite extreme and use shoots. In a certain group of ferns the fronds grow around the support to make their way towards the light.
The habit is ancient indeed. Three hundred million years ago, the Earth had vast coal swamps filled with fern-like trees fifteen metres high. The forest had plenty of vines and climbers, which used structures like those of modern plants to struggle into the sun. It became a tangled and impenetrable mass until at last the whole lot was wiped out as the climate changed.
Tropical forests are still the capital of the scramblers. There, every plant must fight to reach the sunshine against thousands of others. Many jungles are filled with lianas, woody vines that loop down from the trees. In most places they represent less than a tenth of the total mass of live material - but their tactics are so effective that their leaves fill half the canopy. Almost half of all woody species in the Amazon basin are climbers, with fifty or more different kinds in every hectare. They are fond of gaps, places left open when a moribund giant crashes to the ground or when farmers clear a space (which is bad news for the farmers themselves as they compete with the creepers to grow a crop). When forests - tropical or temperate - are broken up by loggers, the lianas and their relatives thrive even as the trees upon which they depend are destroyed.
Climbers climb, in the main, to get into the light. Another good reason to take up the habit is to escape, like a baboon pursued by a lion, from ground-based enemies. Leaves near the surface get chewed more by slugs, snails and the like than do those up in the air. In the arid deserts of northern Chile, convolvuli often grow near cacti or thorny shrubs. After an attack by hungry mice, or by scientists with scissors, they at once increase the rate at which they twine and put out more tendrils in the hope that they will reach a shrub and clamber into the safety of its spiny branches.
Darwin noticed that most twiners needed a rather slender pole if they were to make progress - British climbers, indeed, never curl around trees. The upright must also be rough enough to give them a chance to hold on. The climber does not cling with its whole length, but sets up a series of contact points as it moves onwards. Rather like a bloodhound, it sniffs the air now and again as it tracks its route. As it moves, the tip is raised, circles round and comes back to the stem a few centimetres further on. The details vary, with some tendrils set like a coiled spring to twist within seconds around a support as soon as they touch it. Engineers have worked out that for a smooth pillar the climber cannot manage to ascend a support more than about three times its own thickness - a twig, or a vertical wire. The rough bark of a tree makes the job rather easier. Part of the spiral motion as a hop moves on comes from an increase in the rate of growth on one side of the plant compared with the other. In addition, cell walls on that side become looser, bulge up and force the shoot to wind round and round. In time, a tendril can coil in upon itself and grow hard and woody, to lock its support in a fierce embrace.
In some species the young stems are rigid and grow upright without help for several metres - but once they touch a tree, they pounce. No longer do they need to invest in solid - and expensive
- wood. Instead they become thin and flexible and begin to clamber. Certain lianas grow a flexible stem to find the open air, but once they reach a sunny spot they generate huge trunks that swing downwards from the heights and find another plant to use as a support. That noxious North American the poison oak grows as a solid two-metre shrub when it stands alone, but extends ten times higher if it can find an upright. Many other kinds take advantage of a helper when they get a chance, but stand on their own feet (or roots) if they do not. In a tropical forest, young trees of species not often thought of as climbers grow slim and tall as they lean against their neighbours. If that choice is not available, they stand alone and take up an independent life.
In many climbers, some branches have small leaves and move in a wide circle in search of a new gap through which a shoot can insinuate itself. Those that sneak through and find the sun then grow larger leaves that soak up energy. As the stems spiral away from the ground, they develop wide vessels through which to suck up water and food. The liquid has to travel through a passage many metres long, which makes drinking expensive and forces the plant to reduce water loss with waxy leaves and impermeable stems.
A tree pays a high price for its parasites, for they suck water and minerals from the soil and shade their host from the sun. West African trees in the presence of lianas grow at no more than a fifth of the rate of their fellows. A few climbers can kill. The strangler fig, once it has reached the canopy, sends roots down from its eyrie. As they grow, the aerial roots wrap themselves around the supporter’s trunk, fuse together and squeeze it to death. The lethal tenant is left vertical and proud with its own roots in unencumbered soil. In other trees the benefactor crashes to the ground under the weight of its visitor, but by then the fellow-traveller has moved on in the canopy to bask in sunlight at a second tree’s expense.
