What a Plant Knows
A Field Guide to the Senses of Your Garden - and Beyond
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A captivating journey into the inner lives of plants – from the colours they see to the schedules they keep
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can an orchid get jet lag? Does a tomato plant feel pain when you pluck a fruit from its vines? And does your favourite fern care whether you play Bach or the Beatles? Combining cutting-edge research with lively storytelling, biologist Daniel Chamovitz explores how plants experience our shared Earth – through sight, smell, touch, hearing, memory, and even awareness. Whether you are a green thumb, a science buff, a vegetarian, or simply a nature lover, this rare inside look at the life of plants will surprise and delight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An impressive amount of scientific information and research is packed into this slim volume about plants' perception, but whether this title will interest readers rests entirely on their pre-existing interest in "the parallels between plant and human senses." The author, the director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University, devotes a chapter to each specific sense: what a plant sees, smells, feels, and hears, how it knows where it is, and what it remembers. Despite an overwhelming amount of detail about the world as seen from a plant's point of view and lucid descriptions of experiments, the stakes of why we should care if plants self-medicate, listen to music, or know to grow upwards are left unarticulated. In the most engaging section of the book, Chamovitz writes that plant memories are not "semantic or episodic memories... but rather procedural." Fans of botany and nature writing may be absorbed in learning about plant senses for their own sake, but the book is unlikely to appeal to nonbotanists.
