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The Secret Life of Plants

A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man

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About this listen

"Once in a while you find a book that stuns you. Its scope leaves you breathless. This is such a book." — John White, San Francisco Chronicle

Explore the inner world of plants and its fascinating relation to mankind, as uncovered by the latest discoveries of science. In this truly revolutionary and beloved work, drawn from remarkable research, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird cast light on the rich psychic universe of plants.

The Secret Life of Plants explores plants' response to human care and nurturing, their ability to communicate with man, plants' surprising reaction to music, their lie-detection abilities, their creative powers, and much more. Tompkins and Bird's classic book affirms the depth of humanity's relationship with nature and adds special urgency to the cause of protecting the environment that nourishes us.

 Biological Sciences Biology Botany & Plants Ecology Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science Plant Science
All stars
Most relevant
fascinating book. loaded with information. I will re listen. it touched my soul. thank you for producing and sharing. Bless All.

fantastic

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This is a very heavy book for me as an engineer of electronics. I understand how authors try to present a multitude of opinions, I understand how they tie together incomplete data and coincidental observations with modern approach unveiling the history behind some things. While I give credit and benefit of a doubt to many things described in this book - electric and magnetic fields influencing plant development, something similar to simplistic neural system that allows plants make decisions and feel discomfort, and stuff like that. There are many things which are a complete nonsense. Dowsing on maps? Measuring how good the food is in angstroms? Some stories describe methodology, like the discussion about element transmutation, so if one doubts it - one can actually repeat the experiment and do spectroscopy analysis to confirm or disprove it. My uni had a fairly good spectroscope, and had I read the book some 5 years ago, I could easily replicate some things at no cost. Other stories are based on publications which just claim things out of the blue. This frequency is healthy, so this food is healthy. Why? Because I said so! How about at least assuming that it's not just one frequency but a spectrum, and it's not the main frequency but other frequency distribution pattern, that makes things good or bad? IF that measuring device even is working and repeatable at all. Anyone who has done any radio or signal processing will see that research is full of holes.
That's why this book is so heavy. Every word needs to be taken with a grain of salt, every fact needs to be checked. This is a major headache if you want to really understand something.

Heavy and horrible

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I'll be honest, I can't remember a word of it, but I have insomnia and this is the only thing helping me get to sleep at the moment. For all I can remember I just press play, set a timer, then wake up some time later.

It's great because I love plants so it's a topic I'm happy to listen to whilst tired, but because I love plants I'm aware of the scathing reviews and opinions of most plant scientists, so I feel absolutely no pressure to actually pay attention or remember what I've heard.

I'll probably relisten at some point out of actual interest and form my own opinion, but for now 10/10 this audiobook is great for sending me to sleep.

Excellent for Insomnia

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Conjecture and pseudo science, not recommended, to be fair only made it an hour in before thinking it ain’t right

Spurious

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