Plants' interactions with sound are less well understood, though it is known that flowers such as evening primroses can detect the buzzing of bees and respond by producing sweeter nectar.
(He also likes a glass of beer.) Besides tweaking the spike lengths, his team installed in their modified barley plants versions of the buzz-detecting and nectar-generating genes from evening primroses.
In one place she saw big patches of fine red primroses, on another spot blue gentians sparkled in the grass, and everywhere the golden rock-roses were nodding to her.