What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

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. Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, DeFiore and Company. (June)