What A Plant Knows

How well do you know the plants in your garden and polytunnel? Do you understand how they feel, what they sense, what they know?

What A Plant Knows, a new book by Daniel Chamovitz is described as “a field guide to the senses of our garden – and beyond”. Chamovitz is a plant biologist and the book sets out to find similarities and differences in the genetic makeup of plants and animals. The difference, he writes “is not as significant as I had once believed” and this text is a study of the parallels between plant and human biology.

There are six, seemingly anthropomorphic chapters, What a Plant Sees, Smells, Feels, Hears, How a Plant Knows Where it is, and What a Plant Remembers. In the chapter What A Plant Smells we learn how a butter bean can receive olfactory signals that tell it its neighbour is under attack from insects or bacteria. We recoil at the “specific and refined culinary tastes” of the sinister Cuscuta pentagons, a plant that, having no chlorophyll, needs to get succour from another plant, killing it in the process. We learn how it smells out the tomato plants on which it preys.

The best stories are those that tell of the experiments carried out by Charles Darwin and his son Francis. Modern day experiments with plants have become very sophisticated, including growing them in the International Space Station (to understand the effects of gravity - How A Plant Knows Where It Is). But Charles and Francis were carrying out stunningly clever, simple, experiments over a century ago.

Chamovitz describes the Darwins’ experiences lovingly and with humour and clarity, conjuring up images of Darwin playing his bassoon to plants in How A Plant Hears. (The author admits to being more of a Led Zeppelin fan.)

We learn of Darwin’s obsession with the Venus Fly Trap, and his insomniac low-tech, time-consuming, pre-time lapse photography, join-the-dots mechanisms to record How A Plant Knows Where It Is.

The most interesting chapter of all is What A Plant Sees, which describes the Darwins' classic experiment in botany. Their findings on phototropism to this day are a simple demonstration of "rudimentary sight in plants".

Read What A Plant Knows and you'll never look at a garden in quite the same way again.


“What a Plant Knows” by Daniel Chamovitz is published by Oneworld.