A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner and Livingston Award finalist Zoe Schlanger. There is no doubt that plants are important: plants, or their green precursors the blue-green algae and algae themselves, have produced all the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, allowing animals to evolve. But did you know they can communicate when they are being eaten, allowing nearby plants to bolster their defences. Plants can not only communicate with each other, they can also communicate with other species of plant and animals, allowing them to manipulate animals to defend or fertilise them. This is unlike most other animals. So look again at the potted plant, or the grass or the tree and wonder: Are plants intelligent? Perhaps even more fundamental is are they conscious?