You give the receptionist a hug. She opens the drawer where she keeps her snacks and offers you Butterbrezel. She tells you that as a child, she loved nature documentaries, watching animals fight in slow motion and plants grow in time-lapse. With titles such as The Secret Life of… or The incredible hidden world of…, they allowed her to eavesdrop on intimate moments and private conversations.

At some moment during the 60s, a plant reads the mind of Cleve Backster, a man who had built a career from working with polygraphs. His discoveries were rejected by the scientific community because they could not be replicated. However, people liked the idea of thinking and feeling plants, and in 1973 Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published the book “The Secret Life of Plants”, which later became a movie. It describes an organic network of communication stretching across the earth and out to, into, the universe, to the stars.

The movie is full of plant-loving hippies.