What if your plants could hear you?

As I cracked the spine on Zoë Schlanger’s deep dive into obscure corners of botany, I glanced at my forearms and smiled. Vines of recent red marks dotted my arms. While building a platform for our new backyard zip line, strung between two large loblolly pines (Pinus taeda), I’d unknowingly tussled with the creeping poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) that had vined its way up the tree.

The bottle of toxins that I purchased to rid that tree of that vine still sits in my garage, unopened. Since reading The Light Eaters, I find myself with mixed emotions on the subject of plant eradication. That kind of moral ennui may indeed be part of Schlanger’s goal in writing this engaging and thought-provoking book.

What if we considered plants as subjects, not objects? How does our perception of our leafy neighbors change when we consider that plants can “hear” and adapt to what they’re sensing? Or that they can “see” and make “decisions” based on their perception? These are controversial questions, as the author points out again and again. Through field trips, multiple interviews, and side-by-side science with researchers and botanists across the globe, Schlanger interacts with scholars doing work on the fringes of plant research, crafting their stories with a journalistic flair. Her excellent composition and engaging voice make what might be duller science a literary adventure and, from my vantage, a quite convincing one.