Timelapse Captures How House Plants Move in the Day and Sleep at Night
The beauty of time-lapse photography is that it gives us a view of the world that our eyes can’t naturally see. Darryl Cheng of House Plant Journal created a time-lapse that does just that: it reveals how much ordinary house plants move over the course of a day.
The timelapse is “showing two of my favourite daily movers: oxalis and maranta,” Cheng writes. Boing Boing notes that the moment is known as nyctinasty.
“Nyctinasty is the circadian rhythmic nastic movement of higher plants in response to the onset of darkness, or a plant ‘sleeping’,” Wikipedia states. “Nyctinastic movements are associated with diurnal light and temperature changes and controlled by the circadian clock and the light receptor phytochrome. This is the plant sleeping.”
