Plant stories we love

You talk to your plants, right?

You’re not the only one—48% of Americans do, according to a recent survey. We might have said a word or three to our stinky "three-headed" corpse flower when it bloomed in 2020…

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but to be fair, we live and breathe plants every day at the Chicago Botanic Garden. And we still love hearing stories about plants in pop culture.

Here are just a few of our favorites from 2022.

Chatting up your plants is in vogue

Of the people who talk to their plants, one in five say they do so every day, according to the survey by Trees.com. The plant talkers mostly chat with their houseplants, but 62 percent also talk to their garden flowers and other outdoor plants. Why? Because they believe the chatter helps plants grow, said 65 percent of the respondents.

Photo by Tyler Jones, Arabidopis plants sprouting from lunar soil. UF/IFAS.

Maybe Martian soil is next?

Soil is a big deal at the Garden. So we were thrilled to hear that, for the first time, University of Florida researchers grew plants in soil from the moon. The scientists used seeds from Arabidopsis thaliana—a small, flowering plant—in the lunar soil from NASA. Lunar soil, they noted, is radically different from soil on earth.

Once, at the Garden, we tried to grow plants in Martian “soil” that we made ourselves. Nothing happened. But, oh, the possibilities…

“Hello, pitcher plant. What’s for lunch?”

Carnivorous pitcher plants, like Nepenthes ‘Maria’ in our Tropical Greenhouse, are cool. Insects slide right down the plant’s slippery “pitcher,” which is filled with tissue-dissolving acids and the like.

This fall, biologists for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources opened up a native pitcher plant to show a group of elementary students what was inside. They got a surprise—insects, sure, along with...a lizard called a green anole. The lizard was probably chasing a bug on the plant and slipped. The department’s social media team didn’t miss a beat. “Make the plant posts meatier?” they wrote on Facebook. “We thought you said ‘meat eater…’ ”

Photo courtesy of Georgia DNR, Wildlife Resources Division

Who wore it best?

We love that the LEGO Group added a LEGO orchid to its Botanical Collection. The bark mix “made from LEGO elements” is a nice detail, along with the two “wandering air roots.” Our orchids have wayward aerial roots, too, but ours are stragglier, and we embrace the imperfection.

You be the judge: LEGO orchid—no watering or pesky replantings—or bloom from our Orchid Show?

Orchid Show bloom

A plant named…?

Plants are sometimes named after someone famous. At the Garden, we’ve had blooms including Clematis ‘Princess Diana’ and the Ingrid Bergman® hybrid tea rose (Rosa 'Poulman').