Why read What a Plant Knows?

Book cover of What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

Book description

How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it feel an insect's spindly legs? How do flowers know when it's spring? Can they actually remember the weather? And do they care if you play them Led Zeppelin or Bach? From Darwin's early fascination with stems and vines…

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Topics

Flora

Genres

Science

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Why read it?

2 authors picked What a Plant Knows as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Sue Burke

Author

If you don’t know much about what plants can do, this is a great place to start.

Learn what a plant sees, smells, and feels. Yes, they can do all that. They know what color shirt you’re wearing. They can smell the warning from a neighbor plant being eaten by a bug. They know when you touch them. They know where they are, and they remember things. Plants are not passive, and they are acutely aware of the world around them.

From Sue's list on making you love plants.

Anthony Doyle

Author

This wonderfully quirky book does something that drives my character Seth Macy around the proverbial bend: it talks about what plants know, see, feel, remember…

You will never look at your garden the same way after reading this book. I certainly didn’t. Chamovitz’s argument that plants are “aware” in their own way gave me a whole new appreciation of plant life and the “world” that goes on under our limited radar.

I would put it up there with Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. It’s one of those books that…

From Anthony's list on to read before hibernating.