The latest (January 2017) issue of Scientific American has a short blurb entitled “Veggies with Vision” that harks back to speculation and studies of over 100 years ago.
In 1907 Francis Darwin, Charles’s son, hypothesized that leaves have organs that are a combination of lens-like cells and light-sensitive cells.
For some reason, research in this area went dormant until very recently. Now, scientists seem to be again taking up the study of such ideas. Perhaps they learned about it on the wood-wide web (it is now known that plants — including trees — communicate with each other via various chemical signals).
Although the evidence for eyelike structures in higher plants remains limited, it is growing.
I’m looking forward to learning more about this over the coming years. Meanwhile, behave yourself while out walking in the forest!
