An artist’s impression of an environment where prehistoric plants thrived Christian Jegou/Science Photo Library
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 91av contributor, for one. Wandering among (or is it through?) a 14,000-year-old aspen clone, a single organism made…



