Planting Our World

With fun, fascinating vignettes, a renowned neurobiologist illuminates the interconnectedness of plant life and how we can learn from it to better plan our communities.

We animals account for a paltry 0.3% of the planet’s biomass while plants add up to 85%. 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 bound 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 super organism, so plants constitute the nervous system, the plan that is the ＂greenprint＂ of our world. To ignore the existence of this plan is one of the most serious threats to the survival of our species.

In this latest book, the brilliant Stefano Mancuso is back to illuminate the greenprint of our world. He does it through unforgettable stories starring plants that combine an inimitable narrative style with remarkable scientific rigor, 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 mystery 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 signaling 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 the translator of Stefano Mancuso’s two previous books, The Nation of Plants and The Incredible Journey of Plants, and recently translated The Child Is the Teacher by Cristina De Stefano. He is a regular contributor to the literary quarterly Raritan.