“I have to go home and yell at my beans,” said Matthew.

“Huh? What beans?” I asked this Boy Scout.

“It’s my science project,” he continued, explaining his experiment.

That year, there was a new theory was about communication between plants and humans. Matt had already played music to his potted beans. Did they like classical tunes? No, he said. Rock and roll?

“That made them nervous! But they did like schmaltzy music,” he added.

In his current experiment, he spoke gently to one group of planted bean seeds, and they were growing well. Another pot was not so healthy: those beans were the ones Matthew yelled at and scolded every night.

Sadly, we moved before the trials were over and I never got the end of the story.

That project was not the last of such testing. For centuries, people have pondered whether plants think or react to human actions or perceptions. Most often, amateurs will think up new qualities for beautiful flowers or ferns.

Think about Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in Act 4: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance ... there are pansies, they’re for thoughts.” He was echoing something he’d learned about the language of flowers.

Shakespeare wasn’t the first to perceive character in flowers.

Before him and after him, and continuing today, people have made lists of flowering plants and given certain traits to each. A favorite pastime used to be dialogs made up of gifts of specific flowers. From one such collection, a swain might give a dandelion, standing for “coquetry.”

The damsel might reply by handing him a white rosebud, meaning she was “too young to love.” Crestfallen, he might cut off a yellow rose, which would indicate that then, “We will be strangers.”

Either gardeners had memorized one of these flower codes or they would need to carry around with notebooks with a lot of translations. Have you come across some of these floral interpretations?

Or have you interpreted the plants in your garden in a different way?