What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses: Updated and Expanded Edition

Thoroughly updated from root to leaf, this revised edition of the groundbreaking What a Plant Knows includes new revelations for lovers of all that is vegetal and verdant.

Plants can hear—and taste things, too!

The renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz builds on the original edition to present an intriguing look at how plants themselves experience the world—from the colors they see to the schedules they keep, and now, what they do in fact hear and how they are able to taste. A rare inside look at what life is really like for the grass we walk on, the flowers we sniff, and the trees we climb, What a Plant Knows offers a greater understanding of their place in nature.

Daniel Chamovitz, PhD, is the director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. He has served as a visiting scientist at Yale University and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and has lectured at universities around the world. His work has been covered by The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, CBS, BBC, NPR, and other major media outlets. Chamovitz lives with his wife and three children in Hod HaSharon, Israel. He is the author of What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses.

ISBN: 9780374537128
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Published: November 21, 2017

“Of the dozens of books I read in 2012, several stand out. But there's one I keep coming back to, thumbing through it, letting people know about it. It's Daniel Chamovitz's What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses.” —Chicago Tribune

“The reader...will find enough absorbing science to concede that plants continue to inspire and amaze us. It's time, as Joni Mitchell sang at Woodstock, 'to get ourselves back to the garden' and take a closer look at plants.” —The Wall Street Journal

“This elegantly written account of plant biology will change the way you see your garden...Chamovitz lets us see plants in a new light, one which reveals their true wonder.” —The Guardian

“Thick with eccentric plant experiments and astonishing plant science.” —Sunday Times (UK)

“Plants may be brainless, eyeless and devoid of senses as we know them, but they have a rudimentary 'awareness', says biologist Daniel Chamovitz. In this beautiful reframing of the botanical, he reveals the extent and kind of that awareness through a bumper crop of research.” —Nature