Different dialects affect plant growth

ESSEX, U.K. -- If you want your plants to thrive, talk to them in a Geordie accent – a nursery owner has claimed.

Chris Bonnett, who has a four acre nursery in Essex and his own online garden center spent the summer researching which accents plants respond best to.

Bonnett isolated groups of plants and let them listen to regional accents, including American, Australian, Scottish, Welsh and several British regional dialects, like Geordie, used by residents of the Tyneside area of Northeast England. The plants were played DVDs and CDs of regional soaps and pop stars to help reinforce the different dialects.

Each group was placed in a different area of the nursery near Colchester and staff took great pains to ensure the accents were never mixed up.

The Geordie plants growing almost 10 percent more than those in some other groups.

Bonnett said: “It’s long been thought that plants thrive if you talk to them so we decided to find out once and for all which dialects they respond to best.”

There were ten separate test groups, each consisting of a mix of around 100 different bedding plants.

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