What do plants do all day

Plants are the foundation of many aspects of a liveable planet they provide food a stable climate, theybuild soils and provide many things we depend upon from fibres to timber, fuel and medicines

Even though we know this as as an abstract principle, we tend still not to act as if plants are truly fellow living earthlings.

The problem is that  people are simply not wired to  see  that plants  are active and working every day – to us they look so  passive. In fact they look like lazy buggers

Yet underneath their quiet appearance plants are furiously busy– even in the winter. I believe it helps to reflect on exactly how they are helping us - gradually this broadens our perspectives we move beyond seeing them as decorations or green furnitutre (infrastructure in policy speak) and we may start to see them as truly alive fellow earthlings

Let me tell you a little of what they do all day:

The obvious bit to begin with - photosynthesis

Plants, fungi and bacteria are the best chemists on the earth – they make ICI look like a basement meth lab.

Plants eat light and carbon dioxide mixed with a sprinkling of other nutrients, from these building blocks they make an astonishing world of  colour sounds and scents

It goes a little like this

First take two molecules of carbon dioxide and two molecules of water – use the energy of the sun to split them and spit some of  the oxygen out (useful for people and other animals) – then stick the remaining carbon hydrogen and oxygen together to make  carbohydrates – sugars starches, lignins, pizzas or whatever you need at the time.

By adding  a little nitrogen,phosphorus and sulphur  – they  ask the bacteria and fungi to pick those up and give them to the roots  –  they can move on to making proteins and enzymes.

Plants are energy catchers and distributers

Plants are exquisitely evolved to capture and transform solar energy

That big  yellow thing in the sky is not so benign in fact it constantly transmits the energy of hundreds  of atomic bombs.  Without the atmosphere plants and water to protect us we would soon  be vaporized

Plants absorb  this energy and convert much of it to chemical energy in the carbohydrates  they make.

So maybe a tube of pringles contains the energy of 0.01 atomic bombs – no wonder those jeans feel tight now!

Some of this stored  energy they keep for themselves but mostly they distribute it as food – including by pumping sugars underground for the creatures of the root zone and deep soil. Although they may never see the sun rise these underworld beings  depend on its daily cycle as much as we do

We can think of this chemical energy flowing into  the biosphere as like a giant living battery that powers everything that happens everywhere until it is time for a top up and the cycle  to turn again.

Sometimes this chemical  energy I s deposited as nodules of  of carbon rich matter that after a long time and further changes can form fossil deposits that are ultimately the sources of  coal oil or gas  - long term resource   or long term trouble depending on what we do with it.

Plants are fabricators

Plants use some of this energy to make things we need, oh and for the pollinators obvs,  the bees, the hover flies, the moths, the ants, the hummingbirds, and also for the plant eaters  the kangaroos, the beavers and the  dugongs, the dalai’s llamas, not so much the cats although a hit of ‘nip’ is sometimes welcome.

Food,timber  medicine fibres and tequila  are some of the many things they make for us

Plants are water catchers and rain makers

Every patch of plants is like an installation  of rain chains with sponge gardens underneath –

They catch slow and sink the rain, reducing floods and droughts

Also the  bacteria and chemicals released from their leaves helps water vapour  condense into droplets big enough to be visible as  clouds that  bring the rain again – gentle rain this time.

This flow of water from plants to clouds also drives the biotic pumps and aerial rivers – perhaps a story for another time?

Added to  all of this, plants are pumps – three types of pumps to be precise

1Plants are carbon pumps

Running in parallel with the chemistry and water capture much of the energy that plans capture  is used for pumping.

Plants are pumps – they pump carbohydrates full of chemical energy underground to build the soils and feed the fungi and bacteria, ants dwarves or other things that live beneath us – since these carbohydrates are often dissolved sugars in root exudates this is called the liquid carbon cycle – it creates a vast distributed energy store that can power  the underworld  through the winter.

Plants are also water pumps

Through the tiny stomata on their leaves plants pump out water vapour which is a gas – the loss of water through leaves is called transpiration which can be seen as similar to how   sweating water cools us down too. Like us plants would die faster from overheating than from not eating, just like us they place cooling above eating in their survival strategies

Just as in a boiling kettle the change of state from liquid water to gas during transpiration needs energy. The plants take  what is called latent heat from their environment to do this. As the draw on this latent heat it cools them down and cools the environment around them. As much as 80% of solar energy is used to power transpiration alone – it is probably the most important cooling system for the planet.

The transpired vapour rises and condenses into droplets again thanks to condensation ‘ nuclei’ bacteria or chemicals released from leaves that helps the water molecules come together again as liquid droplets that form clouds and returns as rain eventually

Only when the vapour forms a droplet does it become visible once more – as a result we see clouds and a vital step in the water cycle is completed

At this point the energy that turned liquid to vapour is released and escapes to space where we need it to go.

Of all of the water taken up by the plants –only a tiny amount is used to make carbohydrates, flow the sap and keep the plants upright; pretty much all of the remaing water is needed for cooling, which is the main reason they transpire

As a result plants are also tiny heat pumps

Look up water cycle in any geography book and you will see a picture of water movement from seas to clouds to rain over mountains to rivers back to seas. This is the large water cycle that keeps our supply of fresh water running.

Alongside there are also thousands and millions of ‘small water cycles that flow from  soil to leaf to vapour to clouds and back as rain fog or dew. Research tells us that something like 40% of the water we rely on comes through small local water cycles rather than the ocean.

The water is not  ‘consumed’ by cycling, it just flows around and returns

Crucially each turn of the small cycle – countless  thousands of tiny  cycles every day  is cooling, so the more cycles we have the cooler we are

Plants work in this way very similar to heat pumps and refrigerators, these also  cycle gas to liquid time and again and in the process put the heat where it is least harmful and makes things   cooler where we need it.

More plants mean more leaves that mean more useful shit, more biodiversity ,  better soils, more fresh water, and fewer floods and droughts, and cooler environments too

I said that they are lazy buggers!