Before Kampermpool could start breeding The Plant, he first had to find it. Ask him where it came from and he quickly gets coy, simultaneously jabbing a stubby little thumb at the green hills over his shoulder, pointing vaguely at some trees on the other side of the road, and nodding his head toward Laos in the north, all the while muttering quietly to himself.
When he was a young man, Kampermpool carefully states, considering every word to be sure of giving nothing away, the elders of the hill tribes scattered to the north would talk about a species of plant that danced. They used the dancing plants, he says, high in the mountains, in the jungle villages and the border towns, to make tea.
It was 1976. Kampermpool began to search for the plant. "I hired people to check for me," he says. "I found one in Yunnan, in China, but the leaves are bigger; they have some near Kanchanaburi, near Burma, but nobody pays attention -- it looks like a weed."
And it does look like a weed. A couple of sprigs of Kampermpool's plant would not look entirely out of place atop a salad. Neither would it attract attention sprouting from between two paving slabs. If a trusted friend told you it was bok choy, you would not question it.
Eventually, says Kampermpool, crouching suddenly behind a thick clump of orchids and hunching his shoulders, his hired workers found a dancing species growing deep in the jungle. Kampermpool shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, leans forward, and whispers from behind his hand. "Shhhhhhhh," he says. He is no longer standing in his nursery with the morning sun slanting through the clouds: Dr. Pradit Kampermpool is back in the jungle.
"So I'm watching," he whispers, parting imaginary foliage and squinting through the years, past the rows of orchids and the bales of barbed wire, to an imaginary clearing. "Hmmm..." he says softly. "Well, the leaves are similar." He pauses for effect. "Then it moved a little bit!" he shouts, flinging his arms in the air and jumping backward.
It was 1991. The search for the dancing plant was over. It had taken 15 years. "This plant nearly disappeared from the world," Kampermpool says, "so I dug it up."
It is a simple statement. Kampermpool is not trying to be literal, but that is exactly what he did. He dug it up. He took a shovel deep into the jungle, dug up the plant, shook the dirt from its roots, brought it back here and carefully planted it in the trough filled with dark, wet soil that sits at the shady end of his nursery. It has remained there ever since, its roots probing the rich mulch that Kampermpool regularly shovels on and gently pats down. Finally, the complex breeding programs, the 24-hour nurturing -- the watering, fertilizing, measuring, sampling, pruning, trimming -- the crossbreeding, the biopsies, the singing, the coaxing, the watching, the constant monitoring, could begin. First he bred the plant, and then he bred it again -- second generation, my friend, OK? -- and then later still, he crossbred it with a Chinese species of gyrant to create a hybrid. Slowly, over the years, the plant became The Plant.
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On Oct. 31, 1873, Charles Darwin wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, "Now I want to tell you, for my own pleasure, about the movements of Desmodium [gyrans] ... The little leaflets never go to sleep, and this seems to me very odd; they are at their games of play as late as 11 o'clock at night and probably later."
Darwin was the author of "The Origin of Species," published in 1859. Hooker, his friend and confidant, was the director of England's Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, a repository for thousands of plant species collected from all over the world. On June 10, 1850, Hooker collected a specimen from Sikkim, a northeast Indian state that sits snugly in the Himalayan foothills, with Nepal a few miles to the west, Bhutan to the east, and China stretching out to the north; on June 30, 1850, he collected another sample from Khasia, in Meghalaya state, southeast of Sikkim. Hooker sent the specimens back to Kew.
Darwin began studying Desmodium gyrans -- or Hedysarum, as he sometimes called it -- and the movements of its little leaflets as early as 1855, after borrowing one of Hooker's specimens. "I do hope it is not very precious," Darwin wrote, thanking Hooker for the loan, "for, as I told you, it is for probably a most foolish purpose. I read somewhere that no plant closes its leaves so promptly in darkness, and I want to cover it up daily for half an hour, and see if I can teach it to close by itself." More than 20 years later, Darwin was still trying.
If the pointed little leaves of his borrowed specimen twitched to sounds as Kampermpool's do, Darwin never noticed it, or if he did, he never mentioned it. And if he sang to his specimen as Kampermpool does, bending close and whispering into its bushy leaves, crooning softly, gently wheedling, cajoling, and coaxing it to move, he never mentioned that either.
"I am working away as hard as I can at all the multifarious kinds of movements of plants," he wrote to German researcher Fritz Muller on July 24, 1878, "and am trying to reduce them to some simple rules, but whether I shall succeed I do not know."
Characteristically, Darwin did succeed. Two years later, a book-length monograph titled "The Power of Movement in Plants" was published. It was the last book published during Darwin's lifetime, representing more than two decades of research on moving plant species. During that time he performed round after round of experiments, measuring the movements of the leaves in all conditions, depriving the plants of light and nutrients, syringing water onto the leaves to simulate rainfall, subjecting them to extreme temperatures, and removing slices from the plants.
Darwin's Desmodium gyrans specimen moved when he syringed water onto the leaves. As the water landed on its pointed little leaflets, it set the plant twitching, and Darwin measured the movements. He wrote again to Muller in April 1881, and concluded that the movements were designed "to shoot off the drops of water."
"If you are caught in heavy rain," he continued, "I should be very much obliged if you would keep this notion in your mind, and look to the position of such leaves."
Still, Darwin was not finished with the plant. Long before it became The Plant -- more than a century before it was discovered in the jungle and transported to Kampermpool's nursery in Udon Thani -- Desmodium gyrans had a hold over Darwin that was almost as strong as the one it now has over Kampermpool. On April 16, 1881, a year after the publication of "The Power of Movement in Plants," Darwin dispatched a note to his friend Lord Avebury. The first line reads, "Will you be so kind as to send and lend me the Desmodium gyrans by the bearer who brings this note."
Once again, he was requesting a specimen; but Darwin never finished his research on Desmodium gyrans. He died a year later, on April 19, 1882. He was buried next to Sir Isaac Newton, beneath a flagstone in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey, and any theories he had secretly harbored about the plant were buried with him.
Kampermpool will eagerly tell you there's an important difference between the plant Darwin studied more than a century ago and the specimen growing in the Udon Thani nursery.
"It's a dancing plant!" he will predictably insist.
"This plant is a dancing plant!"
That, Kampermpool will proudly state, is the difference. It dances. Indisputably, Darwin's plant moved and, Darwin believed, the movements shook water droplets from its leaves following a heavy rainfall. But Kampermpool's plant -- The Plant -- responds to music -- to music! -- and Kampermpool has actively encouraged this behavior for more than a decade by selectively breeding and crossbreeding the young plants that respond most enthusiastically to his singing.
Next page: Does it really dance? Or does brewing it as tea make you dance?