Attendees of #W2D2017 received a plantable badge. 🙂 As Jenny W. said, the “intended metaphor is clear enough”. We all hope that the conference will have lasting and continuing effects on our profession.

Part of this post is to pass on some planting advice, but that got me thinking back to a fantastic project in Tuscany, Italy, the inception of which I was lucky enough to visit, on rendering signals emitted by the roots of an olive tree. Intrigued? Read on. This is translation as we have never known it…

Plant your badges and share the results

Full details on how to plant your conference badge and care for it as it grows can be found here. This set me thinking – as a bit of fun, how about we share photos of the results? Like the gnomes (think Amélie) or teddy bears going around the world, we could have #W2D2017 badges growing in interesting containers and various climes. What do you say?

The Seggiano olive tree project: Intelligent Roots

This Tuscan community heritage project in the village of Seggiano includes a number of elements or ‘stations’, of which the following is just one.

Inside a perfectly preserved and buried XIX century water cistern, the roots of an Olivastra seggianese olive tree, with its trunk and foliage out in the open on top of the cistern itself, were to be monitored through a complex system of sensors studied and developed by the LINV (International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology) in Florence. All the electrical impulses were then poetically translated into ever-changing writing, that can be interpreted as a musical score. (Benedetti, 2015)

Plants and intelligence

You may also enjoy this TEDTalk by Stefano Mancuso, the director of the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology.