Plants are obliged to communicate a lot, and they use different systems. We experienced this during lockdown, when we were stuck at home and there was an incredible increase in traffic on the internet. If you are unable to move, if you are rooted, it’s of paramount importance for you to communicate a lot. Communication means you are able to emit a message and there is something able to receive it, and in this sense plants are great communicators. To what degree can plants communicate with one another? If you have a spectrum with rocks at one end and humans at the other, where do plants sit? It’s an extremely sophisticated form of communication, a kind of vocabulary. This is an important teaching for us today, because we are entering a period of reduction of resources and the environment is changing because of global warming. There was a very clever evolutionary biologist at the beginning of the last century, Peter Kropotkin, who said that when there are fewer resources, and the environment is changing, then cooperation is vastly more efficient. Not understanding the strength of the community is one of main errors. Plants are so incredibly cooperative with one another because cooperation is the most efficient way to grant the survival of species. What can humans learn from tree communities? You have a fascinating chapter about a tree stump being kept alive for decades by its neighbouring trees. To do that, we really need to imagine a new kind of city, completely covered by plants, without any border between nature and city. According to our studies, we could put around 200bn trees in our urban areas. The closer the tree is to the source of carbon emissions, the better they are at absorbing it. We are producing 75% of our CO₂ in cities, and the best way to remove that CO₂ is by using trees. You argue passionately in favour of filling cities with trees. Second, when you tell a story about life on this planet, not talking about plants, which make up 87% of life, is a nonsense. What I’d like to popularise is, first, the many abilities of plants that we normally are unable to feel and understand, because they are so different from us. What were you hoping to achieve with your new book, Tree Stories ? So it was not a provocation at the beginning, but there was a big resistance among my colleagues to use this kind of terminology, and so after it became a provocation. In the case of plants, they diffuse everything through the whole body, including intelligence. The main difference between animals and plants, in my opinion, is that animals concentrate specific functions inside organs.

In plants, almost every cell is able to do that. The neuron is not a miracle cell, it’s a normal cell that is able to produce an electrical signal. I started to think that almost all the claims I was hearing about the brain were valid also in plants. Is this a provocation?Īt the beginning, it was not at all.

You refer to your field as plant neurobiology. That was my first eureka moment, where I started to imagine that plants were intelligent organisms. It was able to sense the obstacle and to find a more convenient direction. My idea was to film this movement, but I saw something different: the root was changing direction well before touching the obstacle. One of my tasks during my doctorate was to understand how a root growing in the soil was able to move around an obstacle. I began to be interested in plants at university. What’s at the root of your love of plants? He has written five bestselling books on plants. Mancuso teaches at the University of Florence, his alma mater, where he runs the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology. Michael Pollan in the New Yorker described him as “the poet-philosopher of the movement, determined to win for plants the recognition they deserve”. B orn in Calabria in 1965, Stefano Mancuso is a pioneer in the plant neurobiology movement, which seeks to understand “how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion”.

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