CHAPTER ONE

The Question in the Garden

Somewhere tonight a gardener is winding copper wire around a wooden dowel. She saw a video. In it, a tomato plant beside a copper spiral stood a foot taller than its neighbor, and a confident voice explained that this was electroculture: an ancient, free, suppressed way of feeding plants with the energy of the sky. No fertilizer. No pesticide. Just wire, wood, and the atmosphere.

She will push the dowel into her raised bed and wait. And whether or not her tomatoes do better this year, she has joined one of the longest-running experiments in the history of agriculture, an experiment that began almost three centuries ago, drew in clergymen, physicists, a knight of the realm and at least three governments, and has never quite been finished.

This book is about that experiment. It asks the four questions every curious gardener eventually asks. When did electroculture start? Who started it, and why? Has it been hidden? And the one that matters most at planting time: does it work?

Three things wearing one name

Most arguments about electroculture go wrong in the first sentence, because the word covers three different things. Keeping them apart is the most useful habit this book can give you.

• Powered electroculture. A machine or power supply creates a strong electric field over the crop, usually from a network of thin wires overhead charged to tens of thousands of volts, or drives a small current through the soil or growing medium. This is what Lemström, Lodge, Blackman, the British government and modern Chinese greenhouses did. It uses real, measured, supplied electricity.
• Galvanic electroculture. Two different metals, classically copper and zinc, are buried in moist soil and joined by a wire. The soil acts as the electrolyte of a weak battery, and a small real current flows. This is the “earth battery” of the 1840s.
• Passive electroculture. A mast, coil, pyramid or spiral, connected to no power source at all, is said to “harvest” atmospheric electricity or other energies and deliver them to the plants. This is Bertholon’s device of 1783, Christofleau’s apparatus of the 1920s, and the copper coil of today’s social media.

These three have different physics, different histories and, as we will see, very different evidence behind them. A study showing that fifty thousand volts over a greenhouse raises lettuce yields tells you nothing about a coil on a stick. Nearly every overheated claim about electroculture, for it or against it, comes from taking evidence about one kind and spending it on another.

What kind of book this is

I am a minister, not a physicist, and I came to this subject the way most people do: because someone I trust told me it worked, and someone else I trust told me it was nonsense. I have tried to do what Scripture tells us to do with any claim: “prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, ASV).

So this book makes you three promises. Where the historical record is solid, I will tell you what it says. Where a claim rests on one man’s word or on a story repeated without a source, I will say so. And where the honest answer is “nobody knows yet,” I will not dress it up as anything else.

That means some readers will be disappointed. If you want to be told that a copper coil will double your harvest and that the fertilizer companies buried the secret, this book will not tell you that, because the evidence does not. If you want to be told that the whole thing is superstition, this book will not tell you that either, because plants are electrical creatures living in an electrical atmosphere, and some forms of electroculture have real experimental support.

The truth is more interesting than either story. Let us begin where it began: in Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1746, with two myrtle trees.