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It all begins and ends with plants. From the chance to live on this planet to the pleasure of listening to the sound of a violin – every story begins with a plant. There's no getting around it. We animals account for a paltry 0.3% of the planet's biomass while plants add up to 85%. It is obvious, therefore, that every story on this planet has a plant as its protagonist. Our world is a green world; Earth is the planet of plants. And when, with just a little training, we are able to look at the world without seeing it solely as humanity's playground, we cannot help but notice the ubiquity of plants. They are everywhere and their stories are inevitably wound up with ours. As every tree in a forest is linked to all the others by an underground network of roots, uniting them to form a superorganism, so plants constitute the nervous system, the plan that is the 'greenprint' of our world. Not to see this plan, or even worse, to ignore its existence, is one of the most serious threats to the survival of our species.
The brilliant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso is back with a great book to tell us about the greenprint of our world. He does it through unforgettable stories starring plants (and it couldn't be otherwise); stories combining an inimitable narrative style and remarkable scientific rigour. From the story of the red spruce that gave Stradivarius the wood for his fourteen violins, to the Kauri tree stump, kept alive for decades by the interconnected root system of nearby trees. From the story of the slipperiness of the banana skin to the plant that solved the 'crime of the century', the Lindbergh kidnapping, by way of wooden ladder rungs.
Stefano Mancuso is one of the world's leading authorities in the field of plant neurobiology, which explores signalling and communication at all levels of biological organization. He is a professor at the University of Florence and has published more than 250 scientific papers in international journals. His previous books include The Nation of Plants (Other Press, 2021), The Incredible Journey of Plants (Other Press, 2020), The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, and Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence.
Gregory Conti has translated numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Italian including works by Emilio Lussu, Rosetta Loy, Elisa Biagini, and Paolo Rumiz. He is a regular contributor to the literary quarterly, Raritan.
