Nexus - 0217 - New Times Magazine-pages

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and his morning glories, purple, blue, white, red, and pink, as enveloping his house from its foundation to its roof eaves, quoted Carlson as foreseeing a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk world with gigantic flora capable of feeding multitudes while their stomata increased the Earth's supply of life-giving oxygen. Though he did not inform the reporter that the multicoloured, old-fashioned trumpet-shaped morning glories had come from an ancient seed packet found by one of his mother's friends when she was cleaning out her attic, it did occur to Carlson that if Luther Burbank could coax a spiny cactus into losing its thorns, not through crossbreeding but by informing the plant that it no longer needed them because he would ‘protect it’, he too might get his climbing plants to adapt to human desires. "I subscribed to Burbank's idea,” Carlson told us, "that at the highest level, plants are capable of creating what is in the mind of man as a means of assuring their survival into future generations. I did not discount the many stories about tees which had borne no flowers or fruits for years, suddenly blossoming and bearing when threatened with an axe or a chain saw.” One spring, as he collected the seeds from his morning glories for successive annual planting, Carlson and his twelve-year-old daughter, Justine, meditated on how to get the vines to respond to their lovingly felt desires by focusing on their favourite hues, pur- ple for Dan, pink for Justine. “We believed," said Carlson, "that the plants might respond to the colours we favoured and draw clos- er to us as we were mentally and emotionally drawing closer to them." By late summer when the vines were putting out the usual mixed spectrum of blooms over most of Dan's house, he found massed all around his daughter's bedroom window nothing but pink flowers and around his own bedroom window only purple ones. "This confirmed to me," he said, "that we can, in some still undefined way, communicate with plant life, which is even capable of altering the colours of flowers and the shapes of leaves. It must somehow be based on trust. The plants must feel your intent and realise that if they respond you'll save their sceds to assure their flourishing continuance." Even more intriguing was Carlson's belief that his method would allow him to determine the very likes and dislikes of plants. By exposing them to a varied menu of nutrients hitherto unavailable to them, he aimed, through their reactions, to find out which selec- tions they might prefer, instead of just forcing them, like human babies plied with distasteful turnips or liver, to accept what their parents believed, usually mistakenly, to be good for them. This he hoped might ultimately lead to the elimination of defi- ciencies resulting in bad-tasting fruit or vegetables, the eradication of plant disease, and even, with their exposure to spice-laden aerosols such as mint, cinnamon, or nutmeg, the creation of apples with mint, cinnamon; or other flavours, right on the tree instead of in the pie. "What I began to realise," said Carlson, "was that my method was challenging the seeds’ potential, a potential maximised with the right number of Sonic Bloom sprays—which have tured out to be five—put on two weeks apart." Striking a massive fist on the table for emphasis, he added: "I believe I've come across a new principle that can be called indeterminate growth! It shatters the idea that plants are genetically limited to a given particular size or yield." This belief in a lack of limitation led Carlson to another princi- ple: geometric progression. We began regularly to discover that plants treated during one growing season would pass along what- ever changes were taking place in them, and create, right through their seeds, a successive generation 50 per cent larger and more fruitful, even when the newly generating plants remained untreated with Sonic Bloom. I also call this genetic elasticity, the latent abil- ity of plants to exhibit characteristics hidden in their gene pools, 26¢NEXUS Continued on page 75 ' — ~ DECEMBER '93 - JANUARY '94