Plants are so familiar to us that we don’t see them very well. We look at them and think about them according mostly to how we use them—for food and beauty. To shift our perspective, I’ll look at plants as if they were strangers from another planet, as plant-aliens. Making them weirder 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 grow their own solar panels.
• Plant-aliens follow a clock that is geared only to the sun light and the seasons. Small plants 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 them into shade.
• Unlike the many animals that cooperate so they can secure food, plant-alien food makers have little reason to be social. They don’t appear to react to each other at all as they seek out the sun. In fact, however, research is showing that their root systems commune with fungi about soil conditions and they share nutrients.
• 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 kind of pump. Animals, on the other hand, must all use small pumps just to keep fluids moving inside their fragile bodies.
• 

  Life below freezing
  (blendspace.com)

  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 a little kinky. An individual plant-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.*

Plants are so different from us and so impressive that it’s actually not too difficult to portray them as aliens. And after that exercise, it’s pleasant to see them again as our comfortable companions and allies. I wonder if they feel the same way about us.

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