Botanist Stefano Mancuso: ‘You can anaesthetise all plants. This is extremely fascinating’

An advocate of plant intelligence, the Italian author discusses the complex ways in which plants communicate, whether they are conscious, and what his findings mean for vegans

Born in Calabria in 1965, Stefano Mancuso is a pioneer in the plant neurobiology movement, which seeks to understand how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion". Michael Pollan in the New Yorker described him as the poet-philosopher of the movement, determined to win for plants the recognition they deserve". Mancuso teaches at the University of Florence, his alma mater, where he runs the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology. He has written five bestselling books on plants.

What's at the root of your love of plants?
I began to be interested in plants at university. One of my tasks during my doctorate was to understand how a root growing in the soil was able to move around an obstacle. My idea was to film this movement, but I saw something different: the root was changing direction well before touching the obstacle. It was able to sense the obstacle and to find a more convenient direction. That was my first eureka moment, where I started to imagine that plants were intelligent organisms.