Ahhhh, yes, I have a similar experience when a player in one of my games uses the "speak with plant" spell. It's incredible how little a plant knows, but how much they like to talk. In my games, trees always speak slowly, so, so, slowly, and of course they don't see anything, they don't hear anything. It's just one of my little ways of frustrating the hell out of players. Very often after doing it, they ask, "Why the hell would you even want to talk to a tree?"
And yes, they get similar responses from speak with dead, speak with animals - I never make it a pleasant experience.
This also makes me want to mention something I've just started doing in my games, but I will definitely do frm now on because of how well it has worked. If you are familiar with the "augury" type spell, I've always wondered how to give responses that are in keeping with the feel of the spell. You know that the spell description suggests that answers will be truthful but not blatant (things like "great risk holds great reward"). Well, recently in my new world, which has a pantheon of gods I'm quite happy with, one of my party's clerics performed the augury spell, and asked the question, "If we go into that sandstorm, will we be safe?" Her cleric worships the goddess of creation, and it came to me that rather than just giving a bland spoken answer, I could have the god respond in keeping with its place in the pantheon - so her staff budded with shoots of green leaves, and they were left to interpret what that meant. Later on, when they found a phoenix egg trapped under a large plate of glass, they were going to smash the glass and dig it out, and she asked the goddess, and there was an eclipse - and they took that as "touch and die".
Of course, the other cleric in the party worships the god of justice - so I'll need to be a little more creative, but I still love the idea, as it's given me a great way to deal with this spell and bring the whole spiritual aspect to life.
