Thanks to Hanna Rosin, an Atlantic writer whose podcast conversation with this author brought the book above to my attention:

If Plants Could Talk

Some scientists are starting to reopen a provocative debate: Are plants intelligent?

When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. I did not know this at the time, but she was likely under the influence of The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 best seller that claimed, among many other things, that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and practice a form of telepathy. Thanks to these nonsense claims, mainstream botany mostly avoided the debate of whether plants can, in any way, be considered intelligent. But recently, some scientists have begun to devise experiments that break down elements of this big, broad question: Can plants be said to hear? Sense touch? Communicate? Make decisions? Recognize kin?…

Listen to the podcast episode here.