Do Plants Get Bored?

Consider the spider plant on the shelf. It has been in the same eight inches of compost for six years. It has never been anywhere. If you or I stood in a corner for six years we would have opinions about it, and the question is whether the plant has any.

On the evidence, plants are busy. They track light and lean into it, tell day from night, count cold nights before flowering, and respond to being touched by growing differently. A vine reaches for a support it has not touched yet. That is not the behaviour of something switched off; it is a slow, purposeful life running at a speed we are too impatient to watch.

But boredom needs something plants seem not to have: an expectation of something else. To be bored you must hold a model of a better afternoon, compare it with this one, and feel the gap. There is nothing in a plant that keeps a spare afternoon to compare against. It is not waiting for the light to be more interesting; it is simply turning towards whatever light there is.

Which is either terribly sad or the most enviable thing in the room, depending on your week. The spider plant has been in that corner for six years, and every single morning it has done the one thing it likes doing, without once considering the alternative.