38 Books Like What a Plant Knows

This is my candidate for the Great American Novel. Read it for its storyline and its fascinating chapters on whales. Along the way, you’ll encounter discussions about race, religion, friendship, and the virtuous life.

Some of my students ask, “Why does Melville digress so much?” My response: persist in reading this work. What at first seems extraneous becomes vital. You’ll discover a masterpiece.

I love this book because it changes the way I see the world every single time.

Powers writes with a patience that feels almost radical. I found myself slowing my breathing as I read, realizing how little I notice in the rush of daily life. I love how he blurs the line between human and nature, reminding me that we’re never outside the system—we are the system.

The Overstory humbles me, and because humility, to me, is where clarity begins.

This book shifted the paradigm of my life.

I discovered it and its author by listening to David Oakes’ nature podcast Trees A Crowd, which I devoured religiously every day while living in Alaska during the second year of the pandemic. I only intended it as research, but this book changed the composition of my soul. 

It’s a fascinating and genuinely captivating exploration of one of the most evolved lifeforms on Earth. Their survival is essential to our own, and if we won’t learn from them, we’ll fall beside them. But more likely, they’ll outlast us!

Science fiction envisions the future. The best way to imagine future change is to look at how and when change occurred in the past.

The drivers seldom change: climate, war, and famine. None of those indicators are looking particularly good for humanity right now. Dudley Young’s masterful, poetic, and irreverent scholarly work about the origins of the sacred in human history is the most enjoyable and rewarding book I have read on human evolution and development. So many things began to make sense to me after reading it.

Young is a steamroller of a writer, sloshing through millions of years of paleontology and thousands of years of early human culture with the same vim and swagger as he does Yeats’ poetry (his field of expertise)—and all in wonderful prose.   

Ailton Kranek is a well-known Indigenous Rights activist, environmental campaigner, activist, and journalist in and beyond Brazil. His modest seventy-three-page book looks at, and beyond, life in the Krenak village in Minas Gerais on the Doce River, in southeast Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon. What I so like about this book is it confronts the horror of the prospect of extinction without turning away to the present culture as a force of resistance.

The members of the Krenak nation call the river Watu—our grandfather—a person. His story, the story of his village, and of the river are one. Watu winds its way 853 kilometres through the Amazon to the coast. In 2015, the collapse of a dam released highly contaminated water from mining into the river, causing an ecological disaster. But the plight of the village needs to be seen in a wider context… show more.

Few books have made such a lasting impression on me as this remarkable work on fairy tales and how to unlock their deep-rooted lessons.

It was like seeing the nuts and bolts of a secret language laid bare. Fairy tales share a similar structure and vocabulary to dreams, and one of the characters in my novel has very vivid dreams that are sending her messages. It’s hard to write dreams effectively. Too obtuse and they lose the reader. Too obvious, and they come off as silly.

But this book by von Franz is so enlightening and intelligent, you come away understanding the language of the unconscious so much better. It was a real eye-opener for me. John Wick fans will recognize the cover illustration from the library scene in Parabellum.

It’s Ivan Bilibin’s illustration of Vasilisa from the Eastern European folktale Baba Yaga. 

Blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias used to think plants were boring. Then, in college, he got a summer job in habitat restoration at an old quarry, and he fell in love.

He learned about the strange ways plants have sex, how they conquer new territories, and what animals they prefer to eat. Most of all, they fight for survival. It’s not exactly war, but there is never enough water, nutrients, space, and light, and there are always predators. Plants meet their challenges in surprising, wonderful ways.

So go outside, he says, and get to know your local plants like you know your friends.

Here we step into more controversial territory. Is “plant neurobiology” a thing? That is, can they think? Stefano Mancuso says yes, but not like us.

A plant behaves more like a swarm of insects, and each of its parts and cells reacts to changes in its environment, which affect the other cells around it, and in that way, a decentralized intelligence can reach what looks like a decision. Plants find solutions to the problems of life that would never occur to us, and we can copy them to make our own lives better.

Beautiful illustrations will help you fall in love with plants.

I’ve been studying the world of plants since first pursuing graduate degrees in the 1980’s. So, one might surmise that I know quite a lot about how plants function and respond to their environment. Reading through this book, I was fascinated to learn how much I didn’t previously know about these amazingly diverse and complex organisms. Some readers may recall an earlier tome titled The Secret Life of Plants.

In the first chapter of this book, author Schlanger dismisses that once-popular work as “a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection.” She then goes on to interview various biologists, botanists, and physiologists who collectively are conducting mind-bending research on plant intelligence. While this term may make some folks squirm, the scientists she interviews employ such robust methods that all but the most cynical readers will come away understanding that there are many types of intelligence in this… show more.

When I was younger, I stayed overnight in a haunted house, or at least a house that felt haunted. I was in a big, creepy room by myself, and sleep was impossible. Instead, I sat up through the night, feeling very alone. During that long wait for dawn, this book was there for me.

It’s a satire that’s now more famous than many of the grim rural novels that inspired it; more important to me then, it’s the very funny story of Flora Poste, a modern young woman who goes to stay at a remote country farm with her relatives, the dramatic Starkadders, ruled over by Aunt Ada Doom, who once saw something nasty in the woodshed. Flora’s story is a glorious triumph of common sense over an ominous atmosphere.