Interesting to me that you employ religion as the pejorative comparison here, when it's the inherent human religions that have perceived in plants gods and spirits since before the beginning of recorded time.
Perceiving plant gods and spirits is closer to experimental science, attempts to describe and make sense of your actual lived experience. Dismissing them without any evidence or experience, just because they don't fit in the worldview you grew up in, is closer to religion.
You wouldn't call every animist belief the same religion's name. That's a loooot of religions that believe those things - the vast, vast majority of them, in fact.