📮 Chloro-Com’ (EN) #4 — Reading Trees, Hearing Plants
What if communication began with alignment before explanation?
🌍 Disponible en : (FR) version Française
A few days ago, a post on LinkedIn stopped me in my tracks.
It described a simple initiative: giving names to city trees — not to “make things pretty”, but to offer residents a chance to recognize them, to read them, maybe even to begin a quiet dialogue.
A gentle gesture.
A clear intention.
And yet, beneath the post, the same question kept appearing:
“Will people really take the time to read those names?”
That question wasn’t cynical.
It revealed something deeper:
our growing difficulty in hearing a language that isn’t our own.
We assume the problem lies in the name — too Latin, too long, too complicated.
But that’s never the real issue.
This isn’t about nomenclature.
It’s about attention.
Learning to read, before learning to name
A tree didn’t wait for us to baptize it to exist.
It didn’t need a label to become legible.
It was already speaking — in its own way:
through electrical gradients, tiny shifts in turgor, chemical signals, slow but precise adjustments.
A language far from our alphabets, yet no less real.
And this is where everything turns.
We still think that “communicating” means producing words.
Plants communicate by adjusting.
They say:
“I am here.”
“Something is changing.”
“Here is what I need.”
With economy.
With accuracy.
Without ever raising their voice.
When the living becomes audible
This idea reminded me of two recent experiences — very different, yet deeply connected.
First, an artistic installation where the electrical activity of a plant (a peace lily) is translated into sound and moving images:
a plant becoming music, an invisible flux turning into motion, a vegetal sensitivity made visible.1
Then, a project reported by Numerama:
British engineers and artists created a device where the bio-electrical signals of plants and fungi trigger bionic arms tapping on the keys of a synthesizer.
Each key produces a sound.
Each electrical variation becomes a musical pulse.2
In both cases, nothing is “added” to the plant.
We simply make audible what was already there.
If you want to follow that thread, I left a short fragment here: 👉 → The Language of Plants
A very brief, very simple spark — but one that says exactly this:
when we slow down, something begins to speak.
Two logics intersecting
Watching these initiatives — naming trees, translating electrical signals, turning the living into movement or music — something becomes clear:
➡️ We try to create connection through language.
➡️ Plants create connection through coherence.
We arrange words.
They align their processes.
We try to convince.
They adjust.
A plant never explains itself:
it responds, it attunes, it synchronizes with what surrounds it.
And maybe, for us too, the most honest form of communication begins here:
in alignment, before explanation.
What this changes for us
This isn’t a call to “talk to trees”.
It’s an invitation to recover an attention capable of hearing what isn’t verbal.
Because before words, there is:
alignment,
intention,
clarity,
presence.
Plants practice this naturally.
We do not — or not anymore.
And maybe our relationship with the living world can teach us what communication meant before it became a performance.
A simple movement:
becoming coherent before trying to convince.
That’s the thread I’m exploring in my notebooks:
How do we build human communication inspired by the way plants already communicate?
Less noise.
More accuracy.
Less emission.
More perception.
Less anxiety.
More life.
I’ll come back to this.
There’s a seed opening there — slowly, but surely.
hank you for being here.
In this reading where each word tries only to help you hear what is growing — around you, and sometimes within you.
See you soon,
Franz | 1erCopyVegetal 🌿
words that take root