Some plants twine clockwise and some anti-clockwise - as in the famous case of the right-handed honeysuckle and left-handed bindweed. A mutation called ‘lefty’ in a small mustard plant persuades the normally straight stem to spiral to the left, while another causes a bias in the opposite direction. Each changes the shape of a crucial protein in the cell skeleton. The molecule looks like a string of asymmetric dumb-bells, with each element lying together head to tail to form a helical and hollow cylinder. The mutations enlarge one or other end of the protein and deform the cylinder, which changes the pattern of cell division and causes its owner to twist. In an echo of the Flanders and Swann song, plants with a single copy of each mutation do indeed grow straight up (although they do not fall flat on their face). For reasons unknown, a bean that normally circles to the right increases its yield if forced to twist in the opposite direction.
Climbing plants are of interest to gardeners, to brewers and to wine-drinkers but for Darwin they were an introduction to a whole new range of botanical talents. Movement in Plants, his second volume on the topic, shows that leaves, root-tips, shoots and other parts of all species, climbers or not, are in constant motion. They respond to circumstances in much the same way as do animals. Plants might be slower, but they get there in the end.
The hop’s ability to climb is matched by the skills of every seedling as it emerges into a hostile world to fight for light, for water or for food. Movement contains a graphic description of what might appear to be the purposive actions made by a newborn plant in its first days. In the struggle to turn into the right position, to push its root into the soil and its shoot into the air, a seed as it germinated reminded Darwin of a man thrown on his hands and knees by a load of hay falling on him. ‘He would first endeavour to get his arched back upright, wriggling at the same time in all directions to free himself a little from the surround pressure … still wriggling, would then raise his arched back as high as he could. As soon as the man felt himself at all free, he would raise the upper part of his body, whilst still on his knees and still wriggling.’
To escape to safety the shoot and the root must each respond to light, to gravity, to touch or to other stimuli. We ourselves live in a universe of senses - of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and, the forgotten sense, position. Seedlings have no noses, tongues, fingers or ears, but they too perceive the outside world. Animals use electricity and chemicals to pass messages through the body - and so do plants. They have no muscles - but they grow to where they need to be, or move with the help of molecular machinery quite like that which drives our own limbs. As Darwin put it, ‘it is impossible not to be struck with the resemblance between the … movements of plants and many of the actions performed unconsciously by the lower animals … the most striking resemblance is the localisation of their sensitiveness, and the transmission of an influence from the excited part to another which consequently moves’.
Without eyes, ears or nerves, how can a plant know which way is up, what has touched it or whether the sky is blue or grey? Now, we have begun to find out.
Father and son identified two general kinds of activity - those in which just a response, and not its direction, is related to the external trigger and those that involve a move towards, or away from, an outside stimulus. Among the former, they noted that many plants open and close their flowers in sunlight and shade, or ‘go to sleep’ as they fold their leaves at night, perhaps to reduce the amount of heat lost by radiation. Some, like the mimosa, also responded to a sudden prod with a collapse of the leaves in an attempt to frighten off a hungry insect, or to expose an enemy to the thorns with which its branches are decorated. All those with sensitive leaves slept at night but plenty of the sleepers were quite indifferent to a poke.
For the mimosa and its fellows such actions come from a sudden loss of internal pressure in each frond, which spreads to the leaves next to that actually touched. Certain cells held in a bulge at the base of the leaf-stalk are crucial, for if they are rubbed or tickled they act as hinges and the leaf folds at once. They are more sensitive than are our own fingers. The hinges also control the response to darkness to light. Each has a long hair that acts as a lever and is embedded in a sensory cell. On a stimulus, the magnified movement at the base of each sets off a response in the hinge as charged molecules are pumped across its membrane. At once, water is lost, parts of the internal skeleton of the cell collapse and the leaf folds up. In time, the plant forces water back into the crucial structure and sets it ready to respond to the next challenge. The pattern of two opposed forces at work to close or to open the leaf is rather like our own arrangements, in which one muscle causes a limb to extend and another makes it flex.
Many flowers can tell the time and the ancients sometimes set the hour of prayer with a quick glance at the garden. The great classifier of life Linnaeus even designed a bed filled with blossoms that opened at different hours to make a crude botanical timepiece. The talents of many such species - such as the sunflowers that track the sun through the day - turn on no more than a direct response to outside stimuli. Mimosas have a more subtle sense of the hours, for when placed in constant darkness the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness persists. They have an internal biological clock, independent of light and dark. The plants undergo what Darwin referred to as ‘innate or constitutional changes, independent of any external agency’.
An internal timer, based on the build-up and breakdown of chemicals, maintains the daily rhythm. The clock is not precise and will wander away from strict time if kept in constant light or dark. Different species have internal timers with a cycle that varies from around twenty hours to about thirty. Dawn resets the mechanism, which hence keeps up with the shifts in hours of daylight as the seasons progress. The inner and the outer world interact, for in mimosas the leaves do not fold up at night unless they have been illuminated during the day.
Such movements have what might look like purpose, but they lack direction. Other botanical talents give the impression, almost, of having a definite goal in mind. A plant’s life is ruled by the sun, by water, by food and by predators. To survive, it must avoid its enemies and find its friends and, like an animal, hunt fo
r food, water, shelter and - most of all - sunlight.
The Darwins discovered that young shoots will grow towards even a dim light. That simple observation led them to their most significant result: the discovery of an internal chemical message - a hormone - that altered growth. It was the first of thousands of such chemicals now known.
Their experiment was simple but ingenious. A shoot of grass bent over towards the light. It did so, they found, only if the beam hit its topmost point from one side. If the very tip was covered, or the light was directed to a spot just below it, the shoot remained unmoved. In addition, when the plant was buried in sand with only the tip left in daylight and the rest in pitch blackness, the buried shoot grew towards the source of illumination although the rays never touched it. Short bursts of light had about the same effect as did a single longer glow and even very low levels did the job. The tip of the shoot, they realised, was sensitive to the sun’s rays and somehow the information on where it came from was passed (‘influence is transported’) to the stem below and persuaded it to alter its activity.
Years later, in 1913, came direct proof of a chemical messenger. The amputated tip of a stem was placed in daylight on a piece of soft sponge. The sponge soaked up the crucial substance as the scrap of tissue pumped it out and, when it was laid on to a cut stem whose own tip had been removed, the shoot at once altered its pattern of growth. The botanical envoy was named ‘auxin’ (after the Greek auxein, ‘to grow’). It was the first hormone.
For plants and animals alike, to learn about the world outside is not enough. To respond to the messages of opportunity or danger that pour in, information must be transmitted from the point of arrival to a body part that can respond to them. News about the outside world travels through an animal’s body through many routes. Nerves pass it on from cell to cell (and all cells, nerves or not, talk to their neighbours), while distant tissues communicate with the help of chemicals released into the bloodstream. Plants have no nerves, but they, too, pass instructions between cells through special channels that traverse their thick walls and allow the living parts to touch. Darwin’s hormone travels downwards from the shoot tip in that fashion and the channels in addition transfer proteins, nucleic acids, hormones and even viruses. Plants also have open vessels - but unlike our own bloodstream, liquid does not circulate but moves from roots towards shoots or leaves, whence it is lost by evaporation. As a result, any flow of information is one-way. The hormones that travel through the vessels include proteins and molecules that control cell division and cell death as well as others that control the decision to flower or to store food. Other signals tell the dark world beneath the soil when spring has come while yet more keep an eye on the balance between food and growth or send warnings about the arrival of an enemy.
