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Climate journalist Zoë Schlanger was burnt out of disaster reporting, dutifully marking every grim benchmark on our inexorable slide to catastrophe. So she packed it in and went on a five-year global journey pursuing the lush possibility of our global flora, seeing in plants "a masterclass in living to one's fullest, weirdest, most resourceful potential."

She would soon find the realm of plants was riven with controversy. Contentious debates, strictly policed funding, careers tainted by scorn and dismissal. All thanks to an ascientific collection of beautiful myths called "The Secret Life of Plants" which convinced us that plants enjoyed being talked to and favoured Bach to Bon Jovi. It tainted the entire field of plant behaviour and led to a decades long freeze on meaningful research, and even now plant scientists remain tentative and guarded.

Schlanger knows that our tendency to anthropomorphize plants is dangerous territory, even the term plant behaviour is contentious, and yet each chapter is loosely based on human senses and behaviour. I can forgive the inconsistency as it is bolstered by sheer enthusiasm and, not for nothing, provides a handy bit of categorization to frame the narrative.

Can plants not "hear"? Reacting to the chomp of leaves being eaten or growing roots towards the sound of running water underground. Is it not communication when plants pump chemical gases into the air to warn others of the impending threat of leaf-munching caterpillars so they can change the chemical composition of their leaves or excrete gases of their own to lure natural predators to the caterpillars. Maybe it's not "sight" but then how does a unique vine in Chile change it's appearance to match the leaf shape, color, and vein patterns of nearby plants, often mimicking different plants on the same vine. How do plants recall the time of day when pollinators visit? Are they showing evidence of memory? What about the appearance of cooperation with similar plant species sharing resources as to not crowd out or shade others of their own "family". All this sends plant scientists into a tizzy with a host of "well actually" and "yes but" barely contained behind their lips. I like to think of it in terms of the Buddhist Sutra remarking on a finger pointing at the moon � we need to obsess less on the finger and more at what it's trying to point at.

I loved this read. Not for nothing a lot of this was prompted by the realization that one of the founding members of the Society of Plant Signaling and Behaviour is a cell biologist at the University of Bonn where my daughter is currently working on her Masters in, appropriately enough, Plant Sciences. She has a healthy skepticism for this renewed enthusiasm for plant signalling and will stick with polyploidy self-fertilization rates through runs of homozygosity ratios - just don't tell her I think Schlanger's stuff is more readable.