Plants —mind(s) alive?

One botanist who studies how sagebrush send distress signals to each other has found that individual plants appear to have different risk tolerance —A metric of personality, the very notion of which in an organism without a brain-based mind challenges our central assumptions about consciousness. 

Other research on a family of flowering desert shrubs found that female plants heed signals from both male and female plants, but males only heed other males —intimations of preference and judgment, also features of personality and consciousness. 

[Zoë] Schlanger [The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth] synthesizes some of the most provocative findings: "Plants could be said to have dialects, and are alert to their contexts enough to know when to deploy them. More than that, they have a clear sense of who is who; who is family, and who is not. They are in touch with their surroundings, and with the fluctuating status of their enemies. Their communication is not just rudimentary but complex and layered, alive with multiple meanings."