An artist’s impression of an environment where prehistoric plants thrived
Christian Jegou/Science Photo Library
When the Earth Was Green
Riley Black (St Martin’s Press (US, available now; UK, later this month))
The behaviour of plants is invisible to the naked human eye. They operate on timescales our imaginations can’t entertain, and they run roughshod over familiar categories of self, other and community. I confess that I find them boring.
Luckily, others don’t – Riley Black, a palaeontologist and an occasional New Scientist contributor, for one. Wandering among (or is it through?) a 14,000-year-old aspen clone, a single organism made…
