Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants
£12.20£14.20 (-14%)
In this “phytobiography”–a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant–research scientist Monica Gagliano shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition.
By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it.
Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own ‘voices’ and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.
Read more
Additional information
| Publisher | Illustrated edition (13 Nov. 2018), North Atlantic Books,U.S. |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 176 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1623172438 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1623172435 |
| Dimensions | 15.14 x 1.3 x 22.78 cm |
by The British Druid Order
If my review can stop one person wasting their money on this its worth it. Right from the off it appears the author has taken far too many strong hallucinogenics. Plants certainly do have healing properties, are critical to nature and our understanding of the world and provide mankind with everything from materials to the powerful drugs the author has taken. However this account (for lack of a better word) of her travelling the globe and having plants speak to her is basically just a description of what amounts to an endless trip.
The science is interesting but descriptions and analysis all too brief. Instead pages given over to the most idiotic forms of drug induced psychosis of plants as sentient beings communicating with the author via the spirit realm and leading her to take actions they advise (sort of, she’s pretty lenient with that). There is a nugget of interesting science here and I don’t condemn those of a spiritual belief but this ignores the science and is too extreme to be taken remotely seriously by people interested in the later.
Much of the book is reduced to self aggrandising gibberish with the odd paragraph of actual interesting insight but they’re few and far between.
by Matt
This is not a science book, it’s rubbish, just the author’s drug-induced self absorption. If you want to learn about plant science, senses and communication this is definitely not the book for you.
by Tout en chantant
This review is meant mainly for the AUDIO VERSION of the book. Julie Slater does a disgraceful job of it, most off putting. The book itself is great! I have the kindle version too, thankfully.
by The British Druid Order
I had previously heard of Monica Gagliano and her scientific work with plants, but nothing with this depth – there are a few lectures dotted about on the internet that I had listened to, but it wasn’t until I heard her being interviewed on the Rune Soup Podcast that I got an idea of her more in depth connection to the plant world. The interview is linked below.
Anyway, I bought the book.
I found the book completely fascinating and an unexpected journey. I don’t think that English is Monika’s first language and at the beginning of the book I found myself re-reading some of the sentences to fully understand them, it helped when I started reading in her voice, but this wasn’t a big problem ( I’ve struggled with english-as-first-language writers before when they are describing technical stuff) and I soon just got into the flow of it without thinking.
I loved the narrative of the book going through different phases. The outline of the book was laid out by plants, and she followed their direction, which really made the whole book very easy to follow.
The overlying theme is of this as a spiritual journey. We start at the end of Monica’s previous scientific research career when her marine subjects offered themselves to her a sacrifice and this greatly affected her entire worldview. I fully get this notion of sacrifice. Within druidry I often give offerings or sacrifice (not of living beings) as a bargaining tool asking for change to manifest from the other world. The sacrifice here appears to be from the otherworld, asking Monica to manifest change in this world.
There is the beginning of her journey into plant spirit medicine, and how this presented itself , how it happened and how some really deep insights were presented to her from the plants she was journeying with.
There is the story about how the plant spirits organised her life path, the break through being that she had to have faith in them and to follow their advice. Again, as a druid, I fully get this as I have had similar guidance from the otherworld that has caused me to take different directions (and succesfully too) that I wouldn’t have otherwise taken.
Then it goes back into scientific research -but with a twist. The plants had a plan for Monika, they have a message that they want to bring into the world at this time (and it actually is coming through towards mainstream thinking now, partly because of this work) and they needed to use Monica as a scientist to get this message into being.
So she was given a set of scientific experiments to do, and the means to do them. The plant spirits told her what to look for, and how to conduct the experiments.
This progressed further with the pea plants, when something quite specific was to be looked for, and this went unseen until something happened within Monika to change the way she was looking at the experiment. A paradigm shift occourred and the predicted (by plants) results became clear as day.
The spiritual journey continued from there, but with a change from being taught and introduced to plant spirits by spiritual teachers, the plant spirits became the teachers themselves and are now taking Monika on a pathway of their choosing.
I found this book easy to get into and a joy to read, I read it much quicker than other books, simply because I didn’t want to put it down.
The ending of the book is such a joyous revelation and life path, it much more of a beginning than an ending, I would her to write another book in a few years time and see what new chapters have been unveiled for her.
This is an absolute gem of a book that spans both scientific and spiritual realms without being awkward of clunky. It just seems totally natural, and how we should be doing science. Science and Spirituality do not have to be polar opposites.
by Tina-King
As someone on an ever deepening spiritually awakening path, this book has simply, but brilliantly, enlarged my conscious awareness to an even greater degree. Having read Holly Worton’s book, ‘If trees could talk’, and Jacqueline E. Lane’s books on devas, nature spirits and elementals, and read many credible metaphysical books, this book adds greatly to my higher understanding of our innate and eternal Oneness. I would highly recommend it to anyone who would like to come out of the darkness of ignorance into the Light of who we really are.