Mimosa pudica (a new “sacred” plant)

Mimosa pudica most definitely has become an important performer in pioneering research on plant-memory.  

Monica Gagliano considers this species “a strange and extraordinary bridge between two kingdoms of life—the animal and the vegetal, the sensitive and the insensitive.” 

After a series of rigorous scientific tests conducted in Italy in collaboration with Stefano Mancuso, she concluded that the Mimosa pudica plants “had the faculty of memory, and their behavior was not hard-wired in DNA, but learned.”

Gagliano says that Mimosa pudica gave her “a sense of elated wonder inspired by something sublime, something magnificent that engenders a deep reverence for life.”

In Brilliant Green (2015), Stefano Mancuso, an authority in the emerging field of plant neurobiology, maintains the following about Mimosa pudica: “What’s important is the fact that this plant not only has an extremely developed sense of touch, but can distinguish among different stimuli and even change its behavior, no longer remaining closed once it learns that a stimulus isn’t dangerous.” 

Mancuso gives Mimosa pudica even more attention in The Revolutionary Genius of Plants (2017), considering it “a true botanical star.” 

To make the slides for the confocal microscope, we were fortunate to have access (here at home where I live in upstate New York) to an absolutely perfect flowering specimen of this plant, whose common names include dormilona and Touch-Me-Not.