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There’s a good chance you’re familiar with Frankenstein’s monster. But have you heard about his garden?

Around the time the scientist who inspired Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was busy electrocuting live animals and dead prisoners, several of his contemporaries were doing the same to perennials and root vegetables. And just as these 18th Century forays into electrical stimulation purported to make the human body more robust (by delivering it from maladies ranging from paralysis and depression to diarrhoea and venereal disease), they were also being investigated for the betterment of plant life. Experiments on electrified gardens were alleged to produce a range of benefits, from brighter flowers to tastier fruit. Before long, this pursuit went the way of its cousin, medical electro-quackery, and by the end of the 19th Century, respectable science had largely jettisoned both.

More than a century on, better tools and new insights are reanimating the study of electricity’s effects on biology. Uninformed early animal experiments have resolved over the past 200 years into real understanding – and led to promising electrical medicine. Similarly, the old vegetable experiments are being exhumed to see what modern fruit they may yield. Maybe the new understanding could even improve 21st Century gardens.

The first hints that electric shocks might have a dramatic impact on crops came not from any human intervention but from nature itself. After a lightning storm, according to longstanding Japanese farming lore, mushrooms would proliferate madly.

But you couldn’t exactly call down lightning on demand to confirm this experimentally. Until, that is, the 1740s when various new devices allowed scientists to store and deploy this still-mysterious phenomena of “electricity” at will for the first time. 

Soon deploying electricity as a gardening aid became a hot topic. Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare – a French physicist and philosopher who experimented widely on the still poorly understood mysteries of electricity – curated many of his contemporaries’ plant experiments into a collection, De L’électricité des Végétaux.

Alongside the brighter blossoms, flowers were alleged to bloom earlier after electrification; similarly, electrifying fruit reportedly hastened the ripeness of their smell and taste. But Bertholon’s main focus was on the new device he had invented: instead of zapping individual fruits and vegetables one by one, the huge contraption could infuse electricity into entire garden plots. It electrified the very soil and air that nurtured the growing plants – as if it was an electrical “manure”.

The electro-vegeto-meter

The elevated system of masts and wiring Bertholon had rigged up collected atmospheric electricity, drew it down, and distributed it into his crops. According to him, it mimicked the stimulating effects of lightning. Only it did the job better than the natural variety, dispensing small, continuous amounts of electricity rather than dosing with a single, damaging strike. The “electro-vegeto-meter”, he reported, increased the growth of the plants beneath its arc, accelerating “the germination, the growth, and production of leaves, flowers, fruit, and their multiplication”.

Bertholon also made copious use of electricity in other forms, reportedly dispatching insect pests by using a rudimentary tool to zap an infested tree. His contemporaries had many other colourful uses for electricity in their gardens – one set out plans to irrigate his plants with a special water that he claimed, rather dubiously, had been “impregnated with electrical fluid” to replace traditional approaches to fertiliser.

Not everyone was convinced. Things went badly after Jan Ingenhousz, the Dutch-British physiologist who discovered photosynthesis, availed himself of an electro-vegeto-meter of his own to use on his garden – and it promptly shrivelled up all his plants. He concluded that Bertholon’s electrical manure was, well, manure.

Interest in electroculture waned. A few private gentleman scientist types continued to run small experiments: in the 1830s, one  claimed his experiments demonstrated that plants are excellent conductors, implying that electricity was a fundamental aspect of their biology. But neither the science nor tools were sufficiently advanced to support such claims. After that, apart from a few niche projects, the idea of electroculture swiftly fell out of favour among the electrorati.

“We cannot avoid asking ourselves,” wrote two critics in a plaintive 1918 paper, looking back on the fall of the events, “how it is that while the study of electricity and its many industrial applications has developed into enormous importance, electroculture in the meantime has remained practically stationary for a century and a half.” They concluded: “We probably find the answer in the stagnation of the science of the living plant.”

In other words, to improve electroculture you’d first have to understand how it might work, and to understand that, one would need to understand the electrical dimensions of plant biology. Luckily, by the time the duo voiced their complaint, the first slim shoots of exactly such an endeavour were already poking through the frost. Interest in vegetation and electricity had been reanimated by none other than Charles Darwin.

Darwin‘s carnivorous vegetables

His grandfather had been convinced that electricity could hasten the growth of plants – but Charles Darwin’s contention was built on more solid scientific ground. He believed electricity to be a fundamental aspect of plant physiology, the same way the neurophysiologists of the 19th Century were starting to show how electric signals are the fundamental underpinning of the human nervous system signals that let us to think and feel and move.

Darwin’s obsession had started small, with a single meat-eating plant in the genus Drosera, otherwise known as the sundews. Barely a year after the publication of On the Origin of the Species, it was all he could think about. “At the present moment, I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world,” he wrote in 1860. Little wonder. Drosera did everything plants aren’t supposed to – it ate meat, and it hunted. Its long, sticky tentacles trapped flies on glue-like secretions and then curled inexorably around the unfortunate prey until it was wrapped up like a macabre Swiss roll.