Diane Ackerman on the natural world, the world of human endeavor and connections between the two.

IT was only a matter of time. Plants have begun texting for help. Thanks to clever new digital devices, a dry philodendron, undernourished hibiscus, or sadly neglected wandering Jew can send its owner a text or Twitter message. Humans like to feel appreciated, so a begonia may also send a simple “Thank-you” text — when it’s happy, as gardeners like to say, meaning healthy and well-tended. Picture your Boston fern home alone placing Botanicalls. But why should potted plants be the only ones to reassure their humans? Another company has found a way for crops to send text messages in unison, letting their farmer know if she’s doing a good enough job to deserve a robust harvest. What is the sound of one hand of bananas clapping? Probes monitoring the soil can send a range of prerecorded messages specific to each plant’s needs.

Ping Zhu

Plants texting humans may be new, but malcontent plants have always been chatting among themselves. When an elm tree is being attacked by insects, it does the chemical equivalent of broadcasting “I’m hurt! You could be next!” alerting others in its grove to whip up some dandy poisons.

If a human kills with poison, we label it a wicked and premeditated crime, one no plea of “self-defense” can excuse. But plants dish out their nastiest potions every day, and we wholeheartedly forgive them. They may lack minds, or even brains, but they do react to injury, fight to survive, act purposefully, enslave giants (through the likes of coffee, tobacco, opium), and gab endlessly among themselves.

Strawberry, bracken, clover, reeds, bamboo, ground elder and lots more all grow their own social networks — delicate runners (really horizontal stems) linking a grove of individuals. If a caterpillar chews on a white clover leaf, the message races through the colony, which ramps up its chemical weaponry. Stress a walnut tree and it will brew its own caustic aspirin and warn its relatives to do the same. Remember Molly Ivins’s needle-witted quip about a Texas Congressman: “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day”? She clearly misjudged the acumen of plants. Plants are not mild-mannered. Some can be murderous, manipulative, seductive, deceitful, venomous, unscrupulous, sophisticated and downright barbaric.

Since they can’t run after a mate, they go to phenomenal lengths to con animals into performing sex for them, using a vaudeville trunk full of costumes. For instance, some orchids disguise themselves as the sex organs of female bees so that male bees will try to mate with them and leave wearing pollen pantaloons. Since they can’t run from danger, they devise a pharmacopeia of poisons and an arsenal of simple weapons: hideous killers like strychnine and atropine; ghoulish blisterers like poison ivy and poison sumac; slashers like holly and thistle waving scalpel-sharp spines. Blackberries and roses wield belts of curved thorns. Each hair of a stinging nettle brandishes a tiny syringe full of formic acid and histamine to make us itch or run.

Just in case you’re tempted to rush home and cuddle your passionflower — resist the urge. Passionflowers release cyanide if their cell walls are broken by a biting insect or a fumbling human. Of course, because nature is often an arms race, leaf-eating caterpillars have evolved an immunity to cyanide. Not us, alas. People die every year from accidentally ingesting passionflower, daffodils, yew, autumn crocuses, monkshood, foxglove, oleander and the like. And one controversial theory about the Salem witch trials is that the whole shameful drama owes its origin to an especially wet winter when the rye crop was infected with ergot, an LSD-like hallucinogen that caused girls to act bewitched.

Devious and dangerous as plants can be, they adorn every facet of our lives, from courtship to burial. They fill our rooms with piquant scents, dazzling tableaus and gravity-defying aerial ballets as they unfold petals and climb toward the sun. Think of them as the original Cirque du Soleil. And many an African violet has given a human shrinking violet a much needed inter-kingdom friendship. But they do demand looking after. And we love our social networks. So I expect texting will sweep the plant world, showering us with polite thank-you’s and rude complaints. What’s next, a wisteria sexting every time it’s probed by a hummingbird? A bed of zinnias ranting as they go to seed?

Surely some playful wordsmiths need to dream up spirited texts for the botanicalling plants to send, telegrams of fulsome fawning or sarcastic taunt. Maybe a little soft soap: “You grow, girl! Thanks for the T.L.C.” Or think how potent it would be, in the middle of a dinner date, to receive a text from your disgruntled poinsettia that reads: “With fronds like you, who needs anemones?!”

A version of this article appeared in print on Nov. 13, 2011.