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.