REVIEW: Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Foreword by Michael Pollan, Translated by Joan Benham, Washington: Island Press, 2015

Do plants dream? This is a question I had when finishing this remarkable book. Stefano Mancuso, the director of the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology (Laboratorio Internazionale di Neurobiologia Vegetale, or LINV) in Florence, Italy, and his co-author, Alessandra Viola, do not answer this question, let alone ask it, but they seem to come awfully close. Plants possess the powers of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, not to mention a myriad of other capacities that humans and other animals lack, so why not the ability to dream, as well as other attributes of sentience and intelligence?

More than any other book, Brilliant Green has inspired my fascination with the social nature of plants. Written in an engaging manner and replete with dazzling imaginaries that are fortified by convincing science, the study radically argues for a major shift in how we consider plants as players in Earth's ecology, with ecology construed in both social and physiological senses. Plants are the unsung heroes of the world, according to Mancuso and Viola, and it is high time we changed our thinking about them.

Why do they think this? Here are just some of the startling insights they provide. Plants communicate with each other, using chemical signals that they send through the air via their leaves and stems and through the soil via their roots, the latter sometimes aided by fungal and bacterial networks. They live in communities and can recognize their siblings, this second attribute made visible by the way they arrange their root systems in relation to each other, depending upon their degree of relatedness. Saplings grown from seeds taken from the same tree cooperate with each other by not competing for sunlight or soil space, for example in the second instance by keeping their root systems contained to their own patch of soil, while those from multiple trees extend their roots in such a way so as to maximize their access to soil nutrients, all in the grand evolutionary imperative to pass on one’s genes.

The power of plants to engage their surroundings goes well beyond their own internecine relations, however. They form alliances with other species, for example, including humans and other animals, using their vegetal wiles to lure unsuspecting insects into transferring pollen from one flower to another, a mode of sexual reproduction that requires assistants, given plants’ sessile nature. In fact, the rootedness of plants is at the core of their ontology; all of their remarkable abilities are enabled, constrained and necessitated by this essential characteristic.

The instantiations of plant genius that Mancuso and Viola enumerate are stupefying. One species of plant produces a flower that replicates, in the stigma of its pistil, the pudendum of a certain kind of insect, such that the male of the species is not only fooled into entering the flower and thereby coating himself in the surrounding pollen during the course of his romantic executions, but who actually prefers the floral to the real version: even when fertile females are present and receptive, the males choose to mate with the flower. It is a demonstration of ecological competition in its most exquisitely attuned form.

It gets better. When one kind of plant becomes smudged by an undesired material – dust, for example – ants that have taken up symbiotic residence in its stems and leaves, quickly move in to clean away the offending particles. When another species is attacked by a swarm of insects, it will send out a chemical signal to another species of insect to come to the rescue, the second group of insects chasing off the first.

These are just a few of the spectacular revelations contained in this remarkable study. It is not a long work, easily consumable in a long day, or two, but you will want to savor it slowly by reading and rereading it because so much of what it has to tell us about plants is so transformative of our common understanding of them.

If I can point to a shortcoming of the book, it would be that Mancuso and Viola stop short of fully developing their discussion of plant personhood and rights associated with it. So while David Chamovitz has reservations about using words such as ‘dignity’ with reference to plants, Mancuso and Viola have no problem with it at all, firmly applauding the unanimous position against the arbitrary destruction of plants made by a Swiss bioethics commission. See my earlier review What a Plant Knows for a simple discussion of the position.

There is a strong set of theories in the social sciences that scholars could draw upon to make real advances in our understanding of the social nature of plants, social not only in the sense of their relations among themselves, but also of course with reference to their relations with other species, including human beings. It is my aim in this blog to engage these theories for this purpose myself.

Brilliant Green is an absolutely brilliant book: spirited, engaging and life changing, at least for me. I hope it will be the same for you. The Kindle version is available on Amazon for a pittance. I could not possibly recommend a better book to read next. Buy or borrow and read it now